The Soviet Union is presented as the adversary against which the United States and its partners organized an Afghan Islamist campaign in the 1980s, and as a point of comparison in Noam Chomsky’s critique of imperial violence. In this account, the campaign’s significance does not end with the Soviet war: the recruited forces later turned their attention to other regions, while the human consequences of intervention fell especially heavily on the country where the fighting took place.

The Afghanistan campaign

During the 1980s, the United States joined Pakistan’s intelligence services and partners including Saudi Arabia and Britain in recruiting, training, and arming extreme Islamist fundamentalists to wage a holy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Chomsky describes the purpose as inflicting the greatest possible damage on the Soviets. The account thus places the Soviet Union within a larger policy: it was the military adversary in a campaign built through international intelligence cooperation and support for armed proxies.

Chomsky also points to the longer reach of that effort. After the war ended, fighters commonly called Afghans—though many, including Osama bin Laden, were not Afghan—turned their attention elsewhere, including Chechnya and Bosnia. He says they received at least tacit U.S. support in those settings and were welcomed by regional governments. In Bosnia, numerous Islamic volunteers gained citizenship in recognition of their military actions. These later developments connect the campaign against the Soviet Union to conflicts beyond Afghanistan, without suggesting that all those involved shared the same national origin or trajectory.

The costs of intervention

The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan is also used to distinguish the costs borne by an intervening power from the consequences for the country invaded. Chomsky observes that the invasion was costly to the Soviet Union, but argues that this is not the first consideration when judging the crime. His comparison is with the Vietnam War: he says it began with a U.S. attack on South Vietnam, which remained the principal target, and ended with the destruction of almost all Indochina. The comparison makes a broader point about the scale of harm: the suffering imposed on the invaded region was incomparably greater than the cost to the power conducting the war.

This contrast prevents the Soviet Union’s losses from standing in for the Afghan experience. The account treats those losses as real, but insists that focusing on them alone would reverse the moral emphasis: the central consequence of the invasion was not what it cost Moscow, but what was done to Afghanistan.

Political language and comparison

Chomsky’s discussion of the Soviet war also sits within a critique of how states name violence. In comparing the Soviet campaign with other uses of force, he notes that U.S. actions have been called “humanitarian intervention” or described with other terms that avoid the word war. He argues that the language used to describe force can conceal responsibility and make the actions of powerful states appear different in kind from violence by their adversaries.

That concern informs his treatment of the Soviet Union: the fact that Soviet intervention was costly to the Soviet state does not settle how it should be understood, just as a state’s own account of its actions cannot replace consideration of who was attacked and what followed. The Soviet Union therefore functions both as a historical actor in the Afghan war and as a comparative reference in an argument about power, responsibility, and the unequal consequences of intervention.