What if the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan Never Happened?
Regret is fun. The Soviets regretted ever entering Afghanistan after a 10 year long war. Some Americans were breaded ever funding the rebels once Afghanistan fell into a civil war. And Americans most certainly regret ever entering Afghanistan in the first place.
why did the soviet union invaded afghanistan
The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a calamity that spawned a lot of regrettable actions and paved the road that led to where we are today. But it started with one action. And so I want to imagine a world where that one mistake never happened 40 years ago. |
| soviet invasion of afghanistan summary |
Timing is everything. Sometimes just a few years can make a difference. Let's imagine that in an alternate 1978, there is never a communist overthrow of the government. Perhaps the SA revolution flat out fails. Perhaps even a communist revolution still occurs. It just happens a few years later, say sometime in nineteen eighty two or eighty three.
Just this delay seems Afghanistan from four decades of war. Why? Leonid Brezhnev.
The invasion was really the decision of an ineffective and dying man. One last bad mistake in a long line that had practically crippled the Soviet Union. By the end of his reign, the Soviet economy was stagnating. The party was corrupt. And he sent in young men to die in a country.
They were misinformed about. Brezhnev died just two years later after giving that order, say Afghanistan has a revolt in 85. Brezhnev would have been dead. And after two sickly successors in the span of two years, Mikhail Gorbachev was now in charge by just the mid 80s.
what caused the soviet invasion of afghanistan
The problems that have been mounting for two decades would now be big enough that an external war is out of the question. Not invading Afghanistan doesn't save the USSR. There are arguments that Afghanistan created a rift between the military and government.So if the war didn't happen. Maybe the USSR could have prevented rebellion. But I doubt that Gorbachev would have sent in troops to Lithuania or Eastern Europe. Once coals for leaving the USSR began.
The Cold War was going to end without the invasion. Afghanistan just remains a poor, struggling nation attempting to modernize just like its neighbors, communist or not. They'd still have presidents that aren't really presidents probably are corrupt, but that's it. It just is a nation in Central Asia, and that's a pretty good fate. It's peaceful.
And there's alternate timeline without the invasion as a dramatic shift into real action, fundamentalist Islamic groups still do exist. Smaller scale attacks or more extreme elements still spread. Thanks to those
Wahhabi funded schools and mosques. So without Afghanistan, could something like 9/11 still have occurred? Unlikely. It's always possible that without the experience of a decade long jihad, bin Laden still ends up being banished from Saudi Arabia in 1992, and his group could simply grow in another country for the sake of theorizing.
Let's say al-Qaida as we know it, still was formed after the Persian Gulf War. America is seen as the enemy for many reasons supporting Israel, troops in Arabia, supporting the sword, etc. without a Taliban controlled Afghanistan, whereas the main nation that they set up shop in such an alternate world. There are a few prime candidates.
First, Sudan and our timeline. Sudan was the group's first home between 92 and 96. They could have conducted attacks against the US from Sudan by the 1998 bombings. One half of their operation was still in the country. So it's plausible. But just like in our timeline, they could hold a safe and stable presence there for long after international condemnation and a few airstrikes. Sudan kicked bin Laden out and the leaders that originally invited him lost their power.
Next, Somalia, it's lawless. And even today, al-Shabaab, who align themselves to al-Qaeda in 2011, controls small parts of the country. But even then, it's not ideal. Somalia, while being in anarchy, is still in a state of war, one that a small terrorist cell would need to fight against.
Native militias. I could list off many troubled countries and the result would be the same. Had al-Qaeda still been created even without the funding from the 80s and were stationed in any other nation in the world in the aftermath of 9/11, that nation would have disowned bin Laden and attempted to at least hand him over to the U.S.. But because the Taliban gave refuge to al-Qaida and refused to hand them over, it justified the most extreme response from the United States.
This wasn't simply a conflict to bring down a small group who committed a horrendous crime anymore. The response now required an invasion and overthrow of an entire nation. Had the Taliban not controlled the country and 9/11 still happened, there would be a military response, but one coordinated with local governments, special forces and small scale action to take down terrorists. Yet instead, it escalated.
The hunt for al-Qaeda became intertwined with rebuilding a country already devastated for decades. 9/11 today still could be seen as a horrendous attack, but without Afghanistan, it'd be a scar that slowly is healing. The ones who committed it were brought to justice.
The war on terror was simply a manhunt instead of a two decade long, impossible task. Like I said, regret is fun.
* This article was originally published here
