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The Fall of Kabul and the Failure of Occupations: US and Soviet interventions in Afghanistan in comparative perspective

Art
March 4, 2022
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Page Hall 0060

The Fall of Kabul and the Failure of Occupations: US and Soviet interventions in Afghanistan in comparative perspective

Friday, March 4, 12:00pm – 1:30pm, Page Hall 0060

The rapid fall of Kabul in August 2021 shocked the world. Why did US involvement end so disastrously after two decades of war and state-building? How does the Soviet occupation and withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 shed light on the tricky nature of occupation?  In this talk I will place the US involvement and ultimate retreat in the context of the Soviet intervention and Afghanistan’s struggles over the last half century that transformed an internal conflict into a devastating forty-year civil war.

Artemy M. Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and Post Soviet Studies at Temple University and the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Building a Better Tomorrow: Development Knowledge and Practice in Central Asia and Beyond at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard, 2011) and Laboratory of Socialist Modernity: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell, 2018). 

Sponsors: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Department of History; Center for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Middle East Studies Center.