A murdered ally, a Christmas Eve invasion, and a decade-long war begins
What happened
Years of factional purges within Afghanistan's Communist party culminated when strongman Hafizullah Amin had his own predecessor, Nur Muhammad Taraki, murdered in October 1979, infuriating Moscow, which had hoped to preserve influence in Kabul through Taraki rather than Amin. On Christmas Eve, Soviet special forces stormed the presidential palace, killed Amin, and installed Babrak Karmal as a client ruler, while regular Soviet troops poured across the border. The Carter administration, which had already begun quietly supplying non-lethal aid to Afghan mujahideen insurgents before the invasion even occurred, responded with a grain embargo, a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and sharply increased covert support for the resistance.
Why it matters
This was the only time the Soviet Union ever invaded a country outside the communist bloc it already controlled, and Moscow justified it under the same Brezhnev Doctrine first used to crush the Prague Spring eleven years earlier; the decade-long war that followed drained Soviet resources and, in a bitter irony future events would sharpen, left behind the fractured state and training grounds from which the Taliban and later al-Qaeda would emerge.
How we know
Declassified Carter administration cables document both the pre-invasion aid to mujahideen fighters and Washington's real-time uncertainty over whether the Soviets would actually invade outright, corroborated by the Soviet Politburo's own later-released internal discussions of the decision.
Sources
- Office of the Historian, US Department of State. The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. Response, 1978-1980 · Reputable sourcehistory.state.gov · The domain "history.state.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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