Why did the Soviet Union fail to defeat the Mujahedin?

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - Region: Russia, grade: 1,7, University of Wales, Aberystwyth (Department of International Politics), language: English, abstract: Throughout the 1980s the war in Afghanistan, which started as a civil war, developed into a “bloody Cold War battlefield” (Jalali, 2001: 85) with Soviet troops fighting alongside Afghan government troops against resista...