Twenty years ago last week - February 15, 1989 - the last soldiers of the Soviet 40th Army pulled out of Afghanistan, marking the end of Moscow's bloody and disastrous imperial adventure. In a decade of savage fighting, the Red Army and its Afghan Communist allies killed over 1.5 million Afghans and drove 2.5 million into exile in Pakistan and Iran.
The new Soviet reformist chairman, Mikhail Gorbachev, determined the Afghan war that was begun by his dim predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev,...
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