Intervention of the United States and the Soviet Union

The documentary on the Afghanistan and Soviet Union war stated that the cause of the war was completely due to the United States and the Soviet Union. Throughout the documentary the enemy was revealed to be the Soviet Union, it was said that the cause of the war was due to their unnecessary intervention, but this opinion cannot fully be relied on because of its bias and because it is in the point of view of the United States.

The documentary also blames Afghanistan’s current problems with its own people solely on the United States and the Soviet Union; it blames the two countries for providing weapons that were used to fight against people of their own country. This brings up the question of, what if the United States hadn’t had intervened in this civil war? Would’ve conditions still have been the same or would it have decreased the amount of casualties during and after Soviet Union intervention? What would’ve happened if the U.S. hadn’t encouraged the rebels to continue their cause?

It also mentions that the Soviet Union tried very hard to conceal the events in Afghanistan from its people. The Soviet Union covered up the war by depicting soldiers building schools and not contributing to any type of combat. They also tried very hard to cover up the number of casualties and “invalids” that returned back from Afghanistan. Why would’ve the Soviet Union tried so hard to do this and why was it so important to cover up the truth?

Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

The CNN documentary on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan unflinchingly exposes both Soviet and Western influences in the destabilization of the region. What was supposed to be a quick occupation that would end in a few weeks, the Soviet invasion lasted for a decade. After Muslim extremists in the region rebelled against sweeping socialist policies in Afghanistan, a rebellion ensued. This rebellion was in part influenced by the fact that Soviet policies were ignorant to Afghanistanian culture and Muslim practices and by the fact that these policies were threatening the control of the Muslim religious leaders. As the political and social unrest reached its height, the Soviet-friendly prime minister assassinated and replaced with a power-hungry dictator, Soviet authorities decided to get militarily intervene. The United States saw this as a threat – Jimmy Carter even went far enough to say that this move threatened American national security and that he was considering unleashing nuclear weapons as a response to this. Thus, the United States began its funding and support of the  the Islamic anti-Soviet jihadist group (which was referred to as ‘mujahideen’).

What was interesting was about the documentary was the fact that many American officials explicitly stated that the war in Afghanistan was fueled by American covert operations which supplied arms and training to the mujahideen. One representative said that this was “our war paid with [Afghanistanian] blood”. What was CNN’s bias in presenting the information like this? Was this admittance of direct US manipulation and destabilizing aid one of owning up for America’s action?

The documentary also exposes the ultimate chaos of the US-USSR proxy war. An American official smugly admits that American troops acquired Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia, China and Egypt because of the alleged materialistic interests that outweighed their socialist priorities. This goes to show how the vision of socialism was failing in the Soviet Union and how intent the United States was to bleed the Soviet Union dry. The unfortunate and truly tragic aspect of this point in history is that this vindictive and disorganized action was fought on foreign land and radically disrupted a religious and cultural country.