The Soviets expected to prop up the Afghan Communists quickly and then withdraw. Instead, just as the U.S. had gotten mired in Vietnam in the 1960s, the Soviets found themselves stuck in Afghanistan. Like the Vietcong in Vietnam, determined Afghan rebel forces outmaneuvered and overpowered a military superpower. Soviet attacks secured the cities. They failed to dislodge the rebels, called mujahideen, from their mountain stronghold, however. Supplied with American weapons, the rebels fought on.
The U.S. had armed the rebels because they considered the Soviet invasion a threat to the rich Middle Eastern oil supplies. U.S. President Jimmy Carter sternly warned the Soviets that any attempt to gain control of the Persian Gulf would be repelled by any means necessary, including military force. No threat developed, though. Therefore, the U.S. limited its response to an embargo of grain shipments to the Soviet Union. It also boycotted the 1980 summer Olympic games in Moscow.
In the 1980s, a new Soviet regime acknowledged the wae's devastating the costs of both Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. After a ten-year occupation---as long as U.S. involvement in Vietnam---President Mikhail Gorbachev ordered his forces to withdraw. The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in February 1989. By then, internal unrest and economic problems were tearing the Soviet Union itself apart.