Introduction

Behind the history of modern day Afghanistan are two intertwined stories. One is of the modernization throes of Afghanistan. The other is the story the last imperialistic

Thrust of the soviet union.

The two came together  the search for ways to improve an isolated, backward Asian kingdom led a small number of Afghans to embrace the Soviet model of Communism. Once they had achieved power almost accidentally, most other Afghans rejected their naïve attempt to remake society in order to impose that model. The USSR  went to their support. This turned a remote civil war into a world issue.

The soviet Union did not become involved in its longest war become of any intrinsic importance of Afghanistan to Moscow. Ensuring Afghan adherence to Marxism-lcninisrn was not a goal that in itself could justify such an involvement. Instead, the involvement showed soviet. Determination, at the height of Leonid I. Brezhnev’s power to assert Moscow’s authority wherever the USSR perceived danger or opportunity. After the determination of the Afghan people to maintain their independence had bloodied the Soviets while devastating their own country, the imperialistic thrust ended. But again, Afghanistan was not the cause, Moscow’s abandonment of the Kabul regime was a result of long festering soviet internal weaknesses, some of which had been exacerbated by the Afghan war Belated recognition of those weaknesses, rather than any battlefield defeat or the war’s immediate costs, produced the changed Kremlin thinking that led to the soviet Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Those weaknesses later brought the collapse of Soviet communist power and of the USSR itself. Aid to Kabul ended.

Without soviet aid  afghan communists lost power Afghanistan turned inward to resume its struggle over modernization. The soviet model had been discredited.

Another    model of greater reliance on Islam for answers, had been strengthened. Traditional factors of national unity had been weakened, leaving uncertainty about Afghanistan’s political structure and coherence. And a land that stumbled into war while seeking   economic development had been blasted backward into an even more desperately primitive economic condition.