Cold War and Its Impact on Soviet-Afghan War

Cold War and Its Impact on Soviet-Afghan War

Introduction

The Cold War was a geopolitical division between the Western allies and the Soviet Union that emerged in the late 1940s, shortly after the end of World War II, and continued through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. During World War II, the United States was allied with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union against Germany, Italy, and Japan. However, within several years of the war's conclusion, this global division of power changed dramatically to one where the United States and its allies in Western Europe and Japan were aligned against the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe.

From the U.S. perspective, the Cold War geopolitical model of the world saw the United States and its allies (the “First World”) competing with the Soviet Union and its allies (the “Second World”) for control of those places not directly aligned with either (the “Third World”). After the 1949 communist takeover of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union also sought to extend its influence over parts of the Third World. For U.S. foreign policymakers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviet Union was an inherently evil and expansionist state bent on world domination that must be stopped, in the parlance of the day, “wherever it reared its ugly head.” On the other hand, Soviet foreign policymakers in the late 1940s saw the United States as an aggressive, expansionist state determined to destroy the Soviet Union.

Thus, the Cold War saw skirmishes between the two superpowers and their surrogates in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and South and southeast Asia. In this Cold War, local events, movements, and revolutions in the Third World were not understood in local terms (e.g., as the overthrow of a local despotic ruler or as part of a local uprising trying to overthrow the government to bring greater social welfare to the poor) but rather were interpreted as possible gains or losses for the First World or Second World based on how they fit into the grand global “battle” between “democracy” and “communism.” Hence, in the name of stopping potential communist threats, the United States helped overthrow governments or intervened directly in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, Chile, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1970s, and Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Grenada in the 1980s.

The Soviets were certainly not immune to such meddling, as seen in their interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in their 10-year battle to control Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. Guiding U.S. actions under this Cold War global geopolitical model were two crude “geographical” principles, containment and the domino theory, which engage with geography as being primarily about location.

Under the concept of containment, the United States established a policy that the forces of the Soviet Union and China should be bottled up and not allowed to expand beyond their spheres of influence, whether beyond China itself ...