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.