Memes

The "attitudes of the nations around Russia" is not a thing. What you are referring to is the attitude of the liberal and reactionary regimes and their brainwashing propaganda they subjected their own people to in which Russia and communism are conflated and thus Russophobia is stoked and encouraged by the ruling classes and their superstructure in order to suppress communist sympathies.

As for Afghanistan, the USSR was literally there supporting a (somewhat) progressive, secular leftist(-ish) government against CIA armed terrorists. The situation in Afghanistan prior to the US invasion, much like in Iraq, was not great because of decades of US meddling and crushing sanctions following the victory of precisely those violent extremist elements that the Americans had armed, funded, trained and ideologically fostered (via Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) against the Soviet aligned government.