Stefan Neumann's List: Afghanistan

• Soviet intervention

• 1979 December - Soviet Red Army invades and props up communist government.

   

  1980 - Babrak Karmal installed as ruler, backed by Soviet troops. But anti-regime resistance intensifies with various mujahideen groups fighting Soviet forces. US, Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia supply money and arms.

   

  1985 - Mujahideen come together in Pakistan to form alliance against Soviet forces. Half of Afghan population now estimated to be displaced by war, with many fleeing to neighbouring Iran or Pakistan.

   

  1986 - US begins supplying mujahideen with Stinger missiles, enabling them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. Babrak Karmal replaced by Najibullah as head of Soviet-backed regime.

   

  1988 - Afghanistan, USSR, the US and Pakistan sign peace accords and Soviet Union begins pulling out troops.

• • this is basically an essay on what the soviets did wrong in the war. use this to attack people on debate that are on soviet side
• Soviet military and KGB advisers permeated the structure of the Afghanistan Armed Forces. In April 1979, General of the Army Aleksiy A. Yepishev, the head of the Main Political Directorate, led a delegation of several generals in a visit to Afghanistan to assess the situation. General Yepishev made a similar visit to Czechoslovakia prior to the 1968 invasion. In August 1979, General of the Army Ivan G. Pavlovski, CINC Soviet Ground Forces, led a group of some 60 officers on a several-weeks-long reconnaissance tour of Afghanistan
• The Soviets expected the resistance to end here, but it had only begun
• The Afghans' values, faith and love of freedom enabled them to hold out against a superpower, even though they suffered tremendous casualties in doing so.
• How did the Soviets get it so wrong?
• Yet, their force commitment, initially assessed as requiring several months, lasted ten years and required increasing numbers of Soviet forces. It proved a bloody experience in which the Soviet Union reportedly killed 1.3 million people and forced five and a half million Afghans (a third of the prewar population) to leave the country as refugees. Another two million Afghans were forced to migrate within the country. Today, the countryside is ravaged and littered with mines. On a percentage basis, the Soviet Union inflicted more suffering on Afghanistan than Germany inflicted on the Soviet Union during World War II.

• on of Afghanistan was based on the following:  

   

  •  stabilizing the country by garrisoning the main routes, major cities, airbases and logistics sites;
    
  •  relieving the Afghan government forces of garrison duties and pushing them into the countryside to battle the resistance;
    
  •  providing logistic, air, artillery and intelligence support to the Afghan forc
• The Soviet concept for military occupat
• • es;
    
  •  providing minimum interface between the Soviet occupation forces and the local populace;
    
  •  accepting minimal Soviet casualties; and,
    
  •  strengthening the Afghan forces, so once the resistance was defeated, the Soviet Army could be withdrawn.
• The Afghan war was fought under four general secretaries-Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov and Gorbachev
• • know naes of weapons for rhetoric purposes in debate
• Soviet equipment:
• Lessons learned

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• The evidence available suggests that geopolitical calculations were at the top of the Kremlin’s goals
• deter US interference in the USSR’s ‘backyard’, to gain a highly strategic foothold in Southwest Asia and, not least of all, to attempt to contain the radical Islamic revolution emanating from Iran.
• This accounts for the increased overseas military, political, and economic support being given at this time to pro-Marxist régimes in Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Yemen, etc.
• The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan was primarily motivated by geopolitical interests in the region.
• The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was a Soviet-backed Marxist group
• clear that the communist
• would need Moscow’s support in order to survive.
• Soviet leadership was unwilling to commit itself to sending any more than token military advisors and some weapons
• advisory aid from
• France,
• A common enemy was the only thing that they shared
• Cold War years,
• It is clear that this Southwest Asian campaign was aimed at securing Moscow’s geopolitical and, to a lesser extent, ideological position in the region.
• two nightmarish scenarios of either American intervention, or the spread of radical Islam into the USSR,
• Whose intentions among the Soviet élite led to the Soviet-Afghan War?
• And whose interests were served by it
• We can infer that Afghanistan, like so many battlefields before and since, served the interests of military advancements.
• • Gates, Robert M. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. 1996.
   
  • Heinämaa, Anna, Maija Leppmännen and Yuri Yurchenko (Translated by A. D. Haun. The Soldiers’ Story: Soviet Veterans Remember the Afghan War. Berkeley: University of California. 1994.
   
  • Jauvert, Vincent. ‘Oui la CIA est entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes…’ Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris). January 15-21, 1998.
   
  • Jones, Ellen. Red Army and Society: A Sociology of the Soviet Military. Boston: Allen & Unwin. 1985.
   
  • Kakar, M. Hassan. Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982. Berkeley: The University of California Press. 1995. Accessed September 17, 2008: http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft7b69p12h;brand=ucpress
   
  • McMichael, Scott. ‘The Soviet-Afghan War’. In The Military History of the Soviet Union (eds. Robin Higham and Frederick W. Kagan). New York: Palgrave
• • 2002.
   
