![]() ![]() ![]() That was a heritage the Afghan government brought to their approach to global conflict. Their predecessors had done so through both world wars. They developed considerable experience in charting a middle path through world politics. Through the first three decades of the Cold War, Afghan leaders were heirs to a tradition of foreign policy nonalignment. Would you characterize the transition between these phases in Afghanistan as a continuous evolution or as periods of abrupt discontinuity? You mention peaceful phases of Cold War competition. So, there are plenty of reasons to rethink our notions of inevitability in this case. But historians working with Soviet records have refuted the view that the Brezhnev Politburo was expansionist, which was an assumption undergirding many of the early accounts of U.S. efforts are often juxtaposed against the more extensive projects of the Soviet bloc, and this comparison has tended to make the events of 1978-79 seem inevitable, and thus uninteresting. In accounts of the Cold War within Afghanistan, U.S. One does not see much mention of Afghanistan in statements like NSC-68, but diplomats and mid-level officials worked energetically to reconcile their policy there with wider goals. On the other hand, Washington was not prepared to bid as lucratively or invest as highly as the Soviets were, but it was also unwilling to see Afghanistan drift into the Soviet bloc. To have a communist government in Kabul, but because it sought a quiet southern border. Moscow ascribed paramount importance to Afghanistan during this time, not because it was especially keen policy across several decades, not just during a specific era or crisis.Īs this project evolved, one of the repeating themes I’ve come across is the tension between grand strategy and local This approach would give me the opportunity to examine peaceful phases of Cold War competition and the evolution of U.S. I didn’t do much work with Afghanistan in the course of my research for that project, but it occurred to me while I was working on it that studying Cold War nonalignment by looking at one state over the long term rather than multiple states during a span of several years could be a very interesting lens. policy toward nonaligned states during the Kennedy and Johnson years. engagement in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion generally been given less scholarly attention? What drew you to write about this time period, and why has U.S. and Soviet engagement in Afghanistan gradually morphed into a Cold War battleground, and the lasting consequences this continues to have on policies toward the country today. Here, Rakove discusses how decades of U.S. involvement had on Afghanistan, and how choices made in Washington, Moscow, and Kabul ultimately destabilized the region. role in Afghanistan before 1979 as relatively marginal, Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Union demonstrates the impact these earlier decades of U.S. While prior accounts tend to treat the U.S. relations with Afghanistan from their outset in 1921, up to the Soviet invasion in 1979. foreign relations for the International Relations Program and an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, offers a deeply researched historical account of U.S. In a new book, Robert Rakove, a historian and lecturer of U.S. ![]() A complex and nuanced region, dialogue about policies there is often focused through the lens of the Cold War and the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. Whether in 1979, 2001, or 2021, Afghanistan has frequently been seen as a crisis area in U.S. ![]()
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