The war seriously affected relations between the Soviet Union and the USA,
making it impossible for President Jimmy Carter to obtain Senate ratification
for theSALTII treaty, and contributing to a breakdown in thede ́tentewhich
had characterized most of the 1970s. The war dragged on in stalemate until
1989 when President MikhailGorbachevfinally withdrew the last Soviet
troops. As in Vietnam for the first few years after American withdrawal, the
situation remained much the same. The pro-Soviet government, still very
heavily dependent on the Soviet Union for supplies, continued to control
some areas with their own troops, but had to accept that the various guerrilla
bands could defy them throughout most of the provinces. Soviet involvement
in the war was deeply unpopular in the Soviet Union, being fought largely by
conscripts among whom there were many casualties, but it ended not so much
because of popular discontent but because the military and financial drain on
the Soviet Union was too great to be continued. Furthermore, the fear of
Islamicfundamentalismspreading from Iran through Afghanistan and into
the southern Soviet republics seemed to subside with the beginnings of
moderation in Iranian politics in the late 1980s.
In 1991 the Soviet Union and the USA pledged to stop supplying arms to
the combatants in the civil war. Eventually, and after the final demise of the
Soviet Union itself, the communist regime in Afghanistan fell in 1992.
However, civil war continued, but now between rival factions of the ever
disparateMujahidin. Peace of a sort was enforced in 1996, when a Pashtun-
dominated Islamic fundamentalist group, theTaliban, largely created by
Pakistani military intelligence, took control of two-thirds of the country and
enforced a repressive version of Islamic law (seeShari‘a). They were never
able to eradicate opposition completely, however, and resistance remained
strong in the north. After numerous international condemnations of their
conduct, the Taliban were eventually defeated by a combination of US-led
bombing raids and troop advances by the disparateMujahidin-based Northern
Alliance, following the beginning of the so-called ‘War on Terrorism’ in
October 2001 (the Taliban were sympathetic to the aims of Osama bin Laden,
the Islamist militant who was believed to have ordered the attacks on the USA
in September from a base in Afghanistan). The broad-based government
installed to replace the Taliban brought some peace to the country, although
its effectiveness in controlling the whole of Afghanistan remained open to
question in 2002.
Agrarian Parties
Agrarian parties are political parties chiefly representing the interests of
peasants or, more broadly, the rural sector of society. The extent to which
they are important, or whether they even exist, depends mainly on two factors.
Agrarian Parties