ABSTRACT
The Soviet Central Asian penetration of Afghanistan began sometime before Soviet troops crossed the border. Beginning in 1978, Soviet leaders apparently modified their reluctance to use Soviet Muslims as part of a political-military strategy. There are two basic hypotheses regarding the rationale for the policies that resulted in the dramatic overrepresentation of Muslim soldiers in the initial invasion force. According to the first hypothesis, Soviet leaders may have believed that Muslim ethnics, who in many cases were the ethnic kin of the adversary on the other side of the border, would be more easily accepted by the Afghans and would therefore undermine their will to resist. The second one argues that these staffing policies resulted from the imperative to flesh out under-strength units in the immediate vicinity of the border with local reservists, who happened to be mostly Central Asian.
