Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Gregory Winger examining U.S. policy toward Afghanistan in the 1970s, leading up to the seizure of power in 1978 by a Soviet-backed Communist organization known as the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). In 1973, the monarchy in Afghanistan was overthrown, and a new government emerged under President Mohammed Daoud Khan, who had served as prime minister for the king in the early 1960s until forced to resign in 1963. In returning to power in 1973, Daoud relied for assistance on the PDPA and the Soviet Union, despite his wariness of them. The new arrangement in Afghanistan posed challenges for the United States. In line with the doctrine President Richard Nixon enunciated in Guam in July 1969, the U.S. government backed Daoud in his embrace of nonalignment and his efforts to steer a middle course between the PDPA and the ultraconservative Islamic clerics in Afghanistan. But because the United States never provided strong enough support to Daoud to counter the extremists, he found himself in an increasingly perilous situation, culminating in his downfall at the hands of the PDPA in April 1978.

The next article, by András Nagy, analyzes the response of the United Nations (UN) to the Hungarian revolution of October–November 1956 and the Soviet invasion that crushed it, killing more than 2,500 Hungarians. Cold War divisions in the UN Security Council usually prevented the UN from responding effectively to events that involved key interests of either of the superpowers, and this was certainly the case during and after the Hungarian revolution. Nagy provides a detailed account of the UN's actions in the autumn of 1956, including the impact of the simultaneous East-West crisis over Suez. He then examines how the UN failed to stem the wave of repression under János Kádár that persisted for more than three years, with more than 100,000 arrested, roughly 230 executed, and more than 25,000 sent to prison. The UN's inability to mitigate the harsh consequences of the invasion underscored the organization's inefficacy during the Cold War.

The third article, by Molly Todd, discusses an important dimension of the human toll of the counterinsurgency war in Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, a war that not only killed tens of thousands but also led to a massive forced exodus from the northern highlands of the country. Faced with Marxist guerrillas armed by Cuba and the Soviet Union, the U.S.-backed government in Guatemala resorted to brutal counterinsurgency tactics that uprooted roughly 2 million people (nearly 80 percent of the population in some northern areas), including 200,000 who fled to southern Mexico. The Guatemalans who sought refuge in Mexico received assistance from numerous sources, including the UN Commission on Refugees, several Mexican government agencies, a medley of humanitarian relief organizations, and leftist "solidarity" groups based in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Todd shows that most members of the solidarity groups, who wanted to challenge U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, were unable to break fully with the assumptions and practices that undergirded U.S. preponderance throughout the region.

The next article, by Stefano Bottoni, examines the role of the Securitate secret police and intelligence organs in Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Communist Party leader whose increasingly harsh repression culminated in his violent overthrow in December 1989. The Securitate was originally set up in 1948 to enforce the Communist regime's policy of widespread, brutal violence. But even before Ceauşescu came to power in 1965, the rampant violence of the early years of the Communist regime had become more selective and ethnicized. Rather than being targeted at entire social classes, as in the late 1940s and 1950s, the violence used by the Securitate was targeted at particular individuals and at ethnic groups whose activities were deemed inimical to Romanian security interests, above all the ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania. Bottoni traces the changing functions of the Securitate, showing how the Romanian secret police can be compared with the repressive organs in other Communist states.

The next article, by Hadrien Buclin, explores...