Abstract
Abstract When the Red Army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the conventional wisdom was that Soviet forces would eventually move onward to their real target: the Persian Gulf oil fields. Most analysts ignored or discounted what had been happening in Afghanistan itself during the months arid years leading up to the invasion. Accumulating historical evidence now makes clear that the Soviet Union was not pursuing a master plan of regional expansion. To be sure, Soviet policy in Afghanistan became progressively more doctrinaire and more adventurous during the last years of Leonid Brezhnev; after tolerating a Soviet-tilted brand of nonalignment there for more than two decades, Moscow suddenly began to prepare for a Communist revolution. But Afghan political developments pro pe1led Brezhnev and his advisers on their course much faster than they had anticipated or programmed, in ways they were unable to control, and with undesired results they did not envisage.
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