Soviet-Afghan War

The Soviet-Afghan War was fought from December 1979 to February 1989 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up its faltering communist client government against a growing insurgency of Islamist and nationalist Afghan mujahideen fighters. Soviet forces controlled major cities and lines of communication but struggled for a decade to suppress a rural guerrilla insurgency that operated across difficult mountainous terrain and drew extensive covert support, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles from 1986 onward, funneled through Pakistan by the United States, Saudi Arabia and other states opposed to Soviet expansion. The war became a prolonged and costly quagmire for the Soviet Union, inflicting tens of thousands of Soviet casualties and far greater Afghan losses, including millions of refugees who fled to Pakistan and Iran. Mikhail Gorbachev ordered a full Soviet withdrawal, completed in February 1989, and the war's cost is widely cited among the contributing pressures on the Soviet Union's eventual collapse, while the power vacuum left in Afghanistan fed directly into the civil war and rise of the Taliban that followed.