Not surprisingly, these tactics created an enormous refugee problem: one-third of the pre-war population fled to Iran or Pakistan while two million were displaced internally. In the 1980s, half the refugees in the world were Afghans.
After the better part of a decade and having killed between 850,000 and 1.5 million civilians, the old men in the Kremlin concluded their great geopolitical manoeuvre wasn't such a masterstroke after all. Afghanistan was a quagmire, a bear trap, the Soviet Union's Vietnam.
The war had made the USSR an object of loathing and contempt; it had radicalised a generation of Muslims resulting in thousands of battle-hardened militants fanning out across the globe taking their jihad to the Soviet vassal state of Chechnya, among other places; it was fostering domestic resentment and bleeding the Soviet Union dry.
So the Russian bear slunk out of Afghanistan, leaving it to the tender mercies of the Taliban.
Many of the foreign policy gurus who'd scorned Carter for having "lost" Afghanistan now agreed that the invasion was a colossal strategic blunder and a significant cause of the decline and fall of the Soviet empire.
Western Putin worship is a curious phenomenon.
If a Western leader strutted around with his shirt off striking action-man poses, he would be - rightly - derided and suspected of having a Mussolini complex.
But when the Russian leader, a former secret policeman turned oligarch, does it, it's seen as reinforcing an image of strength and decisiveness. He's portrayed as a "strong man", a mealy-mouthed euphemism for an authoritarian.
Even as Putin turns the state-run media into a propaganda machine that despots the world over must envy, and bullies independent media into submission - journalism is a very high-risk occupation in contemporary Russia - pundits in the West continue to trot out the weasel words of power worship: ruthless, calculating, comfortable with the exercise of power, a master of realpolitik restoring Russia's standing in the world.
(These terms aren't used critically: they are expressions of sneaking admiration.)
What is Putin's contribution to the world?
By fabulously enriching several cronies he's been a boon to the super-yacht industry. He fomented a civil war in Ukraine which is turning the country into a wasteland.
He pretty much strangled Russian democracy at birth, gave a safe haven to whistle-blower/traitor Edward Snowden, and intervened in Syria to prop up a genocidal tyrant who would rather destroy his country than give up power.
What statesman wouldn't want that lot on his CV? Let Putin "have" Syria.
Eventually it will dawn on him that he's paid a heavy price for the pleasure of thumbing his nose at the world's only superpower and embellishing his personality cult.
And pity the people of Russia: after enduring seven dark decades of totalitarianism, they have been dragged back into a shadow land of gangsterism and repression.
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