Soviet-Afghan War

The Soviet-Afghan War began on 25 December 1979, when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to prop up its client Marxist government against a growing mujahideen insurgency, and ended with the last Soviet troops withdrawing on 15 February 1989. The mujahideen, drawn from Afghanistan's tribal and religious networks, were armed and funded through Pakistan by the United States, Britain, China, Saudi Arabia and other states as a Cold War proxy effort against Moscow, and their portable American-supplied Stinger missiles, introduced from 1986, sharply raised the cost of Soviet air power. A decade of fighting killed between one and three million Afghans, mostly civilians, drove millions more into exile in Pakistan and Iran, and inflicted a political and military cost on the Soviet Union that many historians count among the pressures contributing to its collapse two years after the withdrawal.