ABSTRACT
Arrogance, vanity, ignorance and prejudice all played their parts in bringing Soviet troops into Afghanistan. A coup that foisted an urban leftist regime onto a country torn between the centripetal instincts of government and the fiercely centrifugal interests of the tribes should hardly have counted for much in global affairs, especially given the isolation and poverty of Afghanistan. Yet such was the inexorable logic - the term is used at its loosest - of the Cold War and superpower rivalry, that once the USSR had grudgingly accepted it as nash-'ours' - then it could not be abandoned. This 'tar baby' principle illustrates graphically how little effective autonomy the great nations really had in this period, webbed by invisible but near-irresistible ties of expectation, insecurity, prestige and 'Cold War etiquette'.
