Afghanistan: how we got there: both the war in Afghanistan and America's battle with al Qaeda spring directly from the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

• Author: Paul, Lawrence M.
• Position: TIMES PAST

On Christmas eve in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Afghanistan to rescue a Communist-leaning government under attack by Islamic rebels. No one could have known at the time, but this was one of the taming points of the 20th century, and maybe the 21st as well. The grueling 10-year war that followed led to:

* The collapse of the Soviet Union itself, along with the end of the Cold War.

* The emergence of Islamic guerrilla fighters who evolved into Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

* Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which drew the United States into its own wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that continue today.

In response to the Soviet invasion three decades ago, President Jimmy Carter and other Western leaders expressed the usual Cold War shock and outrage (and Carter pulled the U.S. from the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest). But Carter's advisers also hoped that the Russians would themselves be damaged by the war they had started.

With 80,000-plus troops in the field, the Soviets quickly discovered that conventional forces, even those as powerful as the Red Army, were of little use in a place like Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a country of rugged terrain and harsh weather, about the size of Texas. Then, as now, it was more a collection of tribes than a cohesive nation: People's loyalties tilted more to regional and ethnic leaders than to any national government.

So while Afghanistan has been invaded repeatedly over the centuries, it's difficult to rule and virtually impossible to truly conquer--as the Persians found in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., and again in the 7th century A.D.; as the Mongols, including Genghis Khan, learned in the 13th to 16th centuries A.D.; and as the British found in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The British left Afghanistan after World War I, and the nation struggled to find its footing as a monarchy and a republic. A series of coups in the 1970s brought to power a pro-Soviet government that Moscow sought to protect with the 1979 invasion.

"Time does not concern us," a guerrilla leader told a New York Times reporter during the first year of the Soviet war. "We have been fighting for centuries."

Soviet tanks and troops were of little use in the mountains and canyons. The only weapon that the guerrillas could not effectively combat was helicopters, which could see and attack from above.

HELP FROM THE U.S.

Unable to subdue the Afghan rebellion from the ground, Soviet pilots began turning their guns and rockets on villages and towns to terrorize the population and to discourage resistance.

Eventually, though, even the Soviets' air power met its match, thanks in part to the U.S.

During the Cold War, both sides followed the old adage: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." America's new friends in this case were the Islamic guerillas known as mujahedeen, or "holy warriors," battling the Soviets. In 1986, the U.S. and its allies began arming the mujahedeen with Stinger missiles: shoulder-fired rockets that could hit their targets from three miles away, which meant the rebels could shoot down aircraft before Soviet pilots even knew they were targets.

By the late 1980s, the mujahedeen had battled the mighty Red Army to a stalemate. Finally, the Soviet Union gave up, pulling out the last of its troops early in 1989.

The war had taken a terrible toll on both sides. As many as 1.5 million Afghans died, including hundreds of thousands of civilians, out of a population of 15 million.

On the Soviet side, 15,000 soldiers died and another 11,000 returned home disabled. In addition, the war's enormous expense intensified already crushing economic problems at home...