such prudential calculations. In Poland in December 1981, this
actually prompted a pre-emptive strike against the Solidarity trade
union by a Polish military aware that a Soviet invasion might be
the alternative (Saikal, 1984b).
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan undermined the previ-
ously fundamental notion that the ‘gains of socialism’ were irre-
versible (Wiles, 1985). While the Soviet Union, as noted earlier,
referred to Afghanistan after the 1979 invasion as a ‘developing’
rather than ‘socialist’ country, by the end of the 1980s, the ideo-
logical innovations of the Gorbachev period had stretched the
notion of socialism so much in the direction of a kind of ‘guided’
welfare state that the notion of Soviet power being used to prop up
socialist regimes was becoming decreasingly plausible. However,
even in 1988, it struck one shrewd observer as inconceivable that
the Soviet Union could have sanctioned the overt dismantling of
the Najibullah regime as part of a settlement process in
Afghanistan (Richardson, 1989: 167), and this suggests that the
collapse of the Eastern European glacis, even at this stage, was
below the horizon. Perhaps the Gorbachev leadership would have
gravitated to the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’ in any case, but the withdrawal
from Afghanistan may well have hastened the process.
Was Afghanistan the USSR’s Vietnam?
The Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon in April 1975 did not lead
to the breakdown of the US political system or the breakup of the
USA as a political system. However, they did create a lingering
sense of failure within the United States, which the humiliations of
the Carter Presidency, notably the fall of the Shah of Iran and the
subsequent hostage crisis (Saikal, 1980) significantly aggravated. It
took the Reagan Presidency from 1981 to 1989 to remove this
sense of impotence.
Some analysts have queried whether the experience in
Afghanistan constituted a military ‘defeat’ for the Soviet Union
(Jukes, 1989: 96–8; Galeotti, 1995: 153; Mendelson, 1998: 27),
and by implication, whether an analogy between the US experience
162 The Afghanistan Wars