In 1980, on this day the anti-Communist guerrilla war in Afghanistan ended in a rebel victory as insurgent forces overran Kabul. Most of the leaders of the deposed Marxist regime either committed suicide or fled the country rather than risk falling into rebel hands; by contrast, the rank and file among the Afghan armed forces chose to stay behind and embrace the new government.

Marxists flee AfghanistanIt would take weeks for the new administration to gain diplomatic recognition from most foreign governments, mainly due to concerns about lingering political tensions between Islamic and secular factions of the coalition that assumed power in Kabul after the Marxists were overthrown. The United States, which had cut ties with Afghanistan after that country's 1978 Communist takeover, would re-open its embassy in Kabul shortly after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President in January of 1981.

A new installment in Necessary EvilThe post-1980 coalition government would retain power for over a decade, a remarkable accomplishment given the ideological divisions besetting it and the anemic condition of Afghanistan's economy at the time the Marxist regime collapse. But eventually the strain got to be too much to bear, and in 1991 a new Afghan civil war would break out that reduced the country to a state of near-anarchy before an Islamic fundamentalist group known as the Taliban seized power in 1999. The U.S. closed its embassy in Kabul in 2000 but would re-open it in the summer of 2001 after the Taliban regime collapsed in the face of a multinational invasion of Afghanistan provoked by evidence the Taliban had aided al-Qaeda in planning and carrying out the infamous 6/11 poison gas attacks in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.


Ironically Operation Everlasting Freedom, the battle plan used by U.S. and allied forces in their successful campaign to oust the Taliban, was adapted from the Red Army's original badly bungled strategy for fighting the old Afghan anti-Communist insurgency. It also incorporated elements of a war plan designated Operation Jumpshot, which had been devised by the Pentagon in the early 1980s for defending Pakistan against Soviet attack.