A Long Goodbye

Asking a question of both historical and contemporary significance, Kalinovsky (U. of Amsterdam), wonders why it took the Soviet Union so long to bring its troops home from Afghanistan even as many within the Soviet leadership quickly came to see the harm to accruing to the Soviet Union because of the invasion and occupation. His analysis is primarily a study of Soviet decision-making, exploring the impact of ideology, political legacies, patron-client relations, superpower diplomacy, and bureaucratic politics on elite decisions about the Afghan war. He identifies four key paradigms as helping to determine the slow pace of disengagement: the Soviet Union's legitimizing self-image as a defender of the third world against imperialism, Soviet confidence that it could transform the political-economy of Afghanistan and thus stabilize the Afghan client government, failures of institutional coordination (particularly between the Soviet military and the KGB) that allowed Afghan clients to manipulate Moscow, and high levels of Cold War tensions with the United States that precluded a diplomatic settlement in light of US support for the anti-Soviet mujahedeen. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)