Critically examine the roots of Afghan Civil War. What role the Soviet Union and the United States played in it? (2002)
Afghanistan’s civil war, from the communist coup of 1978 through the mujahideen infighting of 1992–96 to Taliban rule, is often told as a superpower story. Barnett R. Rubin (The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 1995) offers a sharper frame: a rentier state living on foreign aid broke apart once rival patrons armed rival Afghans. The roots were domestic; the superpowers made the war long and the collapse total.
Domestic roots
- A buffer state with a thin core: shaped by the Anglo-Russian Great Game and the Durand Line (1893), the state lived on subsidies and ruled the countryside lightly.
- Fragmentation: Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras; modernising Kabul against a conservative countryside.
- Modernisation from above: Amanullah Khan fell in 1929 for reforming too fast; Mohammad Daoud Khan ended the monarchy in 1973; the Saur Revolution of April 1978 brought the communist PDPA to power.
- Revolutionary overreach: forced land reform and repression provoked revolt within a year, from the Herat uprising of March 1979; in the Khalq–Parcham feud Hafizullah Amin had Nur Muhammad Taraki killed in October 1979.
- Islamist mobilisation: Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar fled to Pakistan in the 1970s, which sheltered them as leverage against Kabul’s Pashtunistan claim. Olivier Roy (Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan, 1986) showed how resistance turned local grievance into jihad.
The Soviet role
- Aid and officer training from 1955 made Kabul a client; a treaty followed in December 1978.
- The Politburo refused Taraki’s pleas for troops in March 1979, but by December feared that Amin would turn to Washington. On 27 December Soviet forces killed him and installed Babrak Karmal, in effect applying the Brezhnev Doctrine outside the Warsaw Pact. Over 100,000 troops turned a revolt into a national war; about a million Afghans died and a third became refugees.
- Under Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammad Najibullah replaced Karmal (1986); the Geneva Accords (14 April 1988) set the exit, completed on 15 February 1989. Soviet aid sustained Najibullah until the USSR ended; he fell in April 1992.
The American role
- Operation Cyclone began with non-lethal aid in July 1979, before the invasion, then grew under the Reagan Doctrine into the largest covert programme in US history, matched by Saudi money. Stinger missiles from 1986 broke Soviet air dominance.
- Aid flowed through Pakistan’s ISI, which favoured the most Islamist parties, above all Hekmatyar’s; Washington tolerated Pakistan’s nuclear programme in return.
- After 1989 the US disengaged. The 1992–96 war among the victors and the rise of the Taliban with Pakistani backing, traced by Ahmed Rashid (Taliban, 2000), filled the vacuum.
Critical assessment
- Geopolitical reading: realists see rational competition over a buffer, a new Great Game.
- State–society reading (Rubin): the war outlived both patrons because foreign money had replaced the state’s own base.
- Post-colonial critique: Afghans were treated as a chessboard; under the Geneva Accords both guarantors kept arming clients, and the mujahideen were never party.
India abstained on the General Assembly’s January 1980 condemnation of the invasion and lost influence as Pakistan gained it. The sequel fits: the Taliban returned in August 2021, Russia recognised them in July 2025, and since October 2025 Pakistan has fought the regime it once sponsored.
Conclusion
The roots lay in a fragile, aid-dependent state and a revolution imposed on a resistant society. The superpowers did not create the war, but they converted a domestic crisis into a decade of proxy war and left a collapsed state behind.