Afghan Civil War until 1979
After the coup d'état by the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (DVPA) under Nur Muhammad Taraki on April 27, 1978, through the Saur Revolution, the latter pursued a rapprochement with the Eastern Bloc in order to advance social transformation (expropriations for land reform).
In particular, the forced secularization and the disempowerment and partial murder of the upper class quickly led to widespread resistance among the population. Around 30 Islamist Mujahideen groups were founded during this period. Moreover, there were also political disputes and power struggles within the DVPA. With the assassination of Prime Minister Nur Muhammad Taraki in September 1979, Hafizullah Amin took power and attempted to quell the resistance. As a result, the civil war escalated, which was soon supported and financed by the CIA.
Taraki had repeatedly and urgently requested Soviet military aid to combat internal unrest since late 1978. At the time, the Soviet Union refused military aid, in part because of the high foreign policy risk. However, as the KGB now feared that Amin might lean on the West and call NATO troops into the country to secure his power, voices were growing within the USSR leadership in favor of a temporary military intervention. When relations with the West reached a new low after the NATO double decision of 12 December 1979, this position prevailed, and so Leonid IlyichBrezhnev gave the order for deployment. However, this was not an expression of the Brezhnev Doctrine, by which the Soviet Union granted itself the right to intervene in socialist states. Afghanistan under the Taraki regime was not considered a socialist state, but only a "state of socialist orientation".
The motive for the intervention is said to be concern for the Muslim population of the southern Soviet republics, which could possibly be infected by the uprising of the Afghan resistance groups. It is also believed that the Soviet Union's strategic goal in doing so was to penetrate as far as the Indian Ocean. The German political scientist Helmut Hubel, on the other hand, argues that the Soviet leadership, from a position of its own strength, would have been concerned with defending its position of power, which it already believed to be secure, and keeping Afghanistan in its sphere of influence.
Soviet invasion
On December 25, 1979, the first units of the Soviet 40th Army under Marshal Sergei Sokolov, newly formed for the Afghanistan mission, the 5th and 108th Motorized Rifle Divisions, crossed the border into Afghanistan at Termiz and Kushka. At the same time, 7000 elite troops of the 103rd Vitebsk Airborne Division were flown into Kabul and Bagram. On the first day of the invasion, a crash of an Il-76 military transport plane on a mountain near Kanzak (northeast of Kabul) killed the pilot, 37 paratroopers and nine other soldiers.
On 27 December, KGB special forces who had been in the country for some time, supported by paratroopers, carried out Operation Storm-333 by storming Tajbeg Palace and other operationally important points in Kabul and killing Amin. The previous Afghan leadership was eliminated in one fell swoop, political prisoners were freed, and on the same day a radio announcement was made that Babrak Karmal had taken over the government. There was little resistance from the Afghan army, and most commanders, under the influence of the Soviet military advisers who had been placed at their side, soon agreed to cooperate with the new government. The latter tried on the one hand to de-escalate the civil war and on the other hand to strengthen ties with the Soviet Union, among other things through an agreement on the stationing of troops.
The Limited Contingent of Soviet troops in Afghanistan (official designation; Russian. Ограниченный контингент советских войск в Афганистане, OКСВА) comprised 85,000 troops as early as February 1980. The troop strength was further increased to about 115,000 by 1988.
International reaction
The military intervention was immediately condemned by Western and Islamic states. It overshadowed the 1980 Summer Olympics (Moscow/Tallinn), which were boycotted by many states as a result.
Military resistance
About two-thirds of the Afghan army joined the resistance against the Soviets. The conservative mujahideen received increasing international support. On March 21, 1980, the Islamic Alliance for the Freedom of Afghanistan was founded as an alliance of Islamist and monarchist groups. These were at odds with each other and cooperation was limited to fighting communist rule. The war was waged ruthlessly and cruelly by both sides; war crimes were committed by the Soviets and government forces as well as the Mujahideen.
The fight against the Soviet invaders and the Communist government was led in particular by an alliance of seven Islamic parties, which had their common general staff in Pakistan and were at odds with each other. The leaders of these parties were also called warlords ("warlord") by the Western press. Pakistan, which intensively supported the Islamist warlord Hekmatyar in particular and pursued its own interests in the neighboring country, was the most important ally of the anti-communist forces along with the USA.
