November 1979. The Iranian revolution had not simply humiliated
the Carter Administration; it had corrupted the whole security
architecture derived from the 1969 enunciation by President Nixon
of the Guam Doctrine, which posited a special role for pro-
American regional powers in guaranteeing regional security. The
major Western European powers, in alliance with the USA, were
also locked in competition with the Soviet Union in Europe, where
the Soviet move to deploy SS-20 Intermediate Range Ballistic
Missiles prompted NATO on 12 December 1979 to decide to
respond by deploying both Pershing II and Ground Launched
Cruise Missiles. However, this decision was important more as a
symptom of the freeze in East–West relations, rather than as a fac-
tor which might have led the Soviets to feel that they had little to
lose by invading Afghanistan. For ironically, it was on the very
day that NATO reached its decision that the Soviet leadership
crossed its own Rubicon as far as the Afghan situation was con-
cerned.
The Soviet invasion
On 12 December 1979, a meeting of the Soviet Politburo, chaired
by Foreign Minister Gromyko, reportedly accepted the recommen-
dation of four key Soviet leaders and Politburo members –
Communist Party General Secretary Brezhnev, KGB Chairman
Andropov, Defence Minister Ustinov, and Gromyko himself – that
Afghanistan was to be invaded. The Politburo decision record, no.
P 176/125, was discreetly headed K polozheniiu v ‘A’(‘On the
situation in “A”’), and recorded in the handwriting of Party
Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, a longtime Brezhnev associate. It
was countersigned by all full members of the Politburo except
Chairman of the Council of Ministers Kosygin, who was seriously
ill at the time and died the following year; according to one
source, this record was actually ‘antedated’ (zadnim chislom) rather
than signed by all members when the decision was actually taken
(Kornienko, 1993: 110). However, Soviet troop movements suggest
that a possible invasion was in prospect from at least 7 October,
The Road to War 33