I was born in the early seventies so the Soviet Union as the empire of evil ready to nuke the civilized world into oblivion for political and economic ideological reasons never resonated with me. By the time I was a teenager and able to comprehend the complexity of politics the Soviet Union was another failed nation that couldn't feed its people.

My memory of the glory of the Soviet Union was food lines and people waiting days on end for toilet paper. My experience of food and other essentials in Australia during the seventies and eighties was abundance. Consequently the Soviet Union got lumped in my mind with other nations that couldn't feed their people like Kampuchea and Bi-Africa. For me it wasn't a state to be feared, if anything it was to be pitied.

Eventually the Berlin wall came down, but again, me not being a cold war warrior and Germany being a long way away from Australia it was all a pretty abstract concept and something that happened on the other side of the world.

Since my knowledge of Cold War and Soviet history is pretty poor I recently picked up Gregory Feifer's book on the Soviet - Afghanistan conflict. Gregory Feifer writes:

Most Americans view the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan as a naked act of aggression by a ruthless, totalitarian state. The reality was far more complex. For more than a year, Soviet leaders rejected pleas from the Afghan communist government to send troops to help put down rebellion by the rural population protesting the regime's merciless modernization program.

After Moscow did invade, it found itself locked in conflict - essentially a civil war - it could barely comprehend. While it cannot be said that Afghanistan triggered the Soviet collapse, it did project the image of a failing empire unable to deal with a handful of bedraggled partisans in a remote part of its southern frontier.

It certainly looks like the Afghan politicians used the Soviets to build their own legitimacy and make up for their own bad governance, especially their inability to resolve internal political conflicts without violence.

The modernization program killed numerous people in the rural areas, robbing Afghanistan of its tribal leadership and stability. Added to that the political violence as the different communist factions in Afghanistan fought with each other using Army and Air Force loyalists didn't make for much pleasant in Afghanistan.

The Soviets were concerned about American influence in Afghanistan after the Revolution in Iran which was anti-American. Previously to that Iran had been pro-American and the Soviets were concerned that America would start to seek influence in Afghanistan instead.

Additionally it seemed Brezhnev was sentimental for the ousted leader of Afghanistan and made an emotional decision to send in the Soviet troops on a large scale. Brezhnev was aging and the core group that made up the Soviet decision makers shielded him from bad news in Afghanistan which largely led to the conclusion that Soviet intervention was necessary.

Originally the Soviets didn't want to get involved in the communist revolution in Afghanistan. The Afghans tried to turn the social organization from tribal and land ownership to one where the peasants received land under state ownership. To do so they killed and displaced tribal elders, tribes and land owners. This caused a great deal of social unrest.

After the Soviets came, the inconsistencies of communism's ability to provide basic things to the Army such as food meant that a black market system built up around the supply routes where officers got first pick of stuff. As a consequence the lowest rank soldiers often stole and looted for supplies, clothes, alcohol and food. Often they would kill Afghans in the process.

The war was violent, with the Soviets wiping out villages with their superior firepower, and the social situation was also often violent with the killing being arbitrary. The attempt to establish communism in Afghanistan failed and the civil war continued up until American forces invaded Afghanistan after September 11th. Gregory Feifer;

Twenty-four years after the Politburu's contemplation of a quick invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Bush Administration believed it could withdraw within months of invading Iraq. The inherent contradictions of the American use of force to try to plant democracy in countries with no tradition of representative government differ little from the Soviet attempt to build communism in Afghanistan.

The same problem exists for the US in Afghanistan as well. The Karzai government is corrupt and illegitimate. The United States is doing deals with Karzai simply because no other form of political and social stability exists in Afghanistan.

It turns out Afghanistan and Iraq were fool's errands. Both were strategic mistakes and the zealots that led the movement for them to occur should have no place in modern political dialog.

I thought Afghanistan was justified even though Iraq was not. I was wrong. Afghanistan was not justified. After reading Feifer's book of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan I don't know how Afghanistan is going to progress to a modern state.

After all the killing the Afghans did, then the Soviets did and now another prolonged COIN conflict with suicide bombers in civil areas; I don't know what Afghanistan is going to do. Leader after leader has been killed and those that remain have only flourished in the forty or so years of war that have been the way of life in Afghanistan.

Gregory Feifer; "The support Babrak Karmal's new [Afghan] regime had expected from Amin's removal failed to materialize. Moscow's blame of the assasinated leader for many of the country's problems - and refusal to realize that whatever slim popular support the PDPA had was fast evaporating - did it no good.

The Red Army soon would make the situation worse. Instead of helping the Afghan government establish control over the country, it precipitated the creation of a deadly opposition that quickly spread in the open and mountainous countryside."

The invasion of Afghanistan collapsed the Cold War detente. The Russian invasion was swift and other than a rising guerrilla presence, the Soviets encountered little resistance. They were planning to conduct an orderly withdrawal of their forces, however, the invasion and the Soviet presence caused issues. Feifer writes;

Regardless of Soviet optimism, events the Red Army did not expect quickly propelled it into a struggle against a population that refused to tolerate invaders no matter how friendly they claimed to be.

Soviet attempts to control uprisings in Kabul, Herat, and other centers only prompted further Afghan animosity. Miltary columns traveling through the countryside began comping under attack - still sporadic - from spontaneously formed insurgent mujahideen groups.

The invasion had begun overcoming ethnic, tribal, geographic, and economic divisions, and solidifying Islam's role as a unifying ideology.

Money started flowing to the Mujahideen from the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China and elsewhere. For the US the amounts only got larger and larger. The Soveit strategy basically became slugging it out. They sent more troops and equipment into Afghanistan, they supported which ever government looked the most stable politically whatever its merits, and while Soviet commanders changed tactics on the ground, the overall strategy was that the USSR was in Afghanistan. That strategy only changed when Gorbachev came to power.