  • Reese, Roger. The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917-1991. London and New York: Routledge. 2000.
   
  • Schöch, Rüdiger. ‘Afghan Refugees in Pakistan During the 1980s: Cold War Politics and Registration Practices’. In New Issues in Refugee Research (Research Paper No. 157). Geneva: Policy Development and Evaluation Service, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 2008.
   
  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998.
   
  • The Russian General Staff (translated and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress). The Soviet-Afghan War: How A Superpower Fought and Lost. Lawrence, Ka. : University Press of Kansas. 2002.

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• The Saur revolution of 20 years ago is perhaps the single event that most upset the political framework in Afghanistan leading to the chaos in the country ever since
• Soviets step in
• 1979.

• After 20 years of continuous strife ordinary Afghans want nothing but to get on with their lives in peace after their endless suffering but all attempts at peace have failed dismally.  

   Just about every Afghan wants the conflict to end today and they are hoping the warring groups talking now in Islamabad will put aside excuses for continuing a conflict that all of them know cannot be won by fighting. 

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• communist People
• s Democratic Party seizes power in a coup
• An Islamic and conservative insurgency soon begins in the provinces.
• The USSR begins massive military aid to the DRA, including hundreds of advisers, as the US scales down its presence a
• fter the murder of its kidnapped ambassador.
• The US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supply money and arms to the mujahideen
• The US leads a boycott of the Moscow Olympics.
• mujahideen

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• On 25 December 1979, Soviet forces entered Afghanistan, and took control   of Kabul. Babrak Karmal, leader of a less hard-line faction of the PDPA,   became President. Karmal adopted more open policies towards religion and   ethnicity. However, the rebellion intensified.

• 1980, the Security Council met to consider a response to the   Soviet intervention, but a draft resolution condemning it was not passed,   due to the negative vote of the USSR.

   

  The matter was then taken up in the General   Assembly, which held an Emergency Special Session on Afghanistan over   five days, from 10 to 14 January 1980. The Assembly adopted the first   of a series of 'Situation in Afghanistan' resolutions (resolution ES-6/2),   in which it deplored the armed intervention in Afghanistan, called for   the withdrawal of all foreign forces, asked States to contribute humanitarian   assistance, and asked the Secretary-General to keep it informed of developments.  

   
• Various approaches to the parties were made   with a view to finding a means to end the conflict, but war continued.   Its effects were devastating. During the next few years about 3 million   refugees fled to Pakistan and 1.5 million to Iran. Many people were also   driven from the countryside to Kabul, and in total more than half of the   population was displaced. Estimates of combat fatalities range between   700,000 and 1.3 million people. With the school system largely destroyed,   industrialization severely restricted and large irrigation projects badly   damaged, the economy of the country was crippled.
• 1985,
• The first in what was to become an annual resolution on human rights and   fundamental freedoms in Afghanistan was adopted on 13 December
• In May 1986, Karmal was replaced as PDPA   leader by Mohammad Najibullah, who subsequently became President in November   1987.

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• All of this evidence draws a clearer picture of Soviet intentions in Afghanistan. It is clear that this Southwest Asian campaign was aimed at securing Moscow’s geopolitical and, to a lesser extent, ideological position in the region.
• two nightmarish scenarios of either American intervention, or the spread of radical Islam into the USSR, helped shape the Soviet Union’s decision to invade Afghanistan
• Whose intentions among the Soviet élite led to the Soviet-Afghan War? And whose interests were served by it?
• The initial intention of the invasion had been to secure the Soviet Union’s strategic position in the worldwide competition against the US.
• fear of militant Islam affecting Moscow’s control over its Muslim population was also behind the Kremlin rationale for war.
• the prestige of socialist ideology was also at stake in Afghanistan, a fact no doubt important in the decision-makers’ minds at the time.
• the actual number may eclipse the latter by at least ten thousand.
• Officially, some 14,833 Soviet soldiers lost their lives during the conflict
• The Afghan people were the war’s most obvious victims, with no less than one million civilians and combatants estimated killed during the conflict
• the Afghans remain the world’s largest single refugee group, as a direct result of the Soviet-Afghan War
• six million people fled to neighbouring Pakistan and Iran during the war.

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• "Millions of Afghan refugees around the world live in difficulty, with many denied basic rights and access to health care, food, and shelter," he said. "We believe they have a better chance of receiving these things in Afghanistan."
• "This is to accommodate the influx of returnees who will be looking for jobs and will need basic things in order to survive,
• It suggested implementing community-based projects to improve shelter and infrastructure and to grant financial assistance to those in areas where there are high numbers of repatriated refugees.
• It is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,

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• • Meeting the needs, including security, of repatriatingfamilies,