The term Cold War

A Cold war or Cold warfare is a state of conflict between nations that does not involve direct military action but is pursued primarily through economic and political actions, propaganda, acts of espionage or proxy wars waged by surrogates. The surrogates are typically states that are "satellites" of the conflicting nations, i.e., nations allied to them or under their political influence. Opponents in a cold war will often provide economic or military aid, such as weapons, tactical support or military advisors, to lesser nations involved in conflicts with the opposing country.

The Cold War (1947-1991)

The Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition existing after World War II (19391945) between the Communist World primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States and its allies. Although the primary participants' military force never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states deemed vulnerable, proxy wars, espionage, propaganda, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race.

The Causes of Cold War

The Soviet Union wanted to spread its ideology of communism worldwide, which alarmed the Americans who followed democracy. The acquisition of atomic weapons by America caused fear in the Soviet minds. Both countries feared an attack from each other. The Soviet Unions action of taking control over Eastern Europe was a major factor for US suspicions. The US President had a personal dislike of the Soviet leader Josef Stalin. America was annoyed by the Soviet Unions actions in the part of Germany it had occupied. The Soviets feared that America would use Western Europe as a base to attack it.

The First Cold War (1947-1962)

The first Cold War involved following major programs and events: 1. Marshall Plan The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was the large-scale economic program, 194751, of the United States

for rebuilding and creating a stronger economic foundation for the countries of Europe. The reconstruction plan, developed at a meeting of the participating European states, was established on June 5, 1947. The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948. During that period some US $13 billion in economic and technical assistance were given to help the recovery of the European countries that had joined in the Organization for European Economic Co-operation. 2. Berlin Blockade After the Marshall Plan, the introduction of a new currency to Western Germany to replace the Reich mark, and massive electoral losses for communist parties in 1946, in June 1948, the Soviet Union cut off surface road access to Berlin. Thereafter, street and water communications were severed, rail and barge traffic was stopped and the Soviets initially stopped supplying food to the civilian population in the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin. Because Berlin was located within the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany and the other occupying powers had previously relied on Soviet good will for access to Berlin, the only available methods of supplying the city were three limited air corridors. By February 1948, because of massive post-war military cuts, the entire United States army had been reduced to 552,000 men. Military forces in non-Soviet Berlin sectors totaled only 8,973 Americans, 7,606 British and 6,100 French. Soviet military forces in the Soviet sector that surrounded Berlin totaled one and a half million men. The two United States regiments in Berlin would have provided little resistance against a Soviet attack. Believing that Britain, France and the United States had little option other than to acquiesce, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany celebrated the beginning of the blockade. Thereafter, a massive aerial supply campaign of food, water and other goods was initiated by the United States, Britain, France and other countries. The success of the airlift eventually caused the Soviets to lift their blockade in May 1949. NATO The United States joined Britain, France, Canada, Denmark, Portugal, Norway, Belgium, Iceland, Luxembourg, Italy, and the Netherlands in 1949 to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United

States' first "entangling" European alliance in 170 years. West Germany, Spain, Greece, and Turkey would later join this alliance. The Eastern leaders retaliated against these steps by integrating the economies of their nations in Comecon, their version of the Marshall Plan; exploding the first Soviet atomic device in 1949; signing an alliance with People's Republic of China in February 1950; and forming the Warsaw Pact, Eastern Europe's counterpart to NATO, in 1955, the Soviet Union, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland founded this military alliance. Other countries of the world stayed away from becoming formally a part of either of two and they formed the non-aligned movement or NAM. 3. Korean War The Korean War (19501953) was a military conflict between the Republic of Korea, supported by the United Nations, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China (PRC), with military material aid from the Soviet Union. The war began on 25 June 1950 and an armistice was signed on 27 July 1953. The war was a result of the physical division of Korea by an agreement of the victorious Allies at the conclusion of the Pacific War at the end of World War II. The Korean peninsula was ruled by Japan from 1910 until the end of World War II. Following the surrender of Japan in 1945, American administrators divided the peninsula along the 38th Parallel, with United States troops occupying the southern part and Soviet troops occupying the northern part. The failure to hold free elections throughout the Korean Peninsula in 1948 deepened the division between the two sides, and the North established a Communist government. The 38th Parallel increasingly became a political border between the two Koreas. Although reunification negotiations continued in the months preceding the war, tension intensified. Cross-border skirmishes and raids at the 38th Parallel persisted. The situation escalated into open warfare when North Korean forces invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. It was the first significant armed conflict of the Cold War. The United Nations, particularly the United States, came to the aid of South Korea in repelling the invasion. A rapid UN counter-offensive drove the North Koreans past the 38th Parallel and almost to the Yalu River, and the People's Republic of China (PRC) entered the war on the side of the North. The Chinese launched a counter-offensive that pushed 4

