On March 20, 2023, the World Happiness Report (WHR) released its twelfth annual ranking of nations based on their level of happiness, as calculated according to the WHR's criteria, which includes such factors as income, freedom, health, social services, and lack of corruption. Most news articles focused on the top ten happiest countries, with Finland at the top for the sixth year running. A few reports from places like the UK and the USA lamented their failure to make the top ten but consoled themselves that they were at least in the top twenty. Conspicuously absent from the list were Bhutan, wherein the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) is constitutionally recognized, and Cuba. Oddly, the State of Palestine is listed, at 99th place, in contrast to Israel, at fourth place. Note that an independent judiciary and equality before the law (the latter of which is one of the pillars of the Bhutanese GNH) are not among the WHR's criteria. Most interesting to this observer, however, is that the nation at the very bottom of the list, in 137th place, is Afghanistan.

Obviously, two decades of "nation building" and "enduring freedom" imposed on Afghanistan by the U.S. and its allies did not have much effect toward increasing the happiness of the Afghan people. Indeed, Afghanistan has been at the bottom of the happiness list for the last four years. In 2019, it was third from the bottom, just above South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

The chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces on August 30, 2021 hasn't seemed to have made much of an impact on Afghan happiness. It's difficult to fall below last place, but the total happiness score for Afghanistan has been steadily falling for years. The withdrawal debacle does point to a revealing contrast between the American project in Afghanistan, between 2001 and 20021 and that of the Soviet Union between 1979 and 1989. According to Western media, one is expected to believe that the Russians "invaded" Afghanistan and were "defeated" by the Afghan resistance, while the United States and its NATO allies intervened in Afghanistan with UN approval and left because both Republicans and Democrats alike thought that it was time for the Afghan government they installed to stand on its own two feet. The actual facts of the matter are quite different.

On April 27, 1978, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), under the leadership of Nur Mohammad Taraki, seized power in Afghanistan, overthrowing the government of Mohammad Daoud , who had led a coup five years earlier, which overthrew the Afghan monarchy. There is not the slightest evidence that the PDPA's Great Saur Revolution, as it was called for the name of the month in which it occurred, was orchestrated by the KGB as some Western sources claimed. The PDPA renamed the nation the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) and began a program of socialist economic and social reforms to enhance the rights of farmers, (land reform and the abolishment of debt-bondage) and of women (forbidding forced marriages and child brides). Education of all classes and both sexes was vigorously promoted.

On the 5th of December 1978, a Treaty of Friendship between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was signed, and Soviet advisors began assisting the Afghan government. On March 20, 1979 PDPA General Secretary Taraki went to Moscow and formally requested the assistance of Soviet troops in the defense the DRA against Islamist insurgents who were supported by Pakistan and the United States. The Soviets were reluctant to offer full scale military support at that time; Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin suggested that Soviet troops in Afghanistan would only make matters worse, and President Leonid Brezhnev warned that Soviet military intervention would only play into the hands of the enemies of the USSR and the DRA. That same month, in Herat, an Afghan infantry division, in support of radial Islamist Ismail Khan, mutinied and murdered about a hundred Soviet advisors and their families. As the Islamist insurgency intensified and CIA and Pakistani intelligence involvement in Afghan politics expanded throughout the year, the Soviet Union, on December 27, 1979 finally sent military forces into Afghanistan to support their Socialist allies.

During the ten years that Soviet forces fought to support the Afghan PDPA government, Pakistan, and especially the US sent massive amounts of financial, material, and intelligence support to the radical Islamist insurgence. Most notably, the US sent shoulder-launched stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Jihadis to counter Soviet air power and helicopter gun ships. It was, incidentally, among those anti-communist Jihadi groups fighting the Afghan socialist government and their Soviet allies that Al Kaida was born. The United States of America, ironically, played a major part in the creation of Al Kaida, the very group behind the terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2021, which attacks led directly to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

After ten years in Afghanistan, the Soviet military withdrew. The decision to withdraw was made by the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev who, having initiated the reform project Peristroika, concluded that the Soviet Union could no longer afford the financial and political cost of maintaining Soviet troops in Afghanistan, despite the ideological commitment to the DRA. The withdrawal was conducted in good order. There were no people dangling from fleeing helicopters, as were seen in the US withdrawal from Viet Nam. Most tellingly, the Afghan socialist government of the PDPA under Mohammad Najibullah continued in power for three years, until April 1992, four months after the dissolution of the USSR.

The American involvement in Afghanistan was very different. In the first place, in contrast to the Soviet action, it was illegal under international law, although no main stream western media would admit that, of course. There was no United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing military action in Afghanistan. Perhaps some Western commentators really believed that the US led invasion of Afghanistan was legal. One American academic and blogger who purports to be an expert on the Middle East condemned the US invasion of Iraq as illegal, contrasting it with the invasion of Afghanistan, which he claimed was legal. I sent him an email asking why he thought the invasion of Afghanistan was legal. He replied that it had UN sanction. I asked him precisely which UN resolution he thought authorized the war. He replied, "The UN resolutions on Afghanistan are easily Googled." I doubt that he had ever searched for those resolutions. If he had, he would have been disappointed. The two UNSC resolutions that Western leaders claimed authorized the invasion, resolution 1368 and resolution 1373, make no mention of Afghanistan. They are vague condemnations of terrorism and statements of resolve to prevent terrorism. They contain no authorization for the use of military force in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the UN charter was clearly violated by the US refusal to negotiate with the Taliban regarding the extradition of Osama bin Laden. When US president Bush demanded that bin Laden be handed over to the US, the Taliban offered to send him to a neutral third country. Bush's response was, "No negotiations." This is clearly in violation of the United Nations Charter Article 33:

A third important difference is that there was no massive material support for the Taliban from any major foreign powers. There may have been some moral support from parts of the Islamic world, but there were no arms shipments of high tech weaponry as there were during the Soviet operations.

A fourth obvious difference is the length of the two wars. America's NATO forces occupied Afghanistan for twenty years, twice as long as Soviets stayed supporting the DRA.

The final, and (after the legality issue) greatest, difference is the ultimate outcome of each war. The Soviets were clearly not defeated in Afghanistan. The regime they supported continued in power for years after they left. In fact it did not fall until after the Soviet Union itself was dissolved. In contrast, the government the Americans installed and propped up for two decades fell fifteen days before the Americans concluded their withdrawal.

As previously noted, the withdrawal of NATO forces has not appeared to have made the Afghan people any happier, but I suspect that, if the WHP report had been in existence during the time of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, it would have found the Afghans at least somewhat happier than they are now.