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A Slow Reckoning examines the Soviet Union's and the Afghan communists' views of and policies toward Islam and Islamism during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989). As Vassily Klimentov demonstrates, the Soviet and communist Afghan disregard for Islam was telling of the overall communist approach to reforming Afghanistan and helps explain the failure of their modernization project. A Slow Reckoning reveals how during most of the conflict Babrak Karmal, the ruler installed by the Soviets, instrumentalized Islam in support of his rule while retaining a Marxist-Leninist platform. Similarly, the Soviets at all levels failed to give Islam its due importance as communist ideology and military considerations dominated their decision making. This approach to Islam only changed after Mikhail Gorbachev replaced Karmal by Mohammad Najibullah and prepared to withdraw Soviet forces. Discarding Marxism-Leninism for Islam proved the correct approach, but it came too late to salvage the Soviet nation-building project. A Slow Reckoning also shows how Soviet leaders only started seriously paying attention to an Islamist threat from Afghanistan to Central Asia after 1986. While the Soviets had concerns related to Islamism in 1979, only the KGB believed the threat to be potent. The Soviet elites never fully conceptualized Islamism, continuing to see it as an ideology the United States, Iran, or Pakistan could instrumentalize at will. They believed the Islamists had little agency and that their retrograde ideology could not find massive appeal among progressive Soviet Muslims. In this, they were only partly right.

In Zinky Boys, Svetlana Aleksievich's \"documentary novel\" about the Soviet-Afghan War, women are represented in three ways: the \"Motherland-mother\" construct implicit in the memory of World War II but that does not fit the Soviet-Afghan War; the \"mournful mother\" construct of those (a majority in the book) who do not accept the loss of their sons for what they see as an unjust cause; and the \"morally-loose woman-at-war\" construct rooted in men's predatory behaviour.  Amid the dramatic political reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, the representation of women in Zinky Boys reflects a changing discourse in Soviet society on the war in Afghanistan that helped pave the way for the collapse of the USSR. The alienation of returning veterans, the pain of mourning mothers who do not accept the reason for their sons' deaths, and the pervasiveness of a \"bad girls\" image of women who served in the war all combined to undercut the power of the Motherland-mother construct so much a part of the cult of World War II this generation grew up on.  Disillusionment with the Soviet-Afghan War was a crucial part of the unravelling of the discursive conditions of the late Soviet period.

This paper demonstrates that when a superpower within a bipolar system fights against a small rival either that is located beyond its sphere of influence or that has geostrategic importance to the other acting superpower, other forces matter more than the distribution of capabilities between the belligerents. Within the study I review two primary explanations for the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Despite the strong resistance of local forces to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, mainly by the Afghan Mujahedeen, Moscow failed to predict the political outcomes of the war. It was in fact a series of negative feedbacks that caused Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan after a decade-long intervention that did not achieve any political goals. One such example was the direct strike against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, launched and coordinated by the United States as the other acting superpower under the bipolar system of that time.

The goal of this article is to trace the developing narrative of the Soviet-Afghan War in Svetlana Aleksievich's Tsinkovye mal'chiki (Zinky Boys) by contrasting the author's initial representation of the truth about Afghanistan in the 1990 full-text edition with the most recent representation found in the 2016 edition of the book. Publicly, Aleksievich has downplayed these textual alterations with the explanation that her interviewees are \"living documents,\" and that therefore she occasionally makes changes that reflect the interviewees' evolving perspectives of the war. This may be true to a certain extent, but the present article identifies trends that suggest a more focused ideological intent or motivation behind the changes. Aleksievich's evolving representation of truth is considered in three interrelated concerns: (1) truth as it relates to the genre of historical accounts; (2) truth as it relates to individual memory processing; and (3) truth as it relates to the document. Cet article vise à tracer le récit en développement de la guerre soviéto-afghane dans le livre Tsinkovye mal'chiki (Cercueils de zinc ; Zinky Boys en anglais) de Svetlana Aleksievitch. Pour ce faire, l'article met en contraste la représentation initiale de la vérité sur l'Afghanistan dans la version intégrale de 1990, avec la représentation la plus récente dans l'édition de 2016. Aleksievitch a publiquement minimisé l'importance de ces modifications textuelles, expliquant que ses interviewés sont des « documents vivants », donc parfois elle introduit des modifications qui expriment leurs perspectives changeantes de la guerre. Cela peut être vrai dans une certaine mesure, pourtant cet article identifie des tendances laissant supposer une intention ou une motivation idéologique plus ciblée à l'origine des modifications. Il examine cette représentation changeante de la vérité sous trois aspects liés : (1) la vérité relative au genre des récits historiques ; (2) la vérité relative à l'intégration des souvenirs de la part de l'individu ; et (3) la vérité relative au document.

