In hindsight it may look silly, now that we know how near collapse the Soviet economy was and how bad training and morale were in their army, but at the time our intel seemed to think they were formidable.nah, not silly. The WWII-era Soviet public put up with terrible privation, well, I guess that goes for the Soviet-era public in general; and yet they mounted the largest ground assault in the history of the world in response to Operation Barbarossa. The threat was real. No one had a gun to their head when they set up a proxy puppet state in Afghanistan then invaded under the terms of the so-called mutual defense pact when the Muzzies went hog-wild to oppose the puppets. The media was state controlled, but no one could control the word of mouth when the body bags started to arrive, and everyone seemed to know someone who had lost a son, brother, or father.
IMHO insufficient credit has been given to Afghanistan in the demise of the Soviet Union. I think the devastating impact on both the economy and the Red Army influenced the decisions not to respond with force in Poland and Lithuania when they began to break away. I don’t buy Gorby’s line that he didn’t do it because he was just a closet liberal social democrat all along.