the United Nations forces back across the 38th Parallel. The Soviet Union materially aided the North Korean and Chinese armies. In 1953, the war ceased with an armistice that restored the border between the Koreas near the 38th Parallel and created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a 2.5-mile (4.0 km) wide buffer zone between the two Koreas. Minor outbreaks of fighting continue to the present day. With both North and South Korea sponsored by external powers, the Korean War was a proxy war. From a military science perspective, it combined strategies and tactics of World War I and World War II: it began with a mobile campaign of swift infantry attacks followed by air bombing raids, but became a static trench war by July 1951. 4. Berlin Crisis of 1961 During the early months of 1961, the East German government actively sought a means of halting the emigration of its population to the West. During the spring and early summer, the East German regime procured and stockpiled building materials for the erection of the Berlin Wall. Although this extensive activity was widely known, few outside the small circle of Soviet and East German planners believed that East Germany would be sealed off. On Saturday August 12, 1961, signed the order to close the border and erect a Wall. At midnight the army, police, and units of the East German army began to close the border and by morning on Sunday August 13, 1961 the border to West Berlin had been shut. East German troops and workers had begun to tear up streets running alongside the barrier to make them impassable to most vehicles, and to install barbed wire entanglements and fences along the 156 km (97 miles) around the three western sectors and the 43 km (27 miles) which actually divided West and East Berlin. Approximately 32,000 combat and engineer troops were used in building the Wall. Once their efforts were completed, the Border Police assumed the functions of manning and improving the barrier. East German tanks and artillery were present to discourage interference by the West and presumably to assist in the event of large-scale riots. On 30 August 1961, President John F. Kennedy had ordered 148,000 Guardsmen and Reservists to active duty in response to East German moves to cut off allied access to Berlin. The Air Guard's share of that mobilization was 21,067 individuals. On 1 November; the Air Force mobilized three more ANG fighter interceptor squadrons. In late October and early November, eight of the tactical fighter units flew to Europe with their 216 aircraft in operation "Stair Step," the largest jet 5

deployment in the Air Guard's history. Because of their short range, 60 Air Guard F-104 interceptors were airlifted to Europe in late November. The four powers governing Berlin (France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States) had agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference that Allied personnel would not be stopped by East German police in any sector of Berlin. But on 22 October 1961, just two months after the construction of the Wall, the US Chief of Mission in West Berlin, E. Allan Lightner, was stopped in his car (which had occupation forces license plates) while going to a theatre in East Berlin. Army General Lucius D. Clay (Retired), U.S. President John F. Kennedy's Special Advisor in West Berlin, decided to demonstrate American resolve. The attempts of a US diplomat to enter the East Berlin were backed by US troops. This led to the stand-off between US and East German tanks at Checkpoint Charlie on 2728 October 1961. The stand-off was resolved only after direct talks between Ulbricht and Kennedy. The Berlin Crisis saw US Army troops facing East German Army troops in a stand-off, until the East German government backed down. The crisis ended in the summer of 1962 and the personnel returned to the United States.

5. Cuban Missile Crisis Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation among the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War. In September 1962, after some unsuccessful operations by the U.S. to overthrow the Cuban regime (Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose), the Cuban and Soviet governments began to build bases in Cuba for a number of medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) with the ability to strike most of the continental United States. This action followed the 1958 deployment of Thor IRBMs in the UK and Jupiter IRBMs to Italy and Turkey in 1961 more than 100 U.S.-built missiles having the capability to strike Moscow with nuclear warheads. On October 14, 1962, a United States Air Force U-2 plane on a photoreconnaissance mission captured photographic proof of Soviet missile bases under construction in Cuba. The ensuing crisis ranks with the Berlin Blockade as one of the major confrontations of the Cold War and is generally regarded as the moment in which the Cold War came closest to turning into a nuclear conflict.

