https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2065-5907
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Sana Haroon, Elisabeth Leake. Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1227–1229, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae184
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Extract
Elisabeth Leake’s Afghan Crucible is a history of the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union and the civil war that ensued. Eight of the nine chapters of this comprehensive and absorbing account are named for a city that centered an aspect of occupation or responses to it; each of these chapters identifies key actors and provides a thorough account of their organization and imperatives. These chapters come together as a truly international history of the events of 1978 to 1989 that fundamentally changed Afghan politics and society. This is an unparalleled account that will serve scholars and students of the Cold War, Afghanistan, western Asia, international diplomacy, and Islamist politics.
Following an introductory chapter about Afghanistan in the 1960s, Leake engages Russian language sources to focus on Kabul and Moscow. Chapter 2 explores the rule of the socialist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) after the 1978 coup brought them into power, and chapter 3 reveals that Soviet leaders had to overcome initial reluctance to send armed forces into Afghanistan to reinforce socialist state building and the legitimacy of the government. PDPA carried out its most weeping and radical changes from 1978 to 1979. Babrak Karmal’s rule from 1980 to 1986 was both emboldened by and delegitimized by his reliance on the occupation. Finally, from 1986 to 1992, the government rolled back earlier reforms, never having overcome its uneasy relationship with Islam and traditionalism and its fundamental ineffectiveness. After years of advising and propping up the regime militarily and a final effort to reinforce the PDPA in 1986, the Soviets began to prepare for withdrawal. The Soviet-backed PDPA had failed to create the infrastructures of state that would hold up the regime.