The Soviet and Afghan government forces, despite their military superiority and air superiority, failed to break the resistance of the mujahideen. Although they were able to quickly occupy important towns and roads in the valleys, they had no control over large areas outside the major cities. A military stalemate was finally reached in 1982, while the fighting on both sides became increasingly brutal. The Soviet army responded to the guerrilla tactics of the mujahideen in hunting battles, who generally took no prisoners, by, among other things, terrorizing the civilian population. A turning point in the ongoing conflict did not come until 1985 with the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as the new General Secretary of the CPSU, who had taken office promising to end the war in Afghanistan. This at a time when the Soviets had begun to move their troops by transport helicopter as well as troop-carrying Mil Mi-24s into combat zones in the country so as not to have to fight the rebels from below. After the first such successes, the Soviet troops lost the possibility of such air transports as a result of the CIA's delivery of state-of-the-art Stinger missiles to the mujahideen. The Soviet leadership came to the realization that the war could not be won and henceforth sought a way to withdraw its troops from the country without losing face.
In May 1986, Mohammed Najibullāh replaced Karmal as head of government and attempted to defuse the war through negotiations. Babrak Karmal, however, remained chairman of the Revolutionary Council and thus head of state until November 20, 1986.
Retreat of the Soviet troops
The indirect negotiations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which began in Geneva in 1982 and were mediated by the United Nations, led to the signing of the Geneva Agreement on 14 April 1988, which provided for the normalisation of relations between the two states and non-interference in each other's internal affairs. Complementary agreement was reached on the return of Afghan refugees who were in Pakistan. The Soviet Union and the United States guaranteed the renunciation of any interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. The withdrawal of Soviet troops was to be completed by mid-February 1989. The mujahideen rejected the agreement, which came into force on May 15, 1988, and also refused to participate in the coalition government under Najibullāh. As of May 15, 1988, the Soviet Union began withdrawing its official 100,300 troops from Afghanistan. According to journalist Sawik Schuster, Gorbachev had insisted on a UN guarantee that no Mujadehin soldiers would be killed during the withdrawal of troops. In a secret mission of the UN, Shuster was in Afghanistan in April 1988 and received the promise demanded by Gorbachev from the united commanders one week before the signing of the Geneva Agreement. However, due to further attacks by the Mujahideen, the Soviet soldiers were again engaged in fighting in July 1988, an account which Schuster strongly contradicted; "never" would shots have been fired from the guard posts which the Mujahideen had set up along the road from Kabul to Termiz. On the contrary, the Soviets had broken their promise when as many as two thousand civilians were killed in Operation Typhoon beginning on January 23, 1989. Dead civilians had been laid as charges on the road where the troop withdrawal took place.
By February 15, 1989, the withdrawal was over. Afghanistan had suffered over one million casualties, and five million people had fled the country because of the war. On the Soviet side, about 13,000 soldiers died in the more than nine years of war; according to later figures from the Russian General Staff, there were over 26,000 dead on the Soviet side.
The road to the new civil war
→ Main article: Afghan civil war (1989-2001)
The withdrawal of Soviet troops left Afghanistan politically and militarily without order. Like the heterogeneous resistance, the government of Mohammed Najibullah was unable to establish a claim to leadership and form a government that was accepted by the majority of the population. As early as January 1989, Kabul, which had been encircled by the mujahideen, was supplied only by a Soviet airlift. The anti-communist resistance organizations formed a counter-government in Peshawar, Pakistan, in February 1989. After the withdrawal of the last Soviet soldier on February 15, 1989, the Soviet Union initially provided material support to the leadership in Kabul. Since the Geneva Agreement only regulated the withdrawal of the armed forces, numerous Soviet advisers remained in Kabul. By the summer, the battle for Jalalabad was raging, in which the Mujahideen groups were unsuccessful. The mujahideen, particularly their largest parties, Hizb-i Islāmī and Jamiat-i Eslami-ye Afghanistan under Burhānuddin Rabbāni, became entangled in fighting among themselves that continued for years. In the spring of 1990, the then Minister of War, Nawaz Tanai, attempted a coup against Najibullāh. This failed and political purges followed. Nevertheless, as a result of increasing resistance, the ruling communist party relinquished its monopoly on power in June 1990 and renamed itself the "Home Party" ("Watan").
By the spring of 1992, the Mujahideen had taken military control of most of Afghanistan. On April 16, 1992, Najibullāh relinquished power through UN mediation after Russia, as the successor state to the USSR, reached an agreement with the USA to end their respective military aid and agreed to accept an Islamic government in Afghanistan. A council of four from Najibullāh's Watan Party assumed political leadership. On April 25, 1992, Kabul was handed over to the mujahideen without a fight and divided into six spheres of influence whose borders were mined. The mujahideen also took over all the remaining cities and garrisons in the area in the following days. However, the various Mujahideen factions began fighting each other immediately after the capture of Kabul. Another civil war broke out.
The fundamentalist Taliban finally emerged victorious from the ensuing conflicts, which met with little interest in the West, and established an Islamist state of God.
