Best Books on the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

On December 24, 1979, Soviet transport planes began landing at Kabul airport in waves. By December 27, Soviet special forces had stormed the Tajbeg Palace and killed President Hafizullah Amin. Within days, over 80,000 Soviet troops were on Afghan soil, expecting a quick stabilization of a friendly socialist government. They stayed for nine years. When the last Soviet soldier crossed the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan in February 1989, Afghanistan was in ruins and the Soviet empire had less than three years left. ## Why the Soviets Went In The decision to intervene was not as simple as it looked from Washington. The Politburo was divided, and the final decision to send ground troops was made by a small group of aging men, Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko, Ustinov, who concluded that the Afghan communist government was too unstable to survive without direct military support, and that a collapse on the Soviet Union's southern border was unacceptable. They expected the operation to last months. None of them understood Afghanistan. The Afghan resistance, the Mujahideen, was fragmented, tribal, and deeply local. It was also almost impossible to defeat by conventional military means. The Soviets controlled the cities and the main roads. The countryside remained hostile. As the war dragged on and Soviet casualties mounted, it became a grinding counterinsurgency without a visible endgame. ## Rodric Braithwaite's "Afgantsy" Rodric Braithwaite's *Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89* is the essential account from the Soviet side. Braithwaite is a former British ambassador to Moscow, and he had access to Russian veterans, archives, and memoirs that Western historians rarely use. The result is a book that treats Soviet soldiers as human beings rather than abstractions, following their experiences from recruitment through deployment to the difficult homecoming in a society that did not know how to receive them. Braithwaite is clear about the strategic failures and the atrocities, but he never loses sight of the individual soldiers caught inside them. The title comes from the Russian word for Afghan veterans, a term that carries the same weight in Russian culture that "Vietnam vet" carries in American. ## Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" Steve Coll's *Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001* covers the American side of the same conflict and its long aftermath. Coll won a Pulitzer Prize for the book, and the reporting shows. He traces the CIA's covert support for the Mujahideen, Operation Cyclone, from its cautious beginnings under Carter through its massive expansion under Reagan. He is particularly good on the consequences: the weapons, money, and organizational experience that flowed into Afghanistan during the 1980s did not disappear when the Soviets left. They created the infrastructure from which the Taliban and al-Qaeda emerged. Coll makes the connection between the Cold War intervention and the 2001 attacks specific and documented rather than vague and rhetorical. ## The Mujahideen and the Long Aftermath One of the things both books share is a clear-eyed account of who the Mujahideen actually were. Western Cold War propaganda presented them as freedom fighters. They were, in many cases, effective fighters, but their vision of Afghanistan's future had nothing to do with liberal democracy. The factions the CIA most heavily backed, particularly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i Islami, were among the most extreme. The inter-factional civil war that erupted after the Soviet withdrawal, from 1992 to 1996, killed tens of thousands of Afghans and left Kabul a ruin. The Taliban took power in 1996 partly because Afghans were exhausted by that civil war. None of this was inevitable, but it was not unforeseeable either. ## Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin's "The Bear Trap" Mohammed Yousaf's *The Bear Trap: Afghanistan's Untold Story*, written with Mark Adkin, offers a third perspective. Yousaf was the head of Afghan operations for Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) during the war, and his account of how Pakistani military intelligence channelled CIA money and weapons to the Mujahideen factions it preferred is detailed and unflattering to everyone involved. The ISI, not the CIA, made most of the decisions about which commanders received support. The preference was for Islamist factions over secular nationalist ones. The consequences, again, lasted past 1989. ## A War That Did Not End The Soviet-Afghan War ended in military withdrawal but not in peace. It fed directly into the Afghan civil war, the Taliban takeover, the creation of al-Qaeda's Afghan base, and eventually September 11. Reading the books about 1979 to 1989 is not just reading about the Cold War. It is reading the first chapter of a conflict that is still running. ## Further Reading [Explore more Cold War books](/category/cold-war)