Oct 5, 2015

Vladimir Putin is following in the footsteps of his old KGB boss Yuri Andropov, who took the Soviet Union into Afghanistan in 1979 to shore up a failing client in Kabul. To succeed where Andropov failed, Putin will need to devote considerable resources and manpower to save Bashar al-Assad. But there are also significant differences in the challenges the two faced that favor Putin. Saudi Arabia will be his constant enemy, just as it was Andropov's.

In the fall of 1979, Andropov was the principal advocate in the Kremlin of a Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan to keep the communist Afghan government in power. The Marxist Afghan party was rapidly losing control of the country to the mujahedeen, and KGB chief Andropov warned defeat in Afghanistan would destabilize all of Soviet Central Asia. Andropov convinced an ailing Leonid Brezhnev that it would be an easy and cheap victory. In 1956, Andropov had been the Soviet ambassador in Hungary who called for Soviet intervention there, which had kept Budapest in the Warsaw Pact.

But the Islamic world is not Eastern Europe. The Soviets faced a firestorm of Islamic opposition in Afghanistan. Days after elite Soviet airborne forces secured Kabul (replacing one communist protege with another after a shootout in the presidential palace), Saudi King Fahd promised Pakistan he would fund the mujahedeen resistance to Soviet aggression. Fahd put then-Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh, in charge of raising private funds for the Afghans. Salman raised tens of millions of dollars, initially exceeding the money the CIA and Saudi intelligence provided the mujahedeen and their Pakistani allies. The entire Islamic world was mobilized by Fahd against Moscow.

The Soviets never resourced the war properly. At their peak effort, the Soviets deployed just over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, far too few to pacify the country. Andropov escalated the war considerably when he became party boss, but the number of boots on the ground was never enough. Russia had put double the number of troops into Hungary, a flat plain easy to conquer, and had a huge army in 1979, but the Kremlin never brought enough resources to the fight in the Hindu Kush.

Millions of Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran, at least a million were killed inside Afghanistan, but the mujahedeen were not beaten. After Andropov died, Mikhail Gorbachev retreated back to the USSR. The 40th Red Army left in disgrace. The Berlin Wall collapsed months later, the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union collapsed (Putin says it was the worst geopolitical disaster of the 20th century).