The first and perhaps most critical differences between the U.S. and USSR in Afghanistan are over goals and objectives. The United States intervened in Afghanistan in 2001 on the side of the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan only after the Emirate had been used as a base for the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. The American goal, endorsed by the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was self-defense against a government that had allowed its territory to be used for an act of war against another state. No American has any has any desire to control or dominate Afghanistan; we just want to be sure we will not be attacked again from its soil.
The Soviet invasion in 1979 was a very different matter. The Soviet leadership wanted an Afghanistan that would be like other Soviet satellite states, under virtual Soviet imperial rule with only the façade of independence. The Soviet invasion and the attempt to impose communism on a rural and largely illiterate Islamic country with a history of xenophobia produced the predictable result, a mass national uprising. With the exception of small pockets of the urban middle class, virtually the entire country was violently opposed to the new occupation and its atheist ideology.
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