Afghan War Quotes

“By the time the news reached Calcutta, it had already given hope and encouragement to the many opponents of Company rule across the length and breadth of Hindustan: it was no accident that when the Great Rebellion did break out in 1857, it did so in sepoy regiments which had been deserted by their British officers in the snows of the Khord Kabul, and in civilian centres such as Lucknow, Agra, and Kanpur where the Persian presses had eagerly reprinted the Afghan epic poems and prose accounts of the British defeat.”
― William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

“[T]he Afghan war was the folly of the crowd of senile old men who were in charge in the late U.S.S.R. And they were, literally, senile. By 1979 the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee resembled our very own Geriatric Park. According to official figures, over the ten years of the war, we lost 15,000 people. According to a study of officers of the General Staff, the total was 26,000. Nobody has any idea how many Afghans were killed; the estimates vary from 600,000 to 2 million. The overwhelming majority were civilians. More than 5 million people became refugees.

The war sucked huge financial resources out of a U.S.S.R. that was rapidly becoming impoverished. At the same time it undermined morale both in the army and in the country at large. General Secretary Brezhnev and his generals who dreamed all this up wanted to play geopolitical games in pursuit of superiority over the United States, but in the end they only inflicted a mortal wound on their own nation.

The Afghan war was momentous not only for us but for the rest of the world as well. We are experiencing its direct consequences to this day. To a significant extent, current Islamic extremism grew out of it. Responding to the criminal stupidity of the Soviet leaders, the U.S. government behaved no less stupidly by doing its utmost to turn a war of the Afghan mujahideen against the U.S.S.R. into an Islamic jihad. Back then, in the 1980s, volunteers from all over the Middle East flocked to the region, and the war changed from being a confrontation between socialism and capitalism, as the Soviet Union insisted it was, into a holy war against infidels. Only the notion that people who had taken up arms in defense of their religion could be switched off by a political decision, that you could say, "Okay, guys, that's enough. We've won, let's all go home," was disastrously mistaken. It was not enough for people who had risen up under the green banners of Islam simply to drive out the Soviet troops. The slogans that had inspired them were something they really believed in. Having driven out the U.S.S.R., they demanded the transformation of Afghanistan into a country governed under sharia law. Osama bin Laden, to whom the Americans had donated money and weapons, was already mutating into their enemy, because the two sides' aims were diverging. The United States was losing interest and no longer wished to finance jihad. For a religious fanatic, however, those who are not with us are against us. It was in Afghanistan, where they had gone to wage a holy war, that the leaders of the Islamic State like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became who they were. That war is continuing even today.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir