7
Consequences of the
Soviet–Afghan War
The completion of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was not
a moment of rapturous joy for Afghans, although there were certain
grounds for celebration. On the one hand, those who had battled
Soviet forces since the December 1979 invasion felt overwhelming
pride that a superpower had been forced into what they saw as a
retreat. But on the other hand, the suffering which the people of
Afghanistan had been forced to endure during a decade of occupa-
tion was enormous, and even on the most optimistic of scenarios,
the damage which had been inflicted on the country would take
years to put right. From the Soviet point of view, too, there was lit-
tle about which to be satisfied. Thousands of young soldiers had per-
ished in a harsh land for little gain, leaving grieving relatives to
ponder how and why such a disastrous commitment had come to be
undertaken. Yet the war affected the two states very differently, and
the aim of this chapter is briefly to identify some of the more
important of these effects, together with two particularly important
lessons of the war. In Afghanistan, the war produced a multilayered
destructuring of politics, economy, and society, in ways which
remain massively apparent at the beginning of a new century. In the
USSR, on the other hand, the burdens of the war contributed to the
short-term delegitimation of Communist Party rule, and played a
role in the breakdown of mono-organisational socialism and the dis-
integration of the USSR as a territorial unit. The new Russian
Federation which emerged from the wreckage of the USSR has been
able to reposition itself in the world, and substantially distance itself
from the Afghanistan conflict. Afghanistan enjoys no such luxury.