Soviets Invade Afghanistan: A Decade of Suffering Begins

Soviet airborne troops seized Kabul airport on the evening of December 24, 1979, beginning a military intervention that would kill over a million Afghan civilians, drain the Soviet treasury, and set in motion a chain of consequences leading directly to the September 11 attacks two decades later. Within forty-eight hours, special forces from the KGB Alpha Group stormed the Tajbeg Palace and assassinated Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, replacing him with the more compliant Babrak Karmal. The Soviet Politburo had debated the invasion for months. Afghanistan Marxist government, installed by a 1978 coup, was losing control of the countryside to a growing Islamic insurgency. Amin, who had seized power by murdering his predecessor, was proving unpredictable and had made quiet overtures to the United States. Soviet leaders feared losing a client state on their southern border and convinced an ailing Leonid Brezhnev to authorize the intervention despite objections from the military general staff. The United States responded by funneling billions of dollars in weapons and training to the Afghan mujahideen through Pakistan intelligence services in what became the CIA largest covert operation. Saudi Arabia matched American funding dollar for dollar. The war attracted thousands of foreign jihadist volunteers, including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, who built training camps near the Pakistani border. The Stinger missile, provided to the mujahideen beginning in 1986, neutralized Soviet helicopter superiority. The last Soviet soldier crossed the Friendship Bridge out of Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, after nearly a decade of fighting that killed 15,000 Soviet troops and an estimated 850,000 to 1.5 million Afghan civilians. The financial and political costs accelerated the Soviet Union collapse. Afghanistan descended into civil war, creating the vacuum the Taliban filled in 1996 and that sheltered al-Qaeda as it planned the September 11 attacks.