Its significance often overlooked, the Soviet-Afghan War stands as one of the seminal events of the last quarter of the twentieth century, for in less than a decade it exposed fatal defects in the Soviet political structure as well as in communist ideology itself, helped trigger and sustain the policy of internal reform led by Mikhail Gorbachev from 1986, contributed strongly to the collapse of the Communist Party and the consequent end to the Cold War and, finally, played a decisive contributing role in the disintegration of the USSR.1 The conflict rapidly involved other nations with strong political interests at stake in Central Asia, not least the United States, which clandestinely siphoned billions of dollars in aid to the Mujahideen through Pakistan, which itself strongly supported not only the resistance in general, but particularly those factions of religious extremists who in the wake of Soviet withdrawal took a prominent part in the internecine struggle between rival Mujahideen factions, which ultimately led to the Taliban’s triumph in the autumn of 1996 over more moderate groups during the continuing civil war that followed Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.2
The international implications soon became apparent: quite apart from the horrific wave of repression that their regime unleashed, the Taliban offered Afghanistan as a training and recruiting ground for other extremist groups whose political and ideological agenda stretched far beyond the borders of their war-ravaged country. In short, by hosting al-Qaida on Afghan soil, the Taliban set the seeds for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which in turn triggered a devastating reaction from the United States and the United Kingdom, soon followed by other NATO powers. All of this “Pandora’s box” may be traced to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ghastly war it inaugurated.
In no small sense, the foundations of a full understanding of the West’s involvement in Afghanistan today must rest upon a firm grasp of the causes, course, and outcome of the Soviet-Afghan War—the lessons of which confirmed the folly that inevitably befalls a superpower pursuing unrealistic political aims with armed forces unable to cope with the unconventional methods of an adversary, which, though vastly disadvantaged in weapons and technology, managed to overcome the odds through sheer tenacity and an unswerving devotion to freedom and its faith.3
In 1979, political leaders in Moscow directed a sceptical military to intervene in the Afghan civil war in order to maintain in power a nominally communist regime in Kabul struggling against a resistance movement of disparate groups known collectively as the Mujahideen. Deeply unpopular with large swathes of rural, deeply conservative, tribal peoples stretched across a country divided on religious, ethnic, and tribal lines, President Taraki’s government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) controlled only urban areas and very little of the countryside, where tribal elders and clan chiefs held sway. Even within the Communist Party apparatus, rival factions grappled for sole control of the affairs of state, denying them the time or ability to implement the socialist reforms they espoused, including the emancipation of women, land redistribution, and the dismantling of traditional structure for society in favor of a more egalitarian alternative. None of these reforms resonated with a traditional, Islamic nation whose opposition manifested its outrage in open civil war. The president was overthrown by his own prime minister—a member of the opposing communist faction—who proved even less effective at imposing rule than his predecessor. Lack of political direction and anger at unwanted reforms precipitated mutinies and mass desertions within the army and outbreaks of bloody revolt in cities, towns, and villages across the country, which the Soviets immediately appreciated as a threat to their influence over a neighbouring state sharing a border with three of the USSR’s Muslim republics.4
Leonid Brezhnev, the Communist Party General Secretary of the Soviet Union, concerned at the disintegrating situation in Afghanistan and determined to maintain a sphere of influence over the region, ordered an invasion. As neither the climate nor the terrain suited Soviet equipment or tactics, the sheer size of the endeavour became daunting. When Soviet troops rolled over the border in December 1979 ostensibly in aid of a surrogate government in Kabul, they expected to conduct a brief, largely bloodless campaign with highly sophisticated mechanized and airborne forces, easily crushing Afghan resistance in a matter of months before enabling a newly installed government to tackle the resistance thereafter. The Soviets never intended to remain long in Afghanistan and their relatively small troop numbers attested to this fact. Nor, despite Western fears, did the invasion represent the belated realization of the historic Russian drive to establish a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean. Theirs was to be a temporary—albeit an internationally condemned—presence.5
Yet the Soviets comprehensively failed to appreciate the quagmire into which they found themselves; their forces possessed very limited combat experience—and none at all in counterinsurgency—and they foolishly assumed their successful interventions in East Germany in 1954, in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 offered models for any military endeavour posed against a popular struggle. Western analysts, too, predicted Soviet victory, but the political and military circumstances behind the interventions behind the Iron Curtain offered no parallels with Afghanistan, for unlike the Soviets’ client states in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan stood embroiled in the midst of a civil war, not a simple effectively unarmed, insurrection—and thus applying simple, albeit overwhelming, military might could only guarantee protection for the central government in Kabul and perhaps control of larger cities and towns—but not the countryside. The Soviet intervention in December 1979 achieved its initial objective with predictable ease: elite troops overthrew the government, seized the presidential palace and key communications centers, killed the president, and replaced him with a Soviet-sponsored successor.
The plan thereafter seemed straightforward: stabilize the political situation, strengthen, re-train, and enlarge the Afghan Army to enable it to quell the insurgency on its own meanwhile performing the more passive roles of garrison duty and protecting the country’s key infrastructure such as major roads, dams, and sources of electricity and gas. Thus, within three years, the Soviets confident in the notion that—armed with the continued presence of their advisors including army officers; KGB personnel; and civilian specialists in engineering, medicine, education, and other spheres, and furnished with a continuous supply of arms and technology, the Afghan government could stand on its own feet—their forces could withdraw across the border, leaving a friendly, stable, compliant, and ideologically like-minded regime firmly in power behind them.
None of these objectives stood up to the reality of the situation, however, for the civil war continued to spiral beyond the government’s ability to suppress it, the Afghan Army’s morale plummeted further, decreasing further its operational effectiveness and worrying Moscow that withdrawing its troops would amount to both humiliation and the collapse of all Soviet influence over its former client state. Thus, what began as a fairly simple military operation—overthrowing a government and occupying key positions throughout the country—which the Soviet military, trained in large-scale, high-tempo operations, could manage with ease, soon developed into a protracted, costly, and ultimately unwinnable scenario, pitting small, ill-armed, but highly motivated guerrilla forces employing fighting methods bearing no relation to those practiced by opponents trained and armed to fight in central Europe against forces of similar organization and doctrine. Experience soon demonstrated the limited efficacy of heavy infantry, tanks, artillery, and jet fighters in a struggle that demanded more helicopter gunships, more heliborne troops, and more Special Forces in the fluid nature of the war conducted by the Mujahideen.6
As the years passed and the casualties steadily mounted, the war graphically exposed the weaknesses of the Soviets’ strategy and the poorly suited structure of their armed forces, which never succeeded in overcoming an ever-growing resistance movement operating over a vast, varied, and exceedingly challenging landscape. Indeed, both Soviet tactics and strategy contained fatal flaws. Their doctrine directed the use of armored and motor rifle units to advance along narrow axes, maintaining secure lines of communication while wreaking destruction upon any resistance they encountered through combined arms; that is, the coordination of firepower offered by infantry, armor, and air assault units. With little experience or training in a counterinsurgency role, the Soviet armed forces chose a simplistic approach to the problem: simply clearing territory in their path, which translated into the widespread killing of civilians as well as resistance fighters who avoided where possible the superior weight of fire that their opponents could bring to bear. Everywhere circumstances appeared to confirm Alexander the Great’s dictum that “One can occupy Afghanistan, but one cannot vanquish her.”
Civilians who survived the onslaught naturally fled, embittered, abandoning their destroyed villages and property behind. Such ruthless exploitation of air and artillery power was deliberately meant to clear areas, particularly along the border with Pakistan, so as to deprive the resistance of recruits and local support as well as to aid in the interdiction of supplies crossing over into Afghanistan. This strategy resulted in a horrendous cost in human suffering: only six months after the Soviet invasion, approximately 800,000 Afghans had fled into Pakistan.
At the outset of the war the Soviets’ strategy involved persuading the population to support the communist-led Kabul government, thus denying the resistance of aid within the anonymity of the provinces. This soon proved unrealistic, not least owing to the regime’s heavy-handed measures; they then turned to denying the insurgents supplies, which led to driving civilians off their land or destroying their livelihoods as a warning to withhold their support from the insurgency. This also involved interdicting supply routes that connected the insurgents to the vital matériel moving through Pakistan, the principal source of aid to the Mujahideen. The Soviets mounted numerous substantial operations against areas known to be actively supporting the resistance and to sever supply lines whenever possible, but the “drip, drip” effect caused by the guerrillas’ constant ambushes, sniping, raids, and mined roads ultimately inflicted unsustainable losses on the 40th Army.
The Soviet-Afghan War differed from other conflicts of the Cold War era. True, like other conflicts of the post-1945 period, it constituted a limited one; but it was longer—slightly over nine years in length—and thus did not share the decisive nature of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, or 1973. The Soviet imbroglio lacked the scale of either the Korean War (1950–53) or Vietnam (1965–73) and did not conclude with a clear political outcome, in contrast to those proxy conflicts. Nor can it be seen as some sort of Soviet “Vietnam,” especially in terms of scale. The Soviets never deployed anything approaching the numbers the Americans sent to southeast Asia, with over half a million personnel by 1968, compared with the average of approximately 100,000 Soviets who served at any given time in Afghanistan. Whereas the Americans conducted numerous operations involving several divisions, the Soviets’ entire 40th Army in Afghanistan consisted of a mere five divisions, four independent brigades, and four independent regiments, plus various small support units. Numbers as insufficient as these denied the Soviets—by their own faulty strategic calculations—any realistic chance of securing over 20 provincial centers plus various key industrial sites—to say nothing of the manpower required to secure whole swathes of remote and practically inaccessible territory inhabited by a seething population giving aid to elusive, seldom visible, opponents who moved by stealth, struck at will, and melted back into civilian life with little or no trace. Protection demanded of hundreds of miles of roads, communication lines, and points of strategic importance—some of which the Soviets must occupy outright or, at the very least, deny to the Mujahideen—placed a colossal burden on the invaders, who failed to appreciate both the sheer scale of the enterprise and the immense commitment in manpower it required.7
The 40th Army served as the mainstay of the Soviets’ military presence in Afghanistan, augmented by the 103rd Airborne Division, which consisted of four regiments, one based around Kabul airfield, a second near the Afghan government residence in Kabul, a third in the Bala Hissar fortress on the outskirts of Kabul, and a fourth at Bagram air base, just northeast of the capital. Although Soviet forces varied in number, they averaged around 100,000 men in Afghanistan at any given time. These troops never intended to play the leading role in subduing the Afghan insurgency—that was to remain the primary responsibility of the DRA Army—and never anticipated the scale of the enterprise triggered by their appearance on Afghan soil. As a consequence, and by the Kremlin’s steadfast adherence to the original notion that the 40th Army remain a “limited contingent,” these troops failed to establish the really substantial presence in the country that subsequent events rendered so necessary. Moreover, with their armed forces structured, equipped, and trained to operate on the northern European plan (or Central Front in NATO parlance), or alternatively on the plains of northern China as the most likely battlegrounds of the future, Soviet strategists expected to conduct fast-paced conventional operations. They certainly did not expect to conduct a low-intensity, asymmetric war in Central Asia and thus their force structure, weaponry, and tactics necessarily underwent substantial alteration—a program which of course took time to implement.8
Broadly speaking, Soviet troops undertook four types of military action in Afghanistan. The first consisted of major operations conducted by both regular and Special Forces, including artillery and aircraft, and generally in conjunction with DRA units, the purpose being to destroy large groups of Mujahideen in particular areas of the country. Soviet commanders conducted these operations in phases lasting for several weeks or longer. The second type of operation was carried out on a smaller scale, perhaps by a single regiment with artillery and aircraft in support. This type of operation focussed on destroying a specific group of rebels in a location discovered via intelligence-gathering. Such operations tended to be conducted in 10 days or less. Thirdly, while such combat missions were under way, units “combed” villages in search of finding concealed weapons cache or medical aid stations. Fourth, small units—often company-sized—conducted ambushes along roads, on mountain trails, and near villages, with locations selected on the basis of intelligence gleaned by Afghan intelligence personnel.
Nonetheless, to a considerable extent the Soviets remained shackled to the methods they knew and understood—large-scale operations in the form of conventional offensives, which they continued to launch regularly, most notably in the Panjshir Valley, despite generally poor results, since none of these major operations achieved more than temporarily neutralising resistance activity in the areas over which the Soviets’ ponderous military machine operated. True, experience revealed that heliborne forces operating in conjunction with mechanized forces could function effectively at the battalion and brigade level, but such methods tended to stifle tactical success when carried out on a divisional or larger scale. In short, counterinsurgency depends on highly mobile, well-led, well-trained, and suitably equipped forces capable of fighting insurgents by employing their own methods. Soviet armor, airpower, and heavily laden infantry dependent on their armored personnel carriers (APCs) for transport over difficult terrain could not, despite their impressive firepower, compensate for their inherent shortcomings in a counterinsurgency environment, for the Mujahideen seldom appeared in concentration—and disappeared before Soviet troops could bring that overwhelming firepower to bear.
The heavily mountainous terrain of Afghanistan—though the country consists of extensive areas of dry plains, deserts, and “green zones” of river valleys and vegetation, as well—strongly influenced the strategy adopted by the Soviets, obliging their commanders to convey troops to an operational area via helicopters or convoys. Whenever possible, they sent troops ahead of the main body or inserted advance parties of troops by helicopter on to high ground so as to cover those following behind. Yet this of course depended on the availability of such aircraft, required proper planning, and exposed the limited number of helicopters to ground fire, especially rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and Stingers.
Close to the larger cities and along frequently travelled roads the Soviets established permanent posts consisting of garrisons of between 15 and 40 troops. They controlled the area, guarded the roads, and guided artillery fire. Owing to their isolation, they could call on help via