The conflict in Afghanistan looms large in the collective consciousness of Americans. What has the United States achieved, and how will it withdraw without sacrificing those gains? The Soviet Union confronted these same questions in the 1980s, and Artemy Kalinovsky's history of the USSR's nine-year struggle to extricate itself from Afghanistan and bring its troops home provides a sobering perspective on exit options in the region.
A Long Goodbye is the first comprehensive account of the Soviet Withdrawal in Afghanistan. Based on newly available archival material and supplemented by interviews with major actors, Kalinovsky reconstructs the fierce debates among Soviet diplomats, KGB officials, the Red Army, and top Politburo figures. The fear that withdrawal would diminish the USSR's status as leader of the Third World is palpable in these disagreements, as are the competing interests of Afghan factions and the Soviet Union's superpower rival in the West. This book challenges many widely held views about the actual costs of the conflict to the Soviet leadership, and its findings illuminate the Cold War context of a military engagement that went very wrong, for much too long.
Dr Artemy Kalinovsky| is Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam, and an Associate of the Cold War Studies Programme|. He was Pinto Post-Doctoral Fellow at LSE IDEAS in 2009-10.