Thirty Years after the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan

This year's 15 February marked the 30th anniversary of the complete withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. When the 40th Soviet Army completed its retreat in 1989, the military intervention had lasted 9 years, 1 month, and 19 days. This is about half as long as the US and NATO intervention, which began in 2001. The two volumes under review not only enhance our understanding of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan but also allow identifying parallels with the ongoing international engagement in the country. The state of research to date has been characterized by studies that revealed competing views regarding why the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, how this affected Soviet society, and to what extent the Afghan war contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.¹ However, this says more about the fact that research is not undertaken in a narrowly comparative manner but with particular foci that differ from study to study: for example, the perspective and sources used. The books discussed here complement each other in that they shed light on the Soviet domestic, geopolitical, and social dimensions of the Afghan war.

Michael Fenzel's No Miracles: The Failure of Soviet Decision-Making in the Afghan War explores the perspective of the political center—the Politburo—in this military endeavor. As a senior US military planning officer with previous deployments in Afghanistan during the post-2001 US and NATO military intervention, Army Brigadier General Michael Fenzel focused his PhD dissertation (2013) on the question of why the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan. Based on an examination of Politburo documents (minutes of meetings and debates) as well as interviews with former Soviet officials as recorded by the Cold War International History Project (Washington, DC), he reaffirms Manfred Sapper's findings from 1994 that Soviet decision making marginalized the Soviet senior officer corps when it came to choosing to intervene and in conducting the subsequent military operation. In this way Fenzel dismisses competing assumptions accepted by many scholars, such as that the Soviet Union's failure in Afghanistan was a military problem, a diplomatic mistake, or the result of Afghan shortcomings. Fenzel shows how the decisions to intervene, to withdraw, and to operate on the ground can be traced to the realm of Soviet (party) politics and were motivated solely by the Politburo leadership and their internal dynamics.

This perspective is complemented by the volume Sovietnam: Die UdSSR in Afghanistan 1979–1989, edited by Tanja Penter and Esther Meier. Its contributors add the experiential dimension of those who were caught up in the Soviet Afghan war at the operational level—for example, the recruits or Soviet soldiers from different ethnic backgrounds (titular Soviet republics)—and how their experiences affected Soviet society during the decade of intervention, directly contributed to the regime's loss of legitimacy, and indirectly led to its demise. The volume originates in a scholarly conference, held in 2013, that aimed to relate Afghanistan, the Cold War, and the end of the Soviet Union from various interdisciplinary perspectives. Comprising contributions that explain Soviet-Afghan relations before 1978, the experiences of war and violence by Soviets and Afghans form the nucleus of the book's insights into the social and psychological dimensions and effects of the war. The strength of the volume stems from the use of alternative sources (given the difficulties of obtaining access to Soviet and US archives for this time period) and the mobilization of a view "from below," manifest in oral history interviews, contemporary images, song and poetry texts, and Internet forums of ex-fighters, among other sources.

Ironically, it was Mikhail Gorbachev, the representative of a new generation of Soviet leaders that had no legacy of World War II experience or a...