The United States considered attacking Cuba via air and sea, and settled on a military "quarantine" of Cuba. The U.S. announced that it would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and demanded that the Soviets dismantle the missile bases already under construction or completed in Cuba and remove all offensive weapons. The Kennedy administration held a slim hope that the Kremlin would agree to their demands, and expected a military confrontation. The Soviets publicly balked at the U.S. demands, but in secret backchannel communications initiated a proposal to resolve the crisis. The confrontation ended on October 28, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy reached a public and secret agreement with Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a U.S. public declaration and agreement to never invade Cuba. Secretly, the U.S. agreed that it would dismantle all U.S.-built Thor and Jupiter IRBMs deployed in Europe and Turkey. Only two weeks after the agreement, the Soviets had removed the missile systems and their support equipment, loading them onto eight Soviet ships from November 59. A month later, on December 5 and 6, the Soviet Il-28 bombers were loaded onto three Soviet ships and shipped back to Russia. The quarantine was formally ended at 6:45 p.m. EDT on November 20, 1962. Eleven months after the agreement, all American weapons were deactivated (by September 1963). An additional outcome of the negotiations was the creation of the Hotline Agreement and the MoscowWashington hotline, a direct communications link between Moscow and Washington, D.C.

6. Sino-Soviet Split The People's Republic of China's Great Leap Forward and other policies based on agriculture instead of heavy industry challenged the Sovietstyle socialism and the signs of the USSR's influence over the socialist countries. As "de-Stalinization" went forward in the Soviet Union, China's revolutionary founder, Mao Zedong, condemned the Soviets for "revisionism." The Chinese also were growing increasingly annoyed at being constantly in the number two role in the communist world. In the 1960s, an open split began to develop between the two powers; the tension lead to a series of border skirmishes along the Chinese-Soviet border. Meanwhile, 7

during 1968, the Soviet Army had amassed along the 4,380 km (2,738 mi.) frontier with China especially at the Xinjiang border, in north-west China, where Turkic separatists might easily be induced to insurrection. Earlier, in 1961, the USSR had some 12 half-strength divisions and 200 aircraft at that border, seven years later, at the end of 1968, they had 25 divisions, 1,200 aircraft, and 120 medium-range missiles deployed there. Moreover, although China had exploded its first nuclear weapon in October 1964, at the Lop Nur basin, the People's Liberation Army was militarily inferior to the Soviet Army. In March 1969, political border tensions transformed into armed raids, at the Ussuri River and on Damansky IslandZhenbao Island; more (smallscale) warfare followed in August. The United States warned the USSR that launching a nuclear strike against China would initiate another World War, prompting the Soviets to back down. Aware of that possibility, China built large-scale underground shelters; Beijings Underground City was for protecting a large portion of the civil populace; military tunnels, the Underground Project 131 command center, were built in Hubei, and the "816 Project" nuclear research center was also built in Fuling, Chongqing. After the 1969 clashes, the Communist combatants withdrew from fullscale war. In September, Minister Alexei Kosygin secretly visited Beijing to speak with Premier Zhou Enlai; in October, the PRC and the USSR began border-demarcation talks. Although fruitless, those talks restored minimal diplomatic communication, and, by 1970, Chairman Mao Zedong understood that the PRC could not simultaneously confront the USSR and the USA, and suppress internal disorder. The reasons for this split are as follows: In the Chinese Civil War. Mao ignored most of the politico-military advice and direction from Joseph Stalin on conducting the Chinese revolution. China, unlike Russia, had no great urban working class, thus Mao organized the peasants and farmers to fight the Chinese Revolution. Thus, he applied peasant revolution against Soviet urban revolution. This was different from Lenins Model of Urban Revolution. During the Second World War (193945) Stalin had urged Mao into a joint, anti-Japanese coalition with Chiang. After the war, Stalin advised Mao against seizing power, and to negotiate with Chiang, Mao refused to act on Stalins advice.

Support from Soviet Union to India against China in Indo-China war 1962. Khrushchev was advocating the idea of Peaceful Coexistence, between communist and capitalist nations which was against Maos lean to one side policy after World War II. Refusal by USSR on developing Chinese Atomic Bomb.

