Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Invasion

by Robert B Rakove

Long before the 1979 Soviet invasion, the United States was closely concerned with Afghanistan. For much of the twentieth century, American diplomats, policy makers, businesspeople, and experts took part in the Afghan struggle to modernize, delivered vital aid, and involved themselves in Kabul’s conflicts with its neighbors. For their own part, many Afghans embraced the potential benefits of political and commercial ties with the United States. Yet these relationships ultimately helped make the country a Cold War battleground.

Robert B. Rakove sheds new light on the little-known and often surprising history of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan from the 1920s to the Soviet invasion, tracing its evolution and exploring its lasting consequences. Days of Opportunity chronicles the battle for influence in Kabul, as Americans contended with vigorous communist bloc competition and the independent ambitions of successive Afghan governments. Rakove examines the phases of peaceful Cold War competition, including development assistance, cultural diplomacy, and disaster relief. He demonstrates that Americans feared the “loss” of Afghanistan to Soviet influence―and were never simply bystanders, playing pivotal roles in the country’s political life. The ensuing collision of U.S., Soviet, and Afghan ambitions transformed the country―and ultimately led it, and the world, toward calamity.

Harnessing extensive research in U.S. and international archives, Days of Opportunity unveils the remarkable and tragic history of American involvement in Afghanistan.

488 pages, Paperback

Published August 8, 2023

Reviews

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author offers a detailed well-researched analysis of US developmental interventions in Afghanistan between 1945 and 1979 as part of its Cold War strategy of containment. Of particular interest is the author’s discussion of the involvement of US corporations and the government in the Helmand Valley development project — a region which would later become synonymous with the illegal drug trade. The project initially led by the Morrison-Knudson corporation was poorly planned and plagued by corruption. However, because it was viewed as critical to Afghanistan and international perceptions of US economic and political model in the Cold War context, the US government did not feel that it could abandon the project. Thus, despite grave reservations about the feasibility of the project, which would not yield any positive results until the 1970s, the United States continued to invest in it. This decision, based on the misguided perception that failure would result in Afghanistan joining the Soviet camp, increasingly entangled Afghanistan in the Cold War and led to unsupportable levels of foreign debt for Afghanistan. However, this situation should not be interpreted to mean that Afghan leaders were hapless victims of US or Soviet designs. On the contrary, they learned to use the Cold War fears of the United States and the Soviet Union to push for more funding as a means of gaining control over rural communities, which traditionally had been resistant to centralized rule. The problem with this strategy of using external funding to advance government policies was that successive Afghan governments never had to be accountable to these populations. But US and Soviet funding was fickle depending on the level of tension between the two superpowers. The sporadic and inconsistent funding of Afghan projects contrasted sharply with those given their neighbors — Pakistan, Iran, and India. This contrast increased tensions between Afghanistan and its neighbors, which in turn allowed regional issues to become Cold War issues and fueled popular distrust of foreign intervention..

This book provides a complex and nuanced history of the unintended consequences of US and Soviet competition in. Afghanistan. In the process the author offers a history of Afghanistan that is devoid of the simplistic formulations (e.g. graveyard of empires, inherently warring people, etc) that plague so much of the literature on Afghanistan. Highly recommend.

[Harry Hughen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly researched, balanced, and engaging, if at some parts dry, diplomatic history of US-Afghanistan relations before the "cataclysm" of the Soviet invasion irreparably changed everything. I definitely enjoyed this, even while feeling bogged down in details about aid distribution or modernization projects in the Helmand valley.

For the US's part, Rakove places Afghanistan as one of the more shrewd examples of US Cold War diplomacy to non-aligned countries. Ditching their often harmful Manichean worldview, US policymakers were able to see that neutrality was the best that could be hoped for in the Afghan case, given their proximity to the Soviets. Ravoke also shows the importance of lower-level diplomats in shaping policy, as the embassy in Kabul fought tenaciously for their superiors in Washington to approve the necessary aid to keep Afghanistan out of the Soviet camp.

For Afghanistan, their policymakers often acted wisely throughout this book in adopting a policy of neutrality and playing the superpowers off each other and garnering a maximum amount of aid this way. Fascinatingly, this policy was a casualty of Detente, as neither the US nor USSR felt Afghanistan's alignment to be existential anymore.

I wish there was more about the 1978 Communist coup, which still kind of boggles my mind that something like this happened. Ravoke admirably builds on Connor Tobin's article disproving the American "Afghan trap" that is in popular consciousness(and unfortunately, some actual academic works). The US actually continued engagement with the DRA well after the war started. Ravoke also shows the Soviets, in a process eerily similar to the US's stumble into Vietnam, bumbling their way into intervening in Afghanistan. It was not part one of a larger blitzkrieg through the Middle East, as American and SW Asia and Middle East leaders(Zia Ul-Haq, for example) thought they were. (Though I will say I do think this was an understandable view at the time, and it was totally rational to aid the anti-Soviet rebels- even if Pakistan/KSA aided some unsavory characters to say the least.)

Overall, I would recommend this if one is interested in the Cold War broadly, or Afghan history, especially in this less talked about period before the decades of calamity.