Whether in 1979, 2001, or 2021, Afghanistan has frequently been seen as a crisis area in U.S. foreign policy. A complex and nuanced region, dialogue about policies there is often focused through the lens of the Cold War and the aftermath of the Soviet invasion.

In a new book, Robert Rakove, a historian and lecturer of U.S. foreign relations for the International Relations Program and an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperationat Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, offers a deeply researched historical account of U.S. relations with Afghanistan from their outset in 1921, up to the Soviet invasion in 1979. While prior accounts tend to treat the U.S. role in Afghanistan before 1979 as relatively marginal, Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Union demonstrates the impact these earlier decades of U.S. involvement had on Afghanistan, and how choices made in Washington, Moscow, and Kabul ultimately destabilized the region.

Here, Rakove discusses how decades of U.S. and Soviet engagement in Afghanistan gradually morphed into a Cold War battleground, and the lasting consequences this continues to have on policies toward the country today.

What drew you to write about this time period, and why has U.S. engagement in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion generally been given less scholarly attention?
My first bookexamined U.S. policy toward nonaligned states during the Kennedy and Johnson years. I didn’t do much work with Afghanistan in the course of my research for that project, but it occurred to me while I was working on it that studying Cold War nonalignment by looking at one state over the long term rather than multiple states during a span of several years could be a very interesting lens. This approach would give me the opportunity to examine peaceful phases of Cold War competition and the evolution of U.S. policy across several decades, not just during a specific era or crisis.