Superpowers Defeated: Vietnam and Afghanistan Compared

Was Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam? Was Vietnam the American Afghanistan? During the Cold War, military conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan validated the crucial importance of war in global power dynamics. After approximately a decade of intense effort, military intervention proved too costly in human and material terms to be politically sustainable for the USA and USSR. In the end, both superpowers were thwarted in obtaining their original war goals and withdrew in disgrace. As a result, the parallelism between the US experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is now a widely accepted truism. But is it so? This book is an attempt to provide a greater degree of substance to the apparent truth that Vietnam and Afghanistan are analogous events, but also to explore the important differences between these two watershed events.

Douglas A. Borer is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and was a Visiting Fulbright scholar in 1998 at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.