afghanistanthe Soviet intervention did was precipitate a full-scale civil war and inter-
nationalize the Afghanistan crisis, turning it into a proxy war between the
ussr and usa-nato. The Soviet Union now found itself condemned to
fight an unwinnable war on behalf of a government that was unsustainable.
The problems began almost as soon as the Soviet army arrived. The inter-
vention precipitated mass desertions from the national army and millions of
Afghans chose exile rather than living under occupation and a Communist
regime. By the mid-1980s more than 3 million Afghan refugees were living
in Pakistan, with a further 1.5 million in Iran. Hundreds of thousands more
were internally displaced. As a result of this mass depopu lation, between 1979
and 1991 agricultural production in Afghanistan fell 40 per cent.
In an attempt to raise a new Afghan army, the government resorted
to forcible conscription but also offered substantial financial incentives
for joining up. Yet despite being trained by Soviet officers, the army more
often than not came off second best in its encounters with the mujahidin.
The Red Army ended up bearing the brunt of combat, only for it too to
be found wanting. As was the case with the Anglo-Indian army in the
First Afghan War, the Soviet war machine was not trained for fighting a
counterinsurgency but for set-piece battles in a European theatre of war.
The insurgents deliberately avoided large-scale pitched battles, which they
knew were unwinnable, and instead ambushed straggling, slow-moving
Digging in, Nasir Bagh refugee camp outside Peshawar. The pdpa coup and subsequent
purges led to thousands of refugees fleeing to Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier and Baluchistan.
After the Soviet invasion this exodus became a flood. By the 1980s the Afghan refugee crisis
was the largest in the world.