political significance, war has no worthy moral, intellectual or
social meaning. Without politics, war is simply murder on an
aggregate scale.
(Borer, 1999: 190–1).
Finally, it is worth noting an important point made by Borer.
‘From a comparative perspective’, he argues, ‘it is clear that
Afghanistan’s impact on the ultimate fate of the Soviet Union was
much greater than Vietnam’s impact on the United States. The
United States survived Vietnam, and the Soviet Union did not sur-
vive Afghanistan. Therefore despite multiple layers of analogy, in
comprehensive terms Afghanistan was not the Soviet Vietnam; and
mercifully, Vietnam was not the American Afghanistan’ (Borer,
1999: 239). Here we find a genuinely novel argument: that
Afghanistan was not the Soviet Vietnam, but something even
worse.
Afghanistan and the disintegration of the Soviet system
Does this argument hold up? A superficial response to it might be
that many factors contributed to the breakdown of the USSR,
but that America’s ‘Vietnam syndrome’ was mono-causal. However,
that claim too is debatable. The USA’s mid-1970s crisis of confi-
dence was also a product of diverse factors. The failure in Vietnam
was certainly one, but others included the collapse of the Bretton
Woods international monetary system after President Nixon’s sus-
pension of US dollar convertibility into gold in 1971, and then, of
course, Nixon’s own enforced resignation in 1974 after the
Watergate scandal (Arnold, 1988: 129). While the combination of
these was debilitating, the stability of the US constitutional system
was never remotely under threat, and in significant respects the last
years of the Vietnam War and the immediate post-Vietnam period
saw important progress in a number of areas of historical tension,
notably the civil rights of African-Americans.
What role, then, did Afghanistan play in the demise of the
Soviet system? Unquestionably, it was not the only factor at
work, and no serious scholar has attempted to claim that it was.
164 The Afghanistan Wars