HOME | DD
Baccter — Too Young to Die
#sovietunion #war #afghanistan #gmod #military #soviet #gmodgarrysmod
Published: 2019-04-27 07:29:51 +0000 UTC; Views: 2204; Favourites: 23; Downloads: 3
Redirect to original
Description
Soviet–Afghan War, the Soviet Union's Vietnam
Made in Garry's Mod and Photoshop
Related content
Comments: 9
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
I don't know a lot about the Soviet-Afghan War, but if you describe it as the USSR's Vietnam, I'm going to guess they didn't fare much better.
Very nice picture.
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
Pretty much. In 1978 Communists couped the Afghan government and instituted a modernization programme that was at odds with traditionalist values and power structures, which combined with the government's subsequent suppression of dissent sparked widespread rebellion by regional chiefs. The Afghan president Nur Muhammad Taraki tried to lobby Moscow for aid, but Leonid Brezhnev initially resisted on the grounds it would provoke a response from the Americans et al, and even recommended Taraki ease up on his reforms. In late 1979 Taraki was murdered in an internal coup by his prime minister Hafizullah Amin, and Brezhnev responded by sending in the 40th Army which killed Amin to reassert the Moscow-friendly faction. The West portrayed this as an outright invasion, although Taraki had been requesting full-scale military support almost immediately after taking power.
Meanwhile, Washington had been bolstering Pakistan in response to the Iranian Revolution and hostile posturing by Afghanistan even before 1978, including aid to the Afghan rebels. Once the Soviets moved in the CIA rapidly expanded its support, along with Britain, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. This was followed by an influx of foreign, mostly Arab volunteers who saw Afghanistan as a "holy war" (hence their name mujahideen)—Osama bin Laden cut his teeth there, originally as a banker to a more moderate Arab army before being swayed to Ayman al-Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad (the group that became al-Qaida).
So the war dragged on, with the Red Army responsible for the bulk of combat operations on the government side, and the largely-disorganized by well-supplied insurgents waging indecisive but demoralizing guerrilla war. After Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary, Moscow began eyeing withdrawal as part of a general strategy to ease international tensions, but the exit was contingent on the Afghan army taking over, and Kabul didn't want to do the job on its own. In 1987 Moscow announced it would begin withdrawal; Gorbachev attempted to negotiate mutual de-escalation with Washington out of fear Afghanistan would collapse completely and empower the extremist factions, but the Reagan administration refused to consider anything less than unilateral Soviet withdrawal. The final Soviet troops left February 15, 1989; the Afghan government managed several battlefield victories on its own, but ultimately collapsed in part from internal conflict in 1992—then the Taliban took over.
So Afghanistan was like Vietnam in the sense of a professional army propping up an unpopular government against a guerrilla army with foreign support, with easy victory in conventional battles but a steady drain on morale from the occupation. An important difference, however, is whereas Kissinger's "domino theory"—the idea that a Vietcong victory would cause a cascade effect of Communist revolution across South Asia—never came to pass, Afghanistan literally served as the incubator for the Islamist insurgencies that rocked the 1990s.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
