THIS DAY IN HISTORY

[IceWizard]

Soviets begin withdrawal from Afghanistan








1988
May 15




More than eight years after they intervened in Afghanistan to support the procommunist
government, Soviet troops begin their withdrawal. The event marked the beginning of the
end to a long, bloody, and fruitless Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

In December 1979, Soviet troops first entered Afghanistan in an attempt to bolster the
communist, pro-Soviet government threatened by internal rebellion. In a short period of
time, thousands of Russian troops and support materials poured into Afghanistan. Thus
began a frustrating military conflict with Afghan Muslim rebels, who despised their own
nation’s communist government and the Soviet troops supporting it. During the next eight
years, the two sides battled for control in Afghanistan, with neither the Soviets nor the
rebels ever able to gain a decisive victory.

For the Soviet Union, the intervention proved extraordinarily costly in a number of ways.
While the Soviets never released official casualty figures for the war in Afghanistan, U.S.
intelligence sources estimated that as many as 15,000 Russian troops died in Afghanistan,
and the economic cost to the already struggling Soviet economy ran into billions of dollars.
The intervention also strained relations between the Soviet Union and the United States
nearly to the breaking point. President Jimmy Carter harshly criticized the Russian action,
stalled talks on arms limitations, issued economic sanctions, and even ordered a boycott of
the 1980 Olympics held in Moscow.

By 1988, the Soviets decided to extricate itself from the situation. Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev
saw the Afghan intervention as an increasing drain on the Soviet economy, and the Russian
people were tired of a war that many Westerners referred to as “Russia’s Vietnam.” For Afghanistan,
the Soviet withdrawal did not mean an end to the fighting, however. The Muslim rebels
eventually succeeded in establishing control over Afghanistan in 1992.





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