7. 1960 U-2 incident The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on May 1, 1960, during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and during the leadership of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, when a United States U2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet Union airspace. The United States government at first denied the plane's purpose and mission, but then was forced to admit its role as a covert surveillance aircraft when the Soviet government produced its remains (largely intact) and surviving pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Coming just over two weeks before the scheduled opening of an EastWest summit in Paris, the incident was a great embarrassment to the United States and prompted a marked deterioration in its relations with the Soviet Union. On May 1, fifteen days before the scheduled opening of an EastWest summit conference in Paris, captain Francis Gary Powers, left the US base in Peshawar on a mission with the operations code word GRAND SLAM to overfly the Soviet Union, photographing Inter-Continental Ballistaic Missile sites in and around Sverdlovsk and Plesetsk, then land at Bod in Norway. All units of the Soviet Air Defence Forces in the Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Siberia, Ural and later in the U.S.S.R. European Region and Extreme North were on red alert, and the U-2 flight was expected. Because of the U-2's extreme operating altitude, Soviet attempts to intercept the plane using fighter aircraft failed. The U-2's course was out of range of several of the nearest Surface to Air Missile sites. The U-2 was eventually brought down near Degtyarsk, Ural Region. The Four Power Paris Summit between president Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev, Harold Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle collapsed, in large part because Eisenhower refused to accede to Khrushchev's demands that he apologize for the incident. The incident severely compromised Pakistan's security and worsened relations between the Soviet Union and Pakistan. 9

9. Space Race during 1960s The Space Race was a mid-to-late twentieth century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in outer space exploration. Between 1957 and 1975, Cold War rivalry between the two nations focused on attaining firsts in space exploration, which were seen as necessary for national security and symbolic of technological and ideological superiority. The Space Race involved pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, sub-orbital and orbital human spaceflight around the earth, and piloted voyages to the Moon. It effectively began with the Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1 artificial satellite on 4 October 1957, and concluded with the cooperative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project human spaceflight mission in July 1975. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project came to symbolize dtente, a partial easing of strained relations between the USSR and the USA. The Space Race had its origins in the missile-based arms race that occurred just after the end of the World War II, when both the Soviet Union and the United States captured advanced German rocket technology and personnel. The Space Race sparked unprecedented increases in spending on education and pure research, which accelerated scientific advancements and led to beneficial spin-off technologies. An unforeseen consequence was that the Space Race contributed to the birth of the environmental movement; the first color pictures taken from space were used as icons by the movement to show the Earth as a fragile blue planet surrounded by the blackness of space.

10. Vietnam War In 1965 Johnson stationed 22,000 troops in South Vietnam to prop up the faltering anticommunist regime. The South Vietnamese government had long been allied with the United States. The North Vietnamese were backed by the Soviet Union and China. North Vietnam, in turn, supported the National Liberation Front, which drew its ranks from the South Vietnamese working class and peasantry. Seeking to contain Communist expansion, Johnson increased the number of troops to 575,000 in 1968.

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Although neither the Soviet Union nor China intervened directly in the conflict, they did supply large amounts of aid and material to the North and supported them diplomatically. While the early years of the war had significant U.S. casualties, the administration assured the public that the war was winnable and would in the near future result in a U.S. victory. The U.S. public's faith in "the light at the end of the tunnel" was shattered on January 30, 1968, when the NLF mounted the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. Although neither of these offensives accomplished any military objectives, the surprising capacity of an enemy to even launch such an offensive convinced many in the U.S. that victory was impossible. A vocal and growing peace movement centered on college campuses became a prominent feature as the counter culture of the 1960s adopted a vocal anti-war position. Especially unpopular was the draft that threatened to send young men to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Elected in 1968, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon began a policy of slow disengagement from the war. The goal was to gradually build up the South Vietnamese Army so that it could fight the war on its own. This policy became the cornerstone of the so-called "Nixon Doctrine." As applied to Vietnam, the doctrine was called "Vietnamization." The goal of Vietnamization was to enable the South Vietnamese army to increasingly hold its own against the NLF and the North Vietnamese Army. On October 10, 1969, Nixon ordered a squadron of 18 B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons to race to the border of Soviet airspace in order to convince the Soviet Union that he was capable of anything to end the Vietnam War. The morality of U.S. conduct of the war continued to be an issue under the Nixon presidency. In 1969, it came to light that Lt. William Calley, a platoon leader in Vietnam, had led a massacre of Vietnamese civilians a year earlier. In 1970, Nixon ordered secret military incursions into Cambodia in order to destroy NLF sanctuaries bordering on South Vietnam. The U.S. pulled its troops out of Vietnam in 1973, and the conflict finally ended in 1975 when the North Vietnamese took Saigon. Millions of Vietnamese died as a consequence of the Vietnam War. The lowest casualty estimates, based on the now-renounced North Vietnamese statements, are around 1.5 million Vietnamese killed. Vietnam released figures on April 3, 1995, that a total of one million Vietnamese 11

combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war. The accuracy of these figures has generally not been challenged. The official estimate for U.S. death toll is about 58,000, with some missing and presumed dead. Millions of Vietnamese fled after the war ended. After the war, thousands of Vietnamese were rounded up into "re-education" camps. Since the mid-1980s, Vietnam has followed a path of economic liberalization similar to the Chinese model, and though still poor, over the past decade Vietnam has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

