Suppose the Soviets invade and conquer Afghanistan in the 80’s. Either the US does not intervene or the actions are ineffective. How would the world of today be different? Better or worse?
Conquer? :dubious:
It’s really hard to read the Wiki page Soviet war in Afghanistan and not think that the Evil Empire was fighting our war in Afghanistan. I struggle to see a difference between the Mujahideen and the Taliban, and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and what we claim we want Afghanistan to become.
Hindsight being 20/20 and all, a Soviet puppet state Afghanistan (and a long list of other countries that our meddling with in the long term helped us not at all) would have been far better than what we ended up with. Thirty plus years of wasted effort, money, and lives and we’re still no where near where we were when this “Cold War” stupidity started. (Oh noes they’re socialists! :eek: Our need for “Strategic Minerals” trump even our own notions of human dignity. “One man, one vote, one time”.)
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
CMC
One of many reasons this question is impossible to answer is that the Soviets had the same problem in Afghanistan that the U.S. does–nobody can define what “victory” would even entail. Wars have a limited shelf life before they reach the point where fighting them is an end in itself. The Soviets initially invaded Afghanistan to prop up an unpopular Communist client ruler, and they stayed there until a year *after *their own elected, anti-Communist advisory legislature was in place in Moscow. Who would have been “defeated” if the Soviets had “won” in 1989? What would the Afghan government have looked like? The impossibility of answering these questions should make us reflect on the similar impossibility of defining what we are fighting and what the objective is in Afghanistan today.
I think the main difference would probably be that Afghanistan would’ve been ruled by some flavour of ex-Communist strongman, like most of the other “-stans” are. Which might have meant a slightly better quality of life for the Afghanistanis, who would’ve been spared both the destructive consequences of a long war and the rise of the Taliban, though I doubt it would be a particularly nice place to live in any case.
Well, assuming the USSR would have collapsed anyway, I can picture Afghanistan going the same route as Yugoslavia - civil war and atrocities and whatnot - and since the west doesn’t intervene (because… who cares, really) the country doesn’t break up along negotiated borders but eventually succumbs to whatever warlord can cobble together the largest coalition. Maybe it becomes a Taliban state, maybe not. It sucks there, in any event.
When I think about it, the OP question is one of the more interesting ones I’ve seen posed here in a long time. Doesn’t mean I have an answer, though. I think there’s a chance the collapse of the Soviet Union would have been significantly delayed. Nevertheless, the US would be in a better position than it got itself into during the Bush II years.
Exactly what is meant by “winning”? Afghanistan was never a place where any central government controlled much-outside of Kabul, it was run by warlords and local despots. Even in the days of the British Empire, Afghanistan was unstable. Perhaps its most peaceful period was under the rule of King Zahir Shah-but he only controlled the elite in and around Kabul. Perhaps if the Soviets stayed indefinitely, but no way was Afghanistan “worth it”.
By “winning”, I mean the Soviets achieve their objectives, such as they were (without US interference).
What objectives? The Soviet objectives in Afghanistan outside of supporting Communist government were never clear or coherent and were a general laundry list drawn up post invasion, one of their problems in fact.
I’m no expert on the subject, but I don’t think it would’ve mattered much. My impression is the USSR was mostly just running on military might to make up for a lack of a functioning political/economic system. So the collapse was probably going to happen anyway. They were spending about 20% of GDP on military towards the end (vs the 3-5% we currently spend in the US).
The USSR already conquered a lot of Islamic countries in the region
http://www.bodine.phila.k12.pa.us/kaufman/world_geography/russia/chp_ussr_map_1.jpg
What would them going one nation further to the south of Turkmenistan matter? What value does Afghanistan have? The human capital is very low and easily negative (requiring more financial and human investment from the USSR than the colony would give back). The land is hard to cross. The nation borders Iran and Pakistan, but would that really matter? The USSR already bordered Iran, Pakistan was run by an anti-USSR dictator at the time (plus like I said, hard to navigate and cross on land).
I’m sure the USSR had a reason to invade, but I don’t know it.
Well, no question the Soviet system was unsustainable, but I think without the unpopular quagmire in Afghanistan, gradual reforms within the system (a la China) would have been possible instead of full on collapse. Also the invasion of Afghanistan was, at least on paper, the big reason for Cold War tensions rekindling after the detente years of the 70’s. So perhaps without Afghanistan (or a quick invasion that gets forgotten), Soviet military spending wouldn’t have had to stay so high.
But I think this is the $64,000 question. Was the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan a primary cause of the collapse of the Soviet regime? And if the Soviets had “won” in Afghanistan would the Soviet regime have survived and still be in power?
I think the answers to both questions are probably yes. The Soviet regime had a lot of other problems but it had had problems throughout its existence. The regime had managed to muddle through and keep going.
But the Afghanistan problem showed everyone that the regime wasn’t working right. And that left an opening for somebody like Gorbachev to come in and try to enact fundamental changes and for the regime to be willing to try to change. Of course as it turns out, trying to fix the regime ended up killing it instead.
Except Soviet military spending plateaued during the same period as the Afghan war. It didn’t really drive them to spend more or less, they just took some of the money they were spending on useless Cold War gadgets and redirected it towards helicopters to go shoot Afganis. They continously increased spending during the Détente period.
As Wesley Clarke says, the Soviets were driven to overspend on their military for reasons that didn’t have much to do with their actual military needs. If anything, that trend started to reverse itself a little during the Afgahn war, with spending remaining steady instead of constantly increasing.
Iraq would still be a friend of the US, receive $5 billion in military aid a year, and be a regional superpower.
Won what? There’s nothing there to win.