Invasion Of Afghanistan

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Afghanistan’s political and economic importance to the Soviet Union has also been recognized as a primary motive towards the invasion. Historian Nabi Misdaq outlines this in his book, Afghanistan: Political Frailty and External Interference. Since the early 1950s, the Soviet Union had invested huge sums of money into Afghanistan, justifying its importance to the Soviets. Soviet involvement in Afghanistan included: 100 million dollars in credit aid, a concessionary loan of 32 million in weapons purchases, and an expansion of aid to 1.2 billion dollars. After the Great War, the Soviets developed a tradition of signing friendly treaties with third-world countries to support the leaders’ images. In retrospect, the rationale was to use these treaties …show more content…
The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.” Brown implies in his article that the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan was strikingly divergent from traditional foreign policies that the Soviets adopted in other third-world countries. Within this, he provides a different approach to the invasion, calling on surging oil prices as a main motive. In 1979, the unfolding of the revolution in Iran consequently led to an extraordinary surge in oil prices, leading to skepticism within the Soviet Union. The increasing costs of oil severely impacted Soviet oil production in 1979. The almost doubling of the oil price added tens of billions of dollars to costs of oil production, critically damaging an otherwise stagnant Soviet economy. Jones also suggests a more psychological approach towards the rising oil prices, stating that a resource boom, by controlling an oil-rich country, would contribute to grossly inflated ambitions in Soviet leaders, thereby encouraging them to pursue overly grand policies. Adding to his argument, Jones describes an oil boom would lead to a significant inflation of national confidence, advancing dangerous Soviet policies which would threaten an already exposed country. Jones further points out a 1977 CIA report exhibiting that the Soviet Union is a laggard in global oil markets and must rely on