Dtente
In the course of the 1960s and '70s, Cold War participants struggled to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed blocs. The Soviet Union achieved rough nuclear parity with the United States. From the beginning of the post-war period, Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and '60s, with per capita GDPs approaching those of the United States, while Eastern Bloc economies stagnated. China, Japan, and Western Europe; the increasing nationalism of the Third World, and the growing disunity within the communist alliance all augured a new multi polar international structure. Moreover, the 1973 world oil shock created a dramatic shift in the economic fortunes of the superpowers. The rapid increase in the price of oil devastated the U.S. economy leading to "stagflation" and slow growth. Dtente had both strategic and economic benefits for both sides of the Cold War, as they tried to check the further spread and proliferation of nuclear weapons. President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty I treaty to limit the development of strategic weapons. Arms control enabled both superpowers to slow the spiraling increases in their defense budgets. At the same time, divided Europe began to pursue closer relations. The West German chancellor recognized East Germany. Cooperation on the Helsinki Accords led to several agreements on politics, economics and human rights. A series of arms control agreements such as SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were created to limit the development of strategic weapons and slow the arms race. There was also a rapprochement between China and the

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United States. The People's Republic of China joined the United Nations, and trade and cultural ties were initiated, most notably Nixon's groundbreaking trip to China in 1972. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union concluded friendship and cooperation treaties with several states in the noncommunist world, especially among Third World and Non-Aligned Movement states. During Dtente, competition continued, especially in the Middle East and southern and eastern Africa. The two nations continued to compete with each other for influence in the resource-rich Third World. There was also increasing criticism of U.S. support for the Suharto regime in Indonesia, Augusto Pinochet's regime in Chile, and Mobuto Sese Seko's regime in Zaire. The war in Vietnam and the Watergate crisis shattered confidence in the presidency. International frustrations, including the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the growth of international terrorism, and the acceleration of the arms race raised fears over the country's foreign policy. The energy crisis, unemployment, and inflation, derided as "stagflation," raised fundamental questions over the future of American prosperity. At the same time, the oil-rich USSR benefited immensely, and the influx of oil wealth helped disguise the many systemic flaws in the Soviet economy. At the same time, the entire Eastern Bloc continued to experience massive stagnation of consumer goods, shortfalls in shortage economies, developmental stagnation and large housing quantity and quality shortfalls.

The New Cold War (1979-1985)

It was a period during the Cold War when relations between the superpowers became cooler, arising from the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. A corresponding change in Western policy from dtente to more confrontational posture against the Soviets emerged, as US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made clear their philosophical undertaking to counter Soviet expansionism in the developing world. There was a return to the costly arms race, with the issue of the stationing intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe remaining unclear, and US proposals for the Strategic Defence Initiative introduced a new paradigm that threatened the equation of Mutually Assured Destruction. This phase of the Cold War

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ended shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union and demonstrated a clear commitment to reduce East-West tensions. Following two main events happened: 1. Iranian Revolution It refers to events involving the overthrow of Iran's monarchy (Pahlavi dynasty) under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and its replacement with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution. Demonstrations against the Shah began in January 1978. Between August and December 1978 strikes and demonstrations paralyzed the country. The Shah left Iran for exile in mid-January 1979, and in the resulting power vacuum two weeks later Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran to a greeting by several million Iranians. The royal regime collapsed shortly after on February 11 when guerrillas and rebel troops overwhelmed troops loyal to the Shah in armed street fighting. Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic Republic on April 1, 1979, and to approve a new theocratic constitution whereby Khomeini became Supreme Leader of the country, in December 1979. The revolution was unusual for the surprise it created throughout the world: it lacked many of the customary causes of revolution (defeat at war, a financial crisis, peasant rebellion, or disgruntled military); produced profound change at great speed; was massively popular; overthrew a puppet regime heavily protected by a lavishly financed army and security services; and replaced a modernising monarchy with a theocracy based on Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists (or velayat-e faqih). Its outcome an Islamic Republic "under the guidance of an extraordinary religious scholar from Qom" was, as one scholar put it, "clearly an occurrence that had to be explained." 2. Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan Afghanistan hit the world's headlines in 1979. Afghanistan seemed to perfectly summarize the Cold War. From the west's point of view, Berlin, Korea, Hungary and Cuba had shown the way communism wanted to proceed. Afghanistan was a continuation of this. In Christmas 1979, Russian paratroopers landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. The country was already in the grip of a civil war. The prime minister, Hazifullah Amin, tried to sweep aside Muslim tradition 14

