Russian Help on Afghanistan

No, the headline above is not a non-sequitur, as much as it may seem like one. It springs from this article I just read on Yahoo!'s news aggregation service.

Now, there are many ways of reading this fairly short news article from Reuters. On the surface, it appears like the incoming Obama administration is already fostering hope in renewed or strengthened relations with the international community. That could be one way of looking at it, since the U.S., NATO, and Russia had a bit of a falling-out after Russia's war with Georgia last summer. Perhaps Big Bad Vlad Putin and Russian President Dmitry* Medvedev felt like they could mend relations with the new Obama administration better than they could with the outgoing Bush administration.**

* I still can never think of a Russian President/Soviet Premier named Dmitry without thinking, of course, of Stanley Kubrik's all-time classic Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Dmitri Kissoff... ha! Still makes me laugh! There are not many Peter Sellers roles that even begin to approach the hilarity of the three he had in this one movie.

** This, despite Bush's famous quote about meeting with Putin and seeing into his soul.

Another way of looking at the news is that Russia, perhaps, sees another opportunity to exert its influence in a region it has long coveted (unless coveted is too strong a word) during a time of leadership transition in the U.S. government. Russia's offer to "help" us in Afghanistan comes hard on the heels of Tuesday's Inauguration, you have to admit. This honestly could be Obama's first foreign-policy test, but it is too early to tell the true intent of the Russians here.

I loved this quote taken directly from the Reuters article:

"Let us hope the new U.S. administration will be more successful in the Afghan settlement than its predecessor," Medvedev told a news conference after talks with Uzbek President Islam Karimov.

Or did he mean, "...more successful than WE were in suppressing the Islamic Mujahideen resistance during our decade-long entanglement in Afghanistan"?!! Which raises a great deal of questions all on its own.

I was old enough to remember the nightly news covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when I was a child. I clearly remember President Jimmy Carter boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow in retalliation for the invasion, which then was repaid in kind by the Eastern Bloc countries boycotting the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, CA.

One thing I was never fully clear on, and I don't think the nightly news programs* ever answered on their own, was WHY the Soviets felt compelled to invade Afghanistan in the first place. It was pretty clear why the U.S. responded the way it did, and the movie they made starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts on Charlie Wilson's War (2007) provided a nice historical perspective, even if it wasn't 100% true. On this topic, the Wikipedia page provides some information related to the events leading up to the Soviet invasion, but it should not be trusted as a source for a deeper understanding of the Soviet rationale.

* The one we probably watched over any others at the time was Dan Rather on the CBS Nightly News, and oh, how long ago does that seem now! Who watches the evening news any more these days?

So, before I go off to the library in search of more scholarly tomes on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I thought I would post the question here: does anyone know which book(s) are the best one(s) on this topic? Wikipedia actually does a decent job of listing source material for the footnotes, all of which are found at the bottom of the page linked above. I could sift through those footnotes to find books on the topic, I suppose. Even then, you always want to be reading the right books, right?

All I know is this: the rationale for the Soviet invasion I remember as being provided at the time, that the Soviets were looking to secure a warm-water port outside their Black Sea fleet, is completely bogus.