Sovyetler Birliği'nin Afganistan'a müdahalesindeki ve geri çekilmesindeki karar alma süreçlerinin analizi: Polihöristik bir yaklaşım

The military intervention of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in Afghanistan in 1979 is one of the breaking points of the Cold War. The détente period of the Cold War, which lasted through the 1970s, came to an end as a result of this intervention by the Soviet Union. Thus, the escalation process of the Cold War began and the political tension between the two blocs in the international system increased again. In 1985, after Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader, a process of liberalization and reform began in the Soviet Union. As a result of Gorbachev's "New Political Thinking", in particular the policies known as "Perestroika" and "Glasnost", attempts to reduce tensions between the United States of America (USA) and the USSR began. In this context, the Soviet Union also put withdrawal from Afghanistan on its agenda and following the Geneva Accords signed in 1988, Soviet troops started to withdraw from Afghanistan. After the complete withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, the USSR disintegrated in a short period of time, and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which was ruled by a socialist regime, collapsed in the following period and the Islamic State of Afghanistan was established. As a result, the Cold War ended, and the bipolar international system was transformed into a unipolar system. The intervention in Afghanistan, which has a significant part in the history of the Cold War, has been widely discussed in the literature and evaluated in different dimensions. In this study, it is aimed to evaluate the decision-making processes in the Soviet Union's intervention and withdrawal from Afghanistan. Foreign policy analysis, and more specifically the study of foreign policy decision-making, is one of the newest sub-disciplines of International Relations. The basis of these studies was laid in the USA after the Second World War. The reasons such as the increase in relations and rivalries between states after the beginning of the Cold War and the increase in the number of states represented in the United Nations with the decolonization process have increased the interest in studies on foreign policy analysis and decision-making studies. In decision-making approaches that focus on the foreign policy-making processes rather than the outcomes of foreign policies by focusing on sub-state units, it is emphasized that foreign policymaking is not made by the state apparatus as a whole. Accordingly, by focusing on the actors involved in the decision- making process, an actor-specific perspective is adopted instead of an actor-general approach. In the area of foreign policy decision-making studies, there have been various approaches throughout the construction and development of this discipline. These approaches are mainly divided into two as decision-making models which are the models based on rational choice theory and the decision-making models based on the cognitive choice school. However, since the nineties, some multidisciplinary theories combining these two schools have started to emerge. One of them is the poliheuristic decision-making model theorized by Alex Mintz. In our study, this model is used as the theoretical framework. According to the hypotheses presented by this model, foreign policy decision-making is a two-stage and complex process that is both surrounded by cognitive constraints and based on a specific rationality. Decision- makers narrow down their foreign policy alternatives through cognitive shortcuts and make their final choices based on a cost-benefit analysis. In this context, the evaluation of the decision-making process is implemented through a method referred to as dimension-based analysis, and a decision matrix is created to calculate the optimum decision by evaluating each of the foreign policy alternatives within the framework of political, diplomatic, economic, military, etc. dimensions. According to the poliheuristic decision-making approach, domestic politics developments have a dominant influence on foreign policy decisions. In our study, the poliheuristic theoretical framework is used with the assumption that the Soviet Union's domestic dynamics have a dominant influence on its foreign policy decisions due to its single-party communist regime. The first part of our study begins with an explanation of the theoretical perspective we use. After presenting a literature review on the development of decision-making studies, the hypotheses of the poliheuristic decision-making model and the method of its application in case studies are explained. Thus, it is discussed how this model can be used to evaluate decision-making processes in Soviet foreign policy. Following the theoretical evaluations, a historical overview of the decision-making processes in Soviet foreign policy was offered. The historical background of the Soviet decision-making structure was introduced by evaluating the decision-making mechanisms and decision units from the Lenin period to the Brezhnev period. Then, with the help of Margaret Hermann's "decision units approach", Soviet decision-making units were examined. Thus, in the following sections of our study, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) is considered as the decision-making unit. Then, the decision-making units and mechanisms from the intervention in Afghanistan to its termination were evaluated. In this way, the dynamics of decision-making processes under the leadership of the Soviet leaders of these years, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev, were conveyed. In the second part of our study, the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan was evaluated. First of all, it was discussed why Afghanistan was important for the Soviet Union. In this context, the structural problems of Afghanistan until the transition to socialist regime in 1978 and the USSR-Afghanistan relations were evaluated. Then, the problems that came to the agenda with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan which was founded with the Saur Revolution, the conflict between the two main factions within the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), the "Khalq" and "Parcham" parties and the effects of this conflict, the emergence of the armed mujahideen as a security threat, and the process of the PDPA regime's invitation to the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan leading to the Soviet intervention are discussed. For the evaluation of these processes, the documents related to the CPSU archives which are available in the digital archive of the think tank "Wilson Center" were used. After presenting the evaluations on Afghanistan and