within the nation and he wanted a more western slant to Afghanistan. This outraged the majority of those in Afghanistan as a strong tradition of Muslim belief was common in the country. Thousands of Muslim leaders had been arrested and many more had fled the capital and gone to the mountains to escape Amin's police. Amin also lead a communist based government - a belief that rejects religion and this was another reason for such obvious discontent with his government. Thousands of Afghanistan Muslims joined the Mujahideen - a guerilla force on a holy mission for Allah. They wanted the overthrow of the Amin government. The Mujahideen declared a jihad - a holy war - on the supporters of Amin. This was also extended to the Russians who were now in Afghanistan trying to maintain the power of the Amin government. The Russians claimed that they had been invited in by the Amin government and that they were not invading the country. They claimed that their task was to support a legitimate government and that the Mujahideen were no more than terrorists. On December 27th, 1979, Amin was shot by the Russians and he was replaced by Babrak Kamal. His position as head of the Afghan government depended entirely on the fact that he needed Russian military support to keep him in power. Many Afghan soldiers had deserted to the Mujahedeen and the Kamal government needed 85,000 Russian soldiers to keep him in power. The Mujahideen proved to be a formidable opponent. They were equipped with old rifles but had a knowledge of the mountains around Kabal and the weather conditions that would be encountered there. The Russians resorted to using napalm, poison gas and helicopter gun ships against the Mujahedeen - but they experienced exactly the same military scenario the Americans had done in Vietnam. By 1982, the Mujahideen controlled 75% of Afghanistan despite fighting the might of the world's second most powerful military power. Young conscript Russian soldiers were no match against men fuelled by their religious belief. Though the Russian army had a reputation, the war in Afghanistan showed the world just how poor it was outside of military displays. Army boots lasted no more than 10 days before falling to bits in the harsh environment of the Afghanistan mountains. Many Russian soldiers deserted to the Mujahideen. Russian tanks were of little use in the mountain passes. The United Nations had condemned the invasion as early as January 1980 but a Security Council motion calling for the withdrawal of Russian 15

forces had been vetoed......by Russia. America put a ban on the export of grain to Russia, ended the SALT II talks taking place then and boycotted the Olympic Games due to be held in Moscow in 1980. Other than that, America did nothing. Why ? They knew that Russia had got itself into their own Vietnam and it also provided American Intelligence with an opportunity to acquire any new Russian military hardware that could be used in Afghanistan. Mujhadeen fighters were given access to American surfaceto-air missiles - though not through direct sales by America. Mikhail Gorbachev took Russia out of the Afghanistan fiasco when he realised what many Russian leaders had been too scared to admit in public - that Russia could not win the war and the cost of maintaining such a vast force in Afghanistan was crippling Russia's already weak economy. By the end of the 1980's, the Mujahideen was at war with itself in Afghanistan with hard line Taliban fighters taking a stronger grip over the whole nation and imposing very strict Muslim law on the Afghanistan population. The other side of war Zbignev Bzezhinski in an interview to French Le Nouvel Observateur said: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it On July 3, 1979 US President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul...We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war... The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was indeed Vietnam-like in its brutality, killing more than a million Afghans and helping to tear apart a country that in 1979 had relatively little religious fanaticism and was making advances in the status of women. In the upheaval, Afghanistan became a base for terrorists. When Ronald Reagan came to office in 1981, he maintained the Carter emphasis on the Persian Gulf-Arabian Peninsula sector that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But his approach to the Middle East and its problems derived from a set of assumptions that were quite different 16

