The last battle of the Cold War begins: The superpowers and Afghanistan, 1945--1980

Following a coup by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in April 1978, the Soviet Union and the United States were increasingly drawn into a civil war in Afghanistan that helped to shape the end of the Cold War, with the crucial decisions made in Moscow, Washington and Kabul between 1978 and 1980.; The Soviet Union had a long-range policy of seeking control over Afghanistan, but Soviet decision making in the 1978 and 1979 was focused almost entirely on events inside Afghanistan and the need to save the Communist regime in Kabul from itself and from the insurgency that began just after the 1978 coup. The December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR was not part of a wider strategy to dominate the region, attain warm water ports, or to threaten the oil supplies of the West.; The United States became involved in Afghanistan much earlier than previous scholarship has suggested, with a limited aid program for the Afghan insurgency in place by mid-summer 1979. The United States became involved in Afghanistan because of a determination by the Carter administration in mid-1978 that the Soviet Union had breached containment in the Third World and must be made to pay a price. Thus for the United States, Afghanistan became a convenient place to implement a new anti-Soviet strategy in the Third World following the massive Soviet intervention in the Horn of Africa.; The PDPA also played a significant role bringing about the war in Afghanistan. By ignoring Soviet advice to expand the regime to include non-communist elements, by attempting to rapidly transform Afghanistan through radical reforms, and by destroying itself through inter-party warfare, the PDPA regime set the parameters for Soviet decision making and made a full scale Soviet intervention more likely.