the process leading to the intervention, foreign policy alternatives were considered by applying the poliheuristic model. In this part of our study, the decision-making analysis is based on two different foreign policy alternatives: "To send a certain number of troops to Afghanistan to eliminate Hafizullah Amin to ensure security in the region" or "to conduct a small-scale operation, sending a limited number of special units to only eliminate Amin, and then return". Our analysis is based on political, diplomatic, and military dimensions. At the end of the analysis, the first option was found to be the number one option in terms of both maximum and average utility. Indeed, the implemented decision was to send troops. The third and final part of our study deals with the decision-making processes during the USSR's withdrawal from Afghanistan. For this purpose, first of all, the reasons why the USSR found itself in a war that lasted more than nine years despite the fact that the military intervention was planned as a short-term operation were discussed. In this context, the war period is analyzed by dividing it into four different phases. The period from December 1979 to February 1980 was still only a military operation, while the period from February 1980 to April 1985 was the phase when the intervention turned into a war and the conflicts were at their peak. In this second phase of the war, Andropov, the Soviet leader after Brezhnev, had various peace initiatives and plans to end the war, but under his successor Chernenko, the war escalated again, and peace plans were suspended. The development that periodically brought the war into the third phase was the replacement of Chernenko by Gorbachev as the new leader of the USSR. As soon as Gorbachev, a reformist figure, took office, he began plans to withdraw from Afghanistan. In order to evaluate the dynamics of the withdrawal process more analytically, our study focuses on Gorbachev's New Political Thinking after reviewing the first two phases of the war. It was aimed to restructure the Soviet Union politically, economically, militarily, and socially with this new reformist political approach, which was mainly composed of Perestroika and Glasnost policies, and more liberal policies were adopted. Consequently, there was a tendency toward rapprochement with the Western bloc in foreign policy. In order to realize this goal, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan was first put on the agenda. In this context, the period from April 1985 to 1987 is considered as the third phase of the war. In this process, while the Soviet leadership was working on scenarios for withdrawal from Afghanistan, Babrak Karmal was removed from the leadership of Afghanistan and replaced by Mohammad Najibullah, and a policy of "national reconciliation" began to be enforced. Thus, the phase of the end of the war began in 1987 and all Soviet troops left Afghanistan in February 1989. The USSR's withdrawal from Afghanistan was the result of the Geneva Accords signed between Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1988, with the US and the USSR as guarantors. Following the evaluation of the process from intervention to withdrawal, a poliheuristic study of the decision to withdraw was conducted. In this study, three different decision alternatives were considered: "To withdraw the troops, guaranteeing the legitimate existence of the PDPA regime via an international agreement", "unconditional withdrawal of troops without any negotiations" or "to continue the war by escalating and withdrawing troops after significant military success has been achieved". Unlike the previous case study, the analysis in this section is based on four criteria: political, economic, diplomatic, and military dimensions. As a result of the evaluation, the first alternative was found to provide the highest benefit in terms of each dimension and this alternative was implemented as a foreign policy decision. Finally, a case comparison was made in our study. The foreign policy decisions implemented in both cases did not achieve the intended objectives. The military intervention, which was planned as a short-term intervention, turned into a long war; as a result of the withdrawal decision, which was planned for the survival of the Soviet Union and the neutralization of Afghanistan, both the Soviet Union disintegrated and the socialist regime in Afghanistan collapsed, and an Islamic state was established in Afghanistan. In terms of the decision-making mechanism, actors who have a security perspective influenced the leader during the intervention phase and ensured that this decision was taken. On the contrary, during the withdrawal phase, the leader with a liberal policy approach influenced other actors and led to the decision to withdraw. As a result of our study, it has been observed that the poliheuristic decision- making approach offers an effective theoretical framework for analyzing decision- making processes in foreign policy as a contemporary perspective. Since this model provides a multidimensional analysis framework, it enables specific assessment of the different dynamics that shape the perspectives of decision-making units in decision- making processes. Another conclusion we have achieved is about the capacity of the model we used in our study to explain the cases we analyzed. This model, which has been generally applied to decision-making processes in liberal democratic regimes in the literature, has been an effective tool for explaining the decision-making processes in the foreign policy of the USSR, which was ruled by an authoritarian one-party regime. This is because, according to the assumption of the poliheuristic model, the most dominant decision criterion in foreign policy decision-making processes is the political dimension. Thirdly, this war in Afghanistan was seen to have had effects that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Islamization of Afghanistan. The Soviet foreign policy, which was pushed into a squeeze in the international arena after the intervention, entered a relaxation after Gorbachev, but as a result of the change in the institutional structure of the USSR and the balance between the party and the state, the Soviet Union finally disintegrated. Among the reasons that led to the disruption of these balances was the exclusion of the Soviet army from the decision-making mechanisms due to its performance in the war in Afghanistan. Socialist Afghanistan, which had become dependent on the Soviet Union, was plunged into a civil war after the Soviet withdrawal and after the collapse of the USSR, the PDPA regime could no longer resist the fundamentalists and collapsed. Key Words : Afghanistan, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, foreign policy decision-making, poliheuristic model.