States are more likely to engage in risky and destabilizing actions such as military buildups and preemptive strikes if they believe their adversaries pose a tangible threat. Yet despite the crucial importance of this issue, we don't know enough about how states and their leaders draw inferences about their adversaries' long-term intentions.Knowing the Adversarydraws on a wealth of historical archival evidence to shed new light on how world leaders and intelligence organizations actually make these assessments. Keren Yarhi-Milo examines three cases: Britain's assessments of Nazi Germany's intentions in the 1930s, America's assessments of the Soviet Union's intentions during the Carter administration, and the Reagan administration's assessments of Soviet intentions near the end of the Cold War. She advances a new theoretical framework-called selective attention-that emphasizes organizational dynamics, personal diplomatic interactions, and cognitive and affective factors. Yarhi-Milo finds that decision makers don't pay as much attention to those aspects of state behavior that major theories of international politics claim they do. Instead, they tend to determine the intentions of adversaries on the basis of preexisting beliefs, theories, and personal impressions. Yarhi-Milo also shows how intelligence organizations rely on very different indicators than decision makers, focusing more on changes in the military capabilities of adversaries. Knowing the Adversaryprovides a clearer picture of the historical validity of existing theories, and broadens our understanding of the important role that diplomacy plays in international security.

The question of what causes war has concerned statesmen since the time of Thucydides.The Steps to Warutilizes new data on militarized interstate disputes from 1816 to 2001 to identify the factors that increase the probability that a crisis will escalate to war. In this book, Paul Senese and John Vasquez test one of the major behavioral explanations of war--the steps to war--by identifying the various factors that put two states at risk for war. Focusing on the era of classic international politics from 1816 to 1945, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War period, they look at the roles of territorial disputes, alliances, rivalry, and arms races and show how the likelihood of war increases significantly as these risk factors are combined. Senese and Vasquez argue that war is more likely in the presence of these factors because they increase threat perception and put both sides into a security dilemma. The Steps to Warcalls into question certain prevailing realist beliefs, like peace through strength, demonstrating how threatening to use force and engaging in power politics is more likely to lead to war than to peace.

A top adviser at the Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism argues that winning the war against Militant Islamists requires a more nuanced understanding of their ideology. His book is among the first attempts to deconstruct and marginalize al-Qaida ideology using Islamic based arguments. By clearly defining the differences between Islam, Islamist, and Military Islamist, Aboul-Enein highlights how militant Islamist ideology takes fragments of Islamic history and theology and weaves them into a narrow, pseudo-intellectual ideology to justify their violence against Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In offering a comprehensive explanation of how Militant Islamists have hijacked the Islamic religion, Aboul-Enein provides a realistic description of the militant threat, which is different and distinct from Islamist political discourse and the wider religion of Islam.

On 15 February 1989, Gromov, the LCST’s 40th Army’s last commander, declared that there were no Soviet, or Shuravi as the locals called them, soldiers left in Afghanistan as he crossed the bridge over the Amu-Daria River. Najibullah meanwhile continued his national reconciliation policy, stabilizing his regime thanks to the mujahideen’s dissensions and Moscow’s continuing support. He hence managed to remain in power until April 1992 when a mujahideen offensive, the end of Soviet support, and a coup inside the regime finally forced him to seek shelter in the UN headquarters in Kabul. Four years later, the Taliban would gruesomely

Nonalignment had been the defining principle in Afghan foreign policy even before the emergence of the movement of the same name. Khalq’s ascendency marked a stark departure from that course. At the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Conference in Belgrade in 1978, Amin’s position on international questions had been indistinguishable from those of Moscow and Havana.¹ Following the Soviet intervention, most countries saw Karmal’s Afghanistan as even more subservient to the USSR. The rejection of Soviet imperialism went far beyond Moscow’s Cold War enemies, spreading to the Third World, communist parties in Europe, and even Romania.² Aside from Soviet allies, India was

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Soviet–Afghan War. It discusses the interplay of Marxism–Leninism and Islam in Afghanistan in line with how the Kremlin saw Islamism during the Soviet–Afghan War. The Soviet–Afghan War was the defining conflict of the late Cold War wherein the conflict revolved around the Soviet Union and its People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan client against the mujahideen. The chapter presents the communist views and policies on Islam in Afghanistan that help understand the evolving Soviet perceptions of and goals in Afghanistan and the enduring tension between ideology and pragmatism in Soviet decision-making. It considers the competition between ideology and realpolitik in driving decision-making during the Cold War.