How Afghanistan Changed a Superpower

The parallels, by now, are well known: A global superpower sends troops to Afghanistan, installs a new leader, and plans to depart within months. Instead, it becomes locked in a years-long struggle against a highly motivated insurgency, and the conflict ends only as a consequence of the ignominious withdrawal of its armed forces.

Today, the narrative applies to the United States, but decades prior, this was the story of the Soviet Union. The comparison—like references to the Great Game and to Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires—is ubiquitous in coverage of the American intervention. The lesson, if one exists, is that great powers have sought time and again to change Afghanistan to their liking, and failed.

Yet comparatively little attention is devoted in the opposite direction: to how invading Afghanistan changed these countries back home. In the Soviet case, it led the citizens of a superpower to reassess