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Afghan War
19781992
WRITTEN BY:
The Editors of Encyclopdia Britannica
See Article History

Afghan War
19781992
 View All
Media
DATE

1978 - 1992

LOCATION

Afghanistan
PARTICIPANTS

mujahideen
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
KEY PEOPLE

Leonid Brezhnev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed
Eduard Shevardnadze
Mohammad Omar
Afghan War, in the history of Afghanistan, the internal conflict (197892)
between anticommunist Muslim guerrillas and the Afghan communist
government (aided in 197989 by Soviet troops). More broadly, the term
also encompasses military activity within Afghanistan since 1992 involving
domestic and foreign forces.
The roots of the war lay in the overthrow of the centrist government of
President Mohammad Daud Khan in April 1978 by left-wing military officers
led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. Power was thereafter shared by two Marxist-
Leninist political groups, the Peoples (Khalq) Party and the Banner (Parcham)
Party, which had earlier emerged from a single organization, the Peoples
Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and had reunited in an uneasy coalition
shortly before the coup. The new government, which had little popular
support, forged close ties with the Soviet Union, launched ruthless purges of
all domestic opposition, and began extensive land and social reforms that
were bitterly resented by the devoutly Muslim and largely anticommunist
population. Insurgencies arose against the government among both tribal and
urban groups, and all of theseknown collectively as
the mujahideen (Arabic: mujhidn, those who engage in jihad)were
Islamic in orientation. These uprisings, along with internal fighting and coups
within the government between the Peoples and Banner factions, prompted
the Soviets to invade the country in December 1979, sending in some 30,000
troops and toppling the short-lived presidency of Peoples leader Hafizullah
Amin. The aim of the Soviet operation was to prop up their new but faltering
client state, now headed by Banner leader Babrak Karmal, but the mujahideen
rebellion grew in response, spreading to all parts of the country. The Soviets
initially left the suppression of the rebellion to the Afghan army, but the latter
was beset by mass desertions and remained largely ineffective throughout the
war.


Soviet helicopter and tank operations in the Afghan War, Afghanistan, 1984.
U.S. Department of Defense
Soviet BMP-1 mechanized infantry combat vehicles moving through Afghanistan, 1988.
U.S. Department of Defense
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The Afghan War quickly settled down into a stalemate, with about 100,000
Soviet troops controlling the cities, larger towns, and major garrisons and the
mujahideen moving with relative freedom throughout the countryside. Soviet
troops tried to crush the insurgency by various tactics, but the guerrillas
generally eluded their attacks. The Soviets then attempted to eliminate the
mujahideens civilian support by bombing and depopulating the rural areas.
These tactics sparked a massive flight from the countryside; by 1982 some
2.8 million Afghans had sought asylum in Pakistan, and another 1.5 million
had fled to Iran. The mujahideen were eventually able to neutralize Soviet air
power through the use of shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles supplied by the
Soviet Unions Cold War adversary, the United States.

Soviet paratroopers rolling through Kabul, Afghanistan, in armoured combat vehicles, 1986.
U.S. Department of Defense

The mujahideen were fragmented politically into a handful of independent

groups, and their military efforts remained uncoordinated throughout the war.
The quality of their arms and combat organization gradually improved,
 however, owing to experience and to the large quantity of arms and other war
matriel shipped to the rebels, via Pakistan, by the United States and other
countries and by sympathetic Muslims from throughout the world. In addition,
an indeterminate number of Muslim volunteerspopularly termed Afghan-
Arabs, regardless of their ethnicitytraveled from all parts of the world to join
the opposition.

Afghan resistance fighters returning to a village destroyed by Soviet forces, 1986.

U.S. Department of Defense

TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE

 The Ottoman Empire

The war in Afghanistan became a quagmire for what by the late 1980s was a
disintegrating Soviet Union. (The Soviets suffered some 15,000 dead and
many more injured.) In 1988 the United States, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the
Soviet Union signed an agreement by which the latter would withdraw its
troops (completed in 1989), and Afghanistan returned to nonaligned status. In
April 1992 various rebel groups, together with newly rebellious government
troops, stormed the besieged capital of Kabul and overthrew the communist
president, Najibullah, who had succeeded Karmal in 1986.

A convoy of Soviet armoured vehicles crossing a bridge at the Soviet-Afghan border, May 21, 1988,

Vitaly ArmandAFP/Getty Images

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 A transitional government, sponsored by various rebel factions, proclaimed an
Islamic republic, but jubilation was short-lived. President Burhanuddin
Rabbani, leader of the Islamic Society (Jamiyyat-e Eslm), a major
mujahideen group, refused to leave office in accordance with the power-
sharing arrangement reached by the new government. Other mujahideen
groups, particularly the Islamic Party (ezb-e Eslm), led by Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, surrounded Kabul and began to barrage the city with artillery and
rockets. These attacks continued intermittently over the next several years as
the countryside outside Kabul slipped into chaos.

Anti-Taliban fighters observing U.S. bombing of the cave sanctuaries of the al-Qaeda terrorist
Erik de CastroReuters/Newscom

Partly as a response, the Taliban (Pashto: Students), a puritanical Islamic

group led by a former mujahideen commander, Mohammad Omar, emerged
in the fall of 1994 and systematically seized control of the country, occupying
Kabul in 1996. The Talibanaugmented by volunteers from various Islamic
extremist groups sheltering in Afghanistan, many of whom were Afghan-Arab
holdovers from the earlier conflictsoon controlled all but a small portion of
northern Afghanistan, which was held by a loose coalition of mujahideen
forces known as the Northern Alliance. Fighting continued at a stalemate until
2001, when the Taliban refused demands by the U.S. government to extradite
Saudi Arabian exile Osama bin Laden, the leader of an Islamic extremist
group, al-Qaeda, which had close ties with the Taliban and was accused of
 having launched terrorist attacks against the United States, including a group
of devastating strikes on September 11. Subsequently, U.S. special
operations forces, allied with Northern Alliance fighters, launched a series of
military operations in Afghanistan that drove the Taliban from power by early
December.
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Afghanistan has never conducted a full census, and it is thus difficult to gauge
the number of casualties suffered in the country since the outbreak of fighting.
The best estimates available indicate that some 1.5 million Afghanis were
killed before 1992although the number killed during combat and the number
killed as an indirect result of the conflict remain unclear. The casualty rate
after 1992 is even less precise. Many thousands were killed as a direct result
of factional fighting; hundreds or thousands of prisoners and civilians were
executed by tribal, ethnic, or religious rivals; and a large number of
combatantsand some noncombatantswere killed during the U.S.
offensive. Moreover, tens of thousands died of starvation or of a variety of
diseases, many of which in less-troubled times could have been easily
treated, and hundreds of thousands were killed or injured by the
numerous land mines in the country. (Afghanistan was, by the end of the 20th
century, one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, and vast
quantities of unexploded ordnance littered the countryside.) The number of
Afghan refugees living abroad fluctuated over the years with the fighting and
reached a peak of some six million people in the late 1980s.