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The primary piece of documentary evidence for the decision to invade comes from a single hand-written page from the Soviet Politburo leadership.

At least 15,000 Soviet soldiers fell in battle, and the aura of the Red Army’s invincibility, which had been so crucial to Soviet power and prestige around the world, was shattered.Ĭuriously, despite its enduring and tragic significance, few historians or political scientists have studied the war in depth: the reasons for the Soviet invasion, the conduct of the war, the relationship of the failed war to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and the role of the war in creating the world in which we now live.

Over a decade more than one million Afghanis died – mostly civilians – and millions more became refugees. Fueled by American and Soviet weaponry – which armed future enemies of both the United States and Russia – Afghanistan became a failed state, creating a power vacuum filled by terrorist movements of various sorts and spreading like a cancer throughout the region. The war triggered an ever-increasing cycle of violence. The world had changed, and a new kind of war had emerged yet the United States and the Soviet Union continued to fight proxy wars against each other, blinded by their own ideological obsessions and incapable of discerning the new common enemy of Islamic fundamentalism.Ī captivating and timely film tells the story of the ten-year Soviet war against Afghanistan ( Afghanistan 1979: The War that Changed the World: ). With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that these events signaled a radical break from the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan Iranian revolutionaries seized American hostages in Tehran and overthrew the Shah Islamic fundamentalists attempted to seize Mecca and enraged crowds of Pakistanis, goaded on by Islamic extremists, attacked the US embassy in Pakistan. Nineteen seventy nine was a pivotal year in twentieth-century history – as momentous, perhaps, as 1945 and the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II.