HOW THE SOVIET UNION STUMBLED INTO AFGHANISTAN
Selig S. Harrison

When the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the conventional wisdom was that Soviet forces would eventually move onward to their real target: the Persian Gulf oil fields. Most analysts ignored or discounted what had been happening in Afghanistan itself during the months and years leading up to the invasion.

Accumulating historical evidence now makes clear that the Soviet Union was not pursuing a master plan of regional expansion. To be sure, Soviet policy in Afghanistan became progressively more doctrinaire and more adventurous during the last years of Leonid Brezhnev; after tolerating a Soviet-tilted brand of nonalignment there for more than two decades, Moscow suddenly began to prepare for a Communist revolution. But Afghan political developments propelled Brezhnev and his advisers on their course much faster than they had anticipated or programmed, in ways they were unable to control, and with undesired results they did not envisage.

The timing of the 1978 revolution was decided not by Moscow but by local Communist leaders. The Afghan Communists who emerged in control of the new regime were not the KGB'S* trusted Afghan proteges. After backing the loser in an internecine Afghan Communist power struggle, Brezhnev mistakenly viewed the alienated victor, Hafizullah Amin, as a potential Tito who was plotting with the United States, Pakistan, and China to establish an anti-Soviet regime.