I’m doing a presentation on the soviet union for school soon and i would like to know all your opinions on this.
I’ve got: an over-bloated bureaucracy (which was prone to corruption), rural poverty (which is very unfair as basically all countries have rural poverty- difference is that some countries actually help these people), and a lacking light industry that led to economic dissatisfaction from the populace.
I might share the PowerPoint here for your feedback although its very small as its for a vocational exam that is only a few minutes
This is an inaccurate depiction. It was Taraki, the original leader of the Saur Revolution, that invited the USSR in the country, not Amin. Then Tarakis protege, Amin, killed him and took his place. Amin began bloody purges and centralized power around him. He also promoted pashtun nationalism, which scared minorities and increased oppisition to the government. So the USSR killed him and replaced him with the more moderate Babrak Karmal. Now whether this was the right move or not is another discussion, but the story is much more complicated than how you portrayed it.
Nah you’re absolutely right. My comment wasn’t meant to be comprehensive, the situation obviously was much more complicated than that. I just wanted to point out that the “Afghan gov invited the Soviets” angle is pretty reductive itself, really doesn’t do the absolute mess of that situation justice and imo is a dangerous cop-out. Amin himself afaik requested Soviet aid too after Taraki was killed. There were reasons for disposing of him - as you correctly pointed out. But just saying “yeah well, they were invited” is highly misleading in this case.
I mean the invasion was highly contested among Soviet leadership too and they themselves couldn’t agree on military action for a long time. Iirc Andropov was a major opponent of military intervention. That war was and is highly complicated and controversial and really deserves to be wrestled with extensively.
I mean the thing is they were invited tho, and not by the guy they deposed. Besides not helping Afghanistan would have been terribly wrong. You cant just allow the west to massacre people, behead teachers, kidnap and rape schoolgirls, all this in your brotherly socialist neighbour, and do nothing about it. We can discuss whether x or y strategy would have been the best one, but helping the DRA was the right internationalist choice. The afghan people chose socialism freely in 1978, without any soviet help or coercion, since the Daud Khan regime was a USSR ally so they had no reason to overthrow him. In response, they faced unprecedented US aggression. Extremist death squads, school raids, girls being kidnapped into sex slavery, soviet engineers working on infrastructure and their families being beheaded and their heads left on poles, absolute barbarism. Ignoring that when you have the 2nd strongest military in the world is antimarxist.