from the initial assumptions of the Carter administration and were much closer to the assumptions after the Afghanistan invasion. Reagan held that the fundamental threat to peace and stability in the region was not the Arab-Israeli conflict but the Soviet Union and its policies. It was therefore important to restore American capability and credibility which could be facilitated by building up American forces to deal with the region. Unlike Carter, he assumed that the main focus of American interests and concern in the Middle East was the Persian Gulf sector, including Afghanistan which could pose a direct threat to the security of the Gulf. Reagan's policy toward Afghanistan maintained that while the United States would employ no military forces of its own, given, in part, that it was unable to secure the support of its allies, it would nonetheless provide aid to the Afghan rebels to pressure the Soviet Union to withdraw its forces. On March 1982 Reagan gave a speech, in which he proclaimed March 21st to be an Afghanistan Day throughought the United States. In many ways, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the United States subsequent support of the mujahidin resistance was another round of the Afghan Great Game. The Great Game portrays Central Asia, and specifically Afghanistan, as the region where international superpower struggles occur. The mujahidin were a mix of Afghan resistance fighters, Afghan refugees who had crossed into Pakistan at the onset of the Soviet invasion and later been recruited to fight the Soviet infidels, and Islamists and Muslims from other Arab nations who answered the international call to jihad against the Soviets. Contrary to popular myth, most of the mujahidin were not Islamic radicals, but rather a group of loosely allied Afghan tribes. Two main portions of the mujahidin, however, were Islamic fundamentalists. The mujahidin received significant financial and military support from various nations and individuals. The United States supported the mujahidin primarily through the CIA. This was controversial because the mujahidin clearly were not any more accepting of American modernity and culture then they were of the Soviet modernity. But, compared to the risks of the Soviet threat, "the relatively new threat of Islamic fundamentalism" was inconsequential, and "fighting communism was still first and foremost in the minds of U.S. policymakers" (Hartman). This was dictated by the Cold War world geopolitical code defeating communism was part of the daily U.S. foreign policy routine on the global scale. Consequently, "The U.S. ignored the threat of Islamism and used it as a bulwark against communism and revolution" in Afghanistan.

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The Period from 1985 to 1991

East-West tensions eased after the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev. After the deaths of three successive elderly Soviet leaders since 1982, the Soviet Politburo elected Gorbachev Communist Party General Secretary in March 1985, marking the rise of a new generation of leadership. Under Gorbachev, relatively young reform-oriented technocrats, who had begun their careers in the heyday of deStalinization under reformist leader Nikita Khrushchev, rapidly consolidated power, providing new momentum for political and economic liberalization, and the impetus for cultivating warmer relations and trade with the West. On the Western front, President Reagans administration had taken a hard line against the Soviet Union. Under the Reagan Doctrine, the Reagan administration began providing military support to anticommunist armed movements in Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere. The Reagan administration also persuaded the Saudi Arabian oil companies to increase oil production. This led to a three-times drop in the prices of oil, and oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues. Following the USSRs previous large military buildup, President Reagan ordered an enormous peacetime defense buildup of the United States Military; the Soviets did not respond to this by building up their military because the military expenses, in combination with collectivized agriculture in the nation, and inefficient planned manufacturing, proved a heavy burden for the Soviet economy. It was already stagnant and in a poor state prior to the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev who, despite significant attempts at reform, was unable to revitalise the economy. In 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev held their first of four summit meetings, this one in Geneva, Switzerland. After discussing policy, facts, etc., Reagan invited Gorbachev to go with him to a small house near the beach. The two leaders spoke in that house well over their time limit, but came out with the news that they had planned two more (soon three more) summits. The second summit took place the following year, in 1986 on October 11, in Reykjavk, Iceland. The meeting was held to pursue discussions about scaling back their intermediate-range ballistic missile arsenals in Europe. The talks came close to achieving an overall breakthrough on nuclear arms control, but ended in failure due to Reagans proposed Strategic Defense Initiative and Gorbachevs proposed cancellation of it.

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Nonetheless, cooperation continued to increase and, where it failed, Gorbachev reduced some strategic arms unilaterally. Other major Gorbachev policy initiatives, Restructuring (Perestroika) and Openness (Glasnost), had ripple effects throughout the Soviet world, including eventually making it impossible to reassert central control over Warsaw Pact member states without resorting to military force. On June 12, 1987, Reagan challenged Gorbachev to go further with his reforms and democratization by tearing down the Berlin Wall. In a speech at the Brandenburg Gate next to the wall, Reagan stated: While the aging Eastern European leaders kept their states in the grip of normalization, Gorbachevs reformist policies in the Soviet Union exposed how a once revolutionary Communist Party had become moribund at the very center of the system. The growing public disapproval of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the socio-political effects of the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine increased public support for these policies. By the spring of 1989, the USSR had not only experienced lively media debate, but had also held its first multi-candidate elections. For the first time in recent history, the force of liberalization was spreading from West to East.

