Afghanistan is mainly known to GCSE history students for two tragic reasons: the bloody and costly Soviet occupation, which lasted from 1979 to 1989; the ongoing war stemming from the 2001 US invasion to hunt down Osama bin Laden (the man the USA held responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks) and to remove from power the fundamentalist Taliban government suspected of sheltering him.
This article focuses on the effect the first of these — the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — had on superpower relations. The war in Afghanistan was part of a larger conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union, and for 10 years the country and its people became a pawn in the Cold War.
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