Where
the Wild Things Are: The Soviet-Afghani War (1979–1989)
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11 September 2009
By C.J. Maloney
We promised the world we'd tame it,
What were we hoping for? -- Bloc Party
In 1220 A.D. Genghis Khan paid the Afghani city of
Bokhara a visit. After sending his army in to
slaughter at will (he was always doing things like
that) he forced the surviving residents to stand
disarmed outside the city walls. Letting his troops
rape and murder a few more in the open – to help
everybody refocus – he accused the terrified remainder
of great sins, and he was certain of their guilt. "If
you had not committed great sins, God would not have
sent a punishment like me upon you," he thought out
loud.
In December 1979 God punished Afghanistan again, for
reasons nobody knows or understands (as is His
pleasure) in the form of 85,000 invading Soviet
troops. Why they were ordered into Afghanistan is
anybody's guess, history gives only hints concerning
motives.
Twenty years ago this month the Soviet Army, in its
last and most rational operation of the entire
Soviet-Afghani War, simply packed up and left, leaving
behind 15,000 of their dead, many more wounded, and a
bundle of warlords armed to the teeth and honed by
years of relentless war, ready to grind into dust what
was left of Afghanistan.
The Accidental Tourist
Foolish men called Afghanistan "a school of courage"
and were wise enough not to send their sons there.
~ Artyom Borovik
Since ideas precede action, it's always important to
ask why but in this case, like in most wars, we'll
never know. Why Russia invaded Afghanistan is an
impossible question to answer. First off, it would be
more accurate to ask why Leonid Brezhnev (the Russian
Communist party boss) invaded Afghanistan, because
like in all dictatorships the guy at the top is the
sole decider about war. But he's dead so he's not
telling.
In addition, everyone who was in the room with him
when the decision was made is dead, too. And rounding
it out is the fact that they were all politicians, so
even if they were still alive they wouldn't tell the
truth anyway.
Historians throw about a smattering of reasons, the
more plausible being that the Russian elite feared
America's politicians – having recently lost one of
their kept dictators, the Shah of Iran, to popular
revolt – would be looking about elsewhere in the
region for a place to stick their weapons and soldiers
into, and the thought of American missile silos in
Afghanistan' s Hindu Kush mountains was enough to make
a Politburo member lose sleep.
Also, in April 1978, what would turn out to be an
utter tragedy for the Russian people was at first
greeted by them as a blessing. The Afghan Army officer
corps, birthed and trained in Soviet military
academies, staged a coup and immediately turned over
power to the Afghan communist party, the PDPA. Russian
military and economic aid, strong since the days of
Lenin, increased dramatically.
Soon enough things began to get dicey, especially
after the Afghani communists, in one of history's more
dim-bulb moments, issued a decree that Afghani women
would now be treated as equal to men before the law.
Afghanistan exploded into rebellion, entire Afghani
military units going over to the tribal leaders.
The PDPA was itself divided into two warring sects
(the Khalq and the Parcham) that went after each other
with the same bloodthirsty fanaticism they displayed
towards the Afghani people. Led by party boss Nur
Mohammed Taraki, a vicious thug who was murdered and
succeeded by Columbia University alum Hafizullah Amin
(who enjoyed burying people alive with bulldozers),
the PDPA was constantly begging Moscow for direct
Soviet intervention to help put down all the
uprisings, but they found the Russian Politburo
extremely reluctant to provide troops.
This intelligent inaction on the part of the Soviet
political elite began to crumble in March 1979, when
the entire 17th Afghani Army division – sent to put
down a rebellion in the western city of He-rat –
instead mutinied. Hunting down their Soviet advisors
and their families, they paraded the severed body
parts of their Soviet "allies" through the streets on
pikes. The Soviet Air Force, accompanied by a rising
flood of weapons, supplies, and more advisors, began
to fly combat missions in support of the Afghan
communists. Still things got worse, and just before
Christmas 1979 the final escalation came.
Acting against the advice of both the Party's high
priests (who pronounced the Afghanis – overwhelmingly
illiterate, agrarian, and religiously devout – to be
utterly incapable of a Communist lifestyle) as well as
Soviet military leaders (who had read history books)
Brezhnev, proclaiming it an "internationalist duty" to
help out a fellow communist regime, started the war
"with a mere wave of (his) elderly hand." (Borovik,
p.15)
In a well-orchestrated and fast moving invasion that
would have done Marshal Zhukov proud, the Soviet Army
stormed into Afghanistan in a classic blitzkrieg
operation, occupying all the major population centers
and airfields which encircled the central Hindu Kush
mountains.
As always throughout history, the invader found
Afghanistan easy to physically occupy. The initial
battle was a resounding Soviet military victory.
Doubtless, back among the dimmer set of Russia's
people vodka toasts were drank to the victory, mission
accomplished banners unfurled. Meanwhile back at
ground zero, "very quickly the jihad was declared."
(Tanner, p.238)
For the invading (and now occupying) Soviet 40th Army,
everything began to go wrong almost immediately.
The Downward Spiral
"Did you think you could help, captain?" said Marta.
"Before I came here – yes, I did. Now I know I'm not
what's needed, and I don't know what is."
~ The Commandant's Desk by Kurt Vonnegut
It is highly likely that the Russian military command
desperately wanted this to be a fast, clean affair, in
and out. Russian troops were barracked away from
population centers, to avoid antagonizing the locals.
Immediately conferences and talks were begun under
Russian supervision, hoping to get the various warring
Afghani cliques to agree to a "national
reconciliation" (i.e. be Communist) so that the Soviet
Army could declare everything well and go home. Ten
years later, as the 1989 Soviet withdrawal was
completed, the negotiations were still ongoing.
Fooling themselves that their soldiers would be
greeted by flower bearing, smiling natives, the
Politburo was shocked that within weeks convoys were
being ambushed, the urban population displayed quiet
hostility at best, and the Soviet Army was "engaging
the Afghan Army - the one they were supposedly
propping up – in open combat." (Tanner, p.241)
Massive desertions melted the Afghani Army to a shell
of its pre-invasion size, entire units going over en
masse to the jihad. The remaining troops "dullards or
those still waiting for their chance to desert"
(Tanner, p.244) were all that was left. The people who
inhabit that part of the world were simply doing what
they always have done when invaded - heading to
mountain redoubts unseen and unknown to any but them,
they hunkered down for a long guerrilla war.
Afghanistan holds two problems; both insurmountable
for any would be conqueror. First, it is not a
"country" in the manner that a Western mind
understands the term, it is more wishful thinking to
describe thousands of little village states and tribal
warlords, all of which switch allegiance with endless
rapidity, as a country. This tribal, village based
structure is decentralized to a national extinction;
there is no one place – or collection of places –
whose occupation will make the tribes surrender.
Second, the main ethnic groups in the region, from the
dominant Pashtuns in the south, the Hazaras deep in
the Hindu Kush, and the Turkic to the north, are all
extremely xenophobic and honed to a martial pitch by
endless war against each other, fought out amidst some
of the world's most difficult terrain. They only stop
fighting each other, sort of, for one reason – to take
on any outside invader who violates their territory,
and the Russians foolishly had done just that.
The fighting intensified quickly and within six months
disaster struck the Soviet Army – they lost an entire
battalion from the 201st Motorized Rifle, wiped out by
a mujahideen ambush on the road between Gardez and
Ghost.
Both sides adjusted as they learned each other, the
Afghani mujahideen (literally "soldiers of God")
dropping large combat formations, too easily crushed
by Soviet combined arms, instead reverting to the
national pastime at which they excelled – small unit
guerrilla tactics relying on the ambush and raid.
The Soviets, with ample experience in guerrilla
warfare, quickly reorganized the 40th Army from a
ground focused, heavily mechanized force to one backed
by massive airpower – especially transport and attack
helicopter, the latter consisting mostly of the war's
most feared weapon, the Mi-24 Hind. From exterminating
entire areas of people with chemical attacks and
scorched earth policies, to internal passports, to
bribing tribes to cease attacking Soviet forces, to
dropping cluster bombs shaped like toys to maul
children, the Russian Army pulled out all the stops,
killing a million or so Afghanis.
Backed by every weapon her military-industrial complex
could provide, the Russians could set foot in any part
of Afghanistan they chose to and they continuously
bloodied any Afghani unit brave enough to stand and
fight. With complete mastery of the air, Mi-24 Hind
attack units flew leisurely up and down the fertile
valleys, turning them into utter wastelands. The land
was devastated, the surviving Afghanis reduced to
subsistence living – yet still they fought on.
The Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul and astride the
main Soviet supply line across the Hindu Kush
mountains, was strategically vital enough to see the
Russians assault and occupy it on nine different
occasions in nine massive operations, each time only
to lose it as soon as they left, the mujahideen simply
moving in behind them. Military supplies, provided by
a coalition of British, American, Saudi, Pakistani,
and Chinese weapons makers, kept the Afghani tribes in
the game.
Then in September 1986, after the Russians had already
given up any hope of "victory," the end game for their
venture was announced when the mujahideen shot down
three Mi-24 Hind helicopters with American provided
Stinger surface to air missiles. With their air
superiority severely compromised, the Soviet 40th Army
was more dependent then ever before on the road
network, highly vulnerable to ambush. Kabul was
frequently short of supplies as the famous Afghani
warlord Massoud – who controlled the Panjshir Valley –
repeatedly cut the road leading across the mountains.
The decrepit nature of the Soviet Union was on blatant
display through the army she fielded in Afghanistan.
The Hidden War abounds with casual references to
broken down tanks, armored cars, and airplanes,
knocked out of action not by enemy fire but shoddy
construction and poor maintenance. From the absence of
a runway sweeper at Bagram – the Soviet Air Force's
main base north of Kabul – to the lack of medical
facilities for the wounded to the lack of rations, as
the war drew to an end the Soviet Army in Afghanistan,
though fearsome, was an increasingly impoverished,
jerry-rigged affair.
In early 1985, the new Russian Communist party boss
Mikhail Gorbachev put the Soviet Army on alert. They
had one year to bring the Afghani War, now a longer
running show than their experience in World War Two,
to a successful conclusion. A little over a year later
at the February 1986 Communist Party Congress, he
announced their failure to do so by calling the
Afghani War "a bleeding wound." He had good reason.
The cost in men, resources, and reputation was quickly
bankrupting what little was left of the Soviet Union.
Closing Time
We were obsessed with our messianic mission and
blinded by arrogance.
~ The Hidden War by Artyom Borovik
The Soviet Army's withdrawal from Afghanistan came
about not due to any change of heart in her leaders'
appetite to meddle in their neighbors' affairs. The
recent excursion into Georgia and the Chechen wars of
the 1990s show that her political elite remains just
as aggressive on her borders. The Soviet Union
withdrew from Afghanistan for the same reason that
everyone has always withdrawn from there – they got
their head handed to them.
One Russian officer summed it all up as not "a victory
or a defeat, but just our withdrawal" (Borovik, p.161)
yet as things go when invading Afghanistan getting out
alive is the best you can hope for. The greatest
defeat the British empire suffered was in Afghanistan,
her invading army wiped out to the man but one, a
wounded doctor allowed to live as a message to his
buddies back in India to stay on their side of the
fence.
Echoing Thomas Jefferson's warning that war does as
much damage to the victor as the vanquished, Borovik's
The Hidden War laments, "we rarely stopped to think
how Afghanistan would influence us." The damage the
lies did to what remained of the Communist Party's
legitimacy, the burden in resources the war placed
onto an economic base crushed to weakness by years of
political control, and, most importantly, the hordes
of Russian soldiers who came home from the war to tell
the truth – all played a large part in the Soviet
Union's collapse.
The Russians, like so many before and after, were
infected by the colonialist delusion that makes people
believe they're a god-like race of sunshine supermen,
and the chosen, inferior natives will thank their
lucky stars for the "help" magnanimously provided.
Instead, what happened to the Russians is what has
always happened to anyone foolish enough to stick
their neck into Afghanistan – the natives scrimped and
bowed and stained their fingers purple, bided their
time, then massacred them at every opportunity.
The necessity for Russia to send her troops into
Afghanistan was presented to the public at large as an
"internationalist duty" that would be inconceivable
for a Great Power to not perform. It was a nice little
puff of a catchphrase and worked as well as could be
hoped because it meant nothing, and nothing is exactly
what the Russians were fighting over in Afghanistan.
Realizing the uselessness of the endless negotiations
with the Afghani tribes and smart enough to see the
writing on the wall, Mikhail Gorbachev, a man who
absolutely deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he was
awarded in 1990, shocked everyone by simply stating
that all Soviet troops would be gone by February 1989,
they were, and the Soviet-Afghani War thus was ended.
Recently my local paper ran a sad picture of an
elderly Russian woman standing in a snow-covered
cemetery, leaning unhappily against her son's cold
gravestone. When he was killed in Afghanistan in 1983
he was nineteen years old. Her grief for what she lost
is etched on her face as deeply as her son's name is
etched on the slab of marble. Her loss – and that of
all the others who lost loved ones in that conflict –
is all that Russia earned herself by invading
Afghanistan.
There is a lesson to be learned in that picture,
summed up in the late 1800s by a Russian Army colonel
named Glukhovsky who wrote "No amount of persuasion,
advice, or threats is capable of re-arranging the
age-long mechanism of Muslim states" (Borovik, p.12)
The Russian people who lived during the 1979–1989
period, and all their Afghani victims, would have been
far happier had Brezhnev been humble enough to listen
to the advice of that long dead army colonel.
Had he done so that old woman, and so many like her,
wouldn't have to stand in cold February cemeteries,
their grief made all the more tragic because it was
bought about for no reason at all.
SOURCES
Feifer, Gregory. 2009. The Great Gamble – The Soviet
War in Afghanistan. New York, NY: HarperCollins
Publishing
Borovik, Artyom. 1990. The Hidden War – A Russian
Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan.
New York, NY: Grove Press
Tanner, Stephen. 2002. Afghanistan: A Military History
From Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban.
New York, NY: DaCapo Press
Arnold, Anthony. 1985. Afghanistan: The Soviet
Invasion in Perspective. Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution Press
February 18, 2009
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