The last Soviet combat unit left Afghanistan in February 1989. This ended an active Soviet military commitment to the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) (renamed the Watan Fatherland – party after the withdrawal) regime against the national rising that followed the Party's putsch in April 1978. The cost was over 13,000 Soviets killed in action and over a million Afghans dead. The war had started at the height of Brezhnev-era confidence in the power and efficacy of the Soviet military, and of the irreversibly favorable shift in the global correlation of forces. It ended with Gorbachev-era perestroika, billed as “the last hope of Socialism.” The Soviet military had failed to secure victory against the people of one of the world's poorest nations. The result has an impact far beyond Afghanistan's mountains and deserts.

There are many lessons behind this shift from a bullying form of Soviet confidence to a more restrained blend of introspection. The Soviets were unable to reproduce the results in Afghanistan of past political consolidation through military superiority such as they had enjoyed in Central Asia, Mongolia, and Eastern Europe. Soviet failure resulted from a lack of cumulative military successes, from the flaws in their PDPA surrogates, and from the tenacious fighting of the Afghan nation with strong international support. Failure also came from the difficulty of adapting a Soviet force configured for general war to one which might excel in counter-insurgency. There were, however, some successful adaptations, notably the Soviet special operations forces.

While the Soviets never sought a purely military solution in Afghanistan once the scope of resistance became apparent, their political tools were even more limited than their military methods.