Opinion | How Russia’s Ukraine invasion echoes Soviet Union’s Afghanistan misadventure

The crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan have been transformed into geopolitically disconnected concerns even as there is much that connects them

Russian aggression in Ukraine serves as a critical reminder of the dangers associated both with the misuse of history and its wilful abandonment

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A jogger passes by a crater caused by a Russian strike opposite a block of flats in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, on May 21. Photo: AP

Published: 3:30am, 24 May 2022Updated: 4:47am, 24 May 2022

The competition for geopolitical attention is visible in our collective framing of conflicts wherein some crises appear more urgent than the others. Accordingly, the larger picture that has emerged is one of historical cherry-picking when it is crucial for us to recognise the linkages that exist between seemingly disparate conflicts.

In particular, the ongoing crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan have been transformed into geopolitically disconnected concerns even as there is much that connects them. To begin with, the Ukrainian crisis feels like a redux of the Afghan war of the 1980s.

Back then, Afghanistan had become an arena where the two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – came face to face. Pitting the US-backed mujahideen against Soviet troops in Afghan territory, the clash between the US and the USSR of the 1980s was a manifestation of their rivalry which, in a way, might have carried over into the present as the Ukraine conflict.

By bringing two historical rivals together once again, the Ukrainian crisis is a reminder of an unsettled ideological dispute, one that is pitting the US’ sense of exceptionalism against Russia’s feelings of revenge and trauma-based nationalism. Thus, while the moorings of the Ukrainian crisis might stretch back to the two world wars, the Soviet war in Afghanistan is not without instructive geopolitical relevance.

The war in Afghanistan, which lasted a decade, transformed what was expected to be a limited Soviet intervention into a full-fledged crisis. The Soviet invasion cost it men, material and morale while accelerating its eventual disintegration.

The Soviet intention to flex its capabilities, fresh on the heels of the US failure in Vietnam, might have partly fuelled its decision to march into Afghanistan. But in doing so, it underestimated the strength of its adversaries, particularly their will to fight, giving the Soviets their own Vietnam.