H-Diplo National Security Archive: The Soviet Invasion of , 1979: Not Trump's Terrorists, Nor Zbig's Warm Water Ports

Discussion published by Seth Offenbach on Friday, February 1, 2019

From the National Security Archive:

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 1979: Not Trump’s Terrorists, Nor Zbig’s Warm Water Ports

Declassified Documents Show Moscow’s Fear of an Afghan Flip, U.S. Diplomat’s Meeting with Afghan Leader Helped Put Soviets Over the Edge National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 657

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Washington D.C., January 28, 2019 – President Trump’s claim that the invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to get rid of terrorists who were coming over the border is false, according to declassified U.S. and Soviet documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Just as false, according to the documents, were the repeated U.S. media assertions at the time, driven by President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, that the Soviet motivation was “the age-long dream of Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean” (Document 8). Soviet Politburo documents that first became available in the 1990s show the real Soviet fear was that the head of the Afghan Communist regime, Hafizullah Amin, was about to go over to the Americans. (Egyptian president Anwar Sadat famously flipped in 1972, ejected thousands of Soviet advisers, and became the second largest recipient, after Israel, of U.S. foreign aid.) Two October 1979 events in particular set off Moscow’s alarms, according to the documents and subsequent analyses by Afghan veteran Gen. Alexander Lyakhovsky and senior Soviet diplomat Georgy Kornienko: Amin’s murder of his predecessor Taraki on October 8, and Amin’s reception of acting American Chargé d’Affaires on October 27. None of the Soviet documents list terrorists going into the USSR as a concern in 1979. The Soviet worry was the incompetence and worse of their Afghan Communist clients, the declining Soviet influence (much less control) in the country, and the possibility of Afghanistan going over to the Americans.

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Citation: Seth Offenbach. National Security Archive: The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 1979: Not Trump's Terrorists, Nor Zbig's Warm Water Ports. H-Diplo. 02-01-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/3649987/national-security-archive-soviet-invasion-afghanistan-1979-not Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. 1