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mods: Days of opportunity the United States and Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion United States and Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion Rakove, Robert B. 1977- creator author. text bibliography History. nyu 2023 monographic eng print x, 471 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm "Long before the calamities of our own age, the United States involved itself deeply in Afghanistan. Harnessing extensive research in U.S. and foreign archives, the historian Rob Rakove traces the remarkable, ultimately tragic story of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan up to the 1979 Soviet invasion. Committed to the preservation of Afghan independence, the United States played an unwitting, destabilizing role in the country, contributing to Afghanistan's emergence as a Cold War battlefield. Most histories of Afghanistan in the Cold War focus on the 1979 Soviet invasion and the country's emergence as a principal battleground in the 1980s. Even as post-Cold War scholarship has substantially corrected prior notions of what motivated Moscow and offered invaluable studies of U.S.-supported development programs in Afghanistan, an overarching treatment of Washington's efforts in Afghanistan remains to be published and the myth of inattention remains intact. The distinction is this: if the United States largely absented itself from pre-cataclysm Afghanistan, it committed at most a sin of omission. If it funded a few token, misconceived aid programs, while Moscow pursued a coherent, aggressive design, that verdict still holds. If, however, the U.S. role has been understated, and Soviet malevolence has been exaggerated, Washington bears considerable responsibility for the disasters that befell Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s. Days of Opportunity chronicles the vibrant years of peaceful Afghan-American relations, beginning in the wake of the Great War, and continuing until the Soviet invasion. It depicts the U.S. relationship with a different Afghanistan: a country largely at peace, which had evaded e…