Reform spreads through Eastern Europe As Gorbachev-inspired waves of reform propagated throughout the Eastern bloc, grassroots organizations, such as Polands Solidarity movement, rapidly gained ground. In 1989, the Communist governments in Poland and Hungary became the first to negotiate the organizing of competitive elections. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany, mass protests unseated entrenched Communist leaders. The Communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania also crumbled, in the latter case as the result of a violent uprising. Attitudes had changed enough that US Secretary of State James Baker suggested that the American government would not be opposed to Soviet intervention in Romania, on behalf of the opposition, to prevent bloodshed. The tidal wave of change culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which symbolized the collapse of Eastern European Communist governments and graphically ended the Iron Curtain divide of Europe. The collapse of the Eastern European governments with Gorbachevs tacit consent inadvertently encouraged several Soviet republics to seek greater independence from Moscows rule. Agitation for independence in 19

the Baltic states led to first Lithuania, and then Estonia and Latvia, declaring their independence. Disaffection in the other republics was met by promises of greater decentralization. More open elections led to the election of candidates opposed to Communist Party rule. In an attempt to halt the rapid changes to the system, a group of Soviet hard-liners represented by Vice-President Gennady Yanayev launched a coup overthrowing Gorbachev in August 1991. Russian President Boris Yeltsin rallied the people and much of the army against the coup and the effort collapsed. Although restored to power, Gorbachevs authority had been irreparably undermined. In September, the Baltic states were granted independence. On December 1, Ukraine withdrew from the USSR. On December 31, 1991 the USSR officially dissolved, breaking up into fifteen separate nations.

The Impact of Cold War

The following are the major effects of cold war: The result is a uni polar world with US as the only super power left to rule the world. It has shifted the balance of power at a global stage to one sided American influence on all states of the globe. US is unaccountable on the global stage and it can do whatever it wants without being questioned e.g. the Iraq war. No country can fully challenge its authority. The creation of European Union has been the second most important impact of the Cold War. The unification of Germany has caused a major shift in the balance of power in Europe. European Union has been the result of Franco-German alliance that has caused the emergence of a single currency called Euro and the tariff free region called European Union. Today, EU is one of the largest exporters of the globe and Euro is the second most important currency after Dollar, it is perceived that in future, it may also act as one of the central bank reserve currencies apart from Dollar. The transformation of Russia into a free market economy and the end of the three hundred year old Russian Empire that has been a major player at global level. Russia emerged as an empire in 18th Century when it occupied most of the Central Asian States, the Caucuses and the Baltic states. It became the beacon of the communism in 20th century but had no sound macro-economic structure. It developed an artificial economy that had centralized power and when its economy went bankrupt, the Soviet Union imploded, resulting in 15 more new countries.

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The collapse of Communism world wide has resulted in the emergence of more and more liberal democracies especially in the former Warsaw Pact Countries. Liberal Democracies are also emerging in South America, another region where communism was widespread. Today, communist countries which are dwindling in number, like Vietnam, are trying to emulate the Chinese Model and adopt a mixed economy. Today, capitalism is at its peak and the world trade has been the maximum in this period. More and more countries are coming closer in trade and major capital has been invested from the western markets to Asian and African markets. So third world is fastly growing under the flag of capitalism and communism has become the icon of the past and a failed model for a state and society to function. NATO did lose its importance in the 1990s because there was no Soviet threat and the Russia left was virtually bankrupt. But after the inclusion of eastern European countries into EU, the NATO has expanded east wards for the first time in its history. Today, all Baltic States and all eastern European countries except Hungary are part of it. This has alarmed the Russians but they are helpless as Europe is the major consumer of Russian gas and oil. The Central Asian Countries became independent for the first time since 1790s and now their precious oil, gas and mineral resources are at the radar of the US and China, as a major future energy hub for these economies. Thus, in future, it is anticipated that the influence of both US and China will increase and Russia will be less influential in this region. This region may become the future supplier of oil, gas and minerals to all major economies.

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