Afghanistan has posed one of the major world crises of the 1980s: since the advent to power in April 1978 of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (POPA), that country has been marked by intense internal conflicts, and by a growing involvement of external powers. Most of the western coverage of the war has presented it in straight- forward terms as a conflict between one nation, the Afghan people, and a foreign invader, the USSR, and has attributed the crisis to the conflict between these two. The solution to the problem would therefore appear to lie in the withdrawal by the USSR of its forces from Afghanistan, to be followed by democratic determination by the Afghan people of the kind of government and international alignment they would prefer.