The Soviet-Afghan War was a conflict that was waged for over nine years from 1979 to 1989, as the Soviet Union tried to prop up a communist regime in Afghanistan against various rebel groups such as the Taliban. The war began with an invasion by the USSR of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1979, followed by the occupation of much of the country. However, the 1980s saw a wide-ranging insurgency war which has drawn comparisons with the experience of the United States in Vietnam. By the time the Soviet Union pulled out in the late 1980s, over a million people had lost their lives, most of them civilians. Half the country's pre-invasion population of 13 million people was displaced by the fighting, with over five million people fleeing over the southern and western borders to Pakistan and Iran. Approximately 3.2 million entered Pakistan and 1.8 million went to Iran, making this one of the largest refugee migrations in modern history.[1]
Chronology of eventsChronology of events
For centuries, Afghanistan has been a contested part of the world. In medieval times, it was the gateway from Mongolia to the Muslim world during the conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors. Then in the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia vied for influence here as Russia expanded across Central Asia and the British aimed to establish Afghanistan as a buffer state to protect the Northern border of the British Raj in India.[2] While the British left India in the late 1940s, the Russians continued their interest in Afghanistan into the Cold War and in 1978, supported the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in seizing power in Afghanistan during the Saur Rebellion.[3]
The PDPA'S grip on power in Afghanistan faced immediate challenges from a range of different religious and regional groups and interests. The situation was threatening to slip out of their control by late 1979, when the Soviets decided to intervene directly by invading Afghanistan in December with tens of thousands of troops, an event that marked the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan War, which would drag on for over nine years until the spring of 1989.[4]
The war which followed saw the PDPA government and the Soviet occupation force face a wide variety of opposition groups including Mujahideen groups formed by fighters from Saudi Arabia and various Middle Eastern countries. These include the forces of Osama bin Laden. Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group, even had a presence here while a Maoist communist faction with ties to China was fighting the Soviets as well. Furthermore, because Afghanistan was a front in the Cold War, the various anti-Soviet groups were supported logistically and materially by the United States, Britain, Israel and other Western nations.[5]
The war had become unwinnable for the Soviets by the late 1980s and the reforming head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, began to withdraw Russian troops from the country, a process which was complete by the spring of 1989. By then, over a million people and soldiers had lost their lives, with millions more displaced. Over five million people fled over the borders to Pakistan and Iran. However, the Soviet withdrawal did not bring an end to the conflict, as the Afghan Civil War broke out in 1989 and would continue down to US intervention in the country in late 2001, with the Taliban seizing power in the mid-1990s.[6]
Extent of migrationExtent of migration
The migration from Afghanistan that occurred as a result of the Soviet-Afghan War took place in three distinct waves: the first wave occurred in 1979 and the early 1980s as the initiation of the conflict led to mass displacement; this was by far the largest wave of migration and led to people moving both internally and externally. For instance, the population of the Afghan capital, Kabul, tripled from approximately 600,000 inhabitants to nearly two million as people sought safety here, while, by way of contrast, the population of the city of Kandahar collapsed as it became part of the front lines of the conflict. Most of the movement, though, was external as millions of people flooded over the southern and western borders to Pakistan and Iran. A second occurred at the end of the 1980s, when many people who had supported the Soviet occupation and the communist regime fled in fear of political reprisals, yet this was tempered by the return of many others to Afghanistan who had spent much of the 1980s abroad. A third wave came about at the time of the civil war in the 1990s, which in its own way was an offshoot of the Soviet invasion all the way back in 1979. All of this resulted in well over five million people being displaced externally and millions more internally, impacting the lives of the great majority of Afghans.[7]
Demographic impactDemographic impact
The demographic impact of this migration has been greatest in Pakistan and Iran, although there has also been some slight spillover into India and other countries of Central Asia, while a small number of western countries such as Germany and the United States have taken in tens of thousands of Afghan refugees over the decades.[8]
It is estimated that 3.2 million Afghans have settled permanently in Pakistan since the late 1970s as a result of the conflicts, although the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees now places the number of people of Afghan heritage living in Pakistan at 3.7 million, owing to a natural increase. The majority of these people were born in Pakistan and are the children of the refugees who arrived in the late 1970s and 1980s; while this is something of a drop in the ocean in terms of Pakistan’s wider population of over 230 million people, most are confined to the north of Pakistan along the Afghan border and as a result, many provinces here have huge Afghan communities. For instance, half of the Afghans in Pakistan alone live in the northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, making it the region with the largest concentration of Afghans outside of Afghanistan itself anywhere in the world, though exact figures are difficult to arrive at as many are undocumented and there is a constant movement of people.[9] In the city of Peshawar, one-in-five of the city’s two million inhabitants are of Afghan heritage.[10]
Fewer Afghans fled to Iran as a result of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, though nearly two million are believed to have done so. The size of the Afghan population, though, has increased more dramatically within Iran owing to natural increase, a result of more Afghans having arrived to and stayed in Iran, whereas more refugees to Pakistan returned home at some point in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. As a result, the Afghan community in Iran is now an estimated three million, though precision is difficult as a huge proportion of the Afghan community in Iran is undocumented owing to fears of forced deportation. A large concentration of these Afghans are in the Iranian capital Tehran, where at least half a million Afghans reside.[11]
See alsoSee also
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References
- ↑ Why the Soviet Union Invaded Afghanistan. History Channel
- ↑ The Great Game and Afghanistan. Library of Congress
- ↑ The Saur Revolution: Prelude to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training
- ↑ The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. Response, 1978–1980. Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute. United States Department of State
- ↑ mujahideen. Encyclopedia Britannica
- ↑ A Look At Afghanistan's 40 Years Of Crisis — From The Soviet War To Taliban Recapture. NPR
- ↑ Afghan migration after the Soviet invasion. National Geographic Education
- ↑ Afghan Migration to Germany: History and Current Debates. BPB
- ↑ Barriers to Access Education for Afghan Refugees in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan. ReliefWeb
- ↑ Latendresse, Simon. The Border as Strategy The Case of Afghans in Peshawar. Policy Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1 (January - June 2007), pp. 61-74
- ↑ EUAA reports on the situation of Afghan refugees in Iran. European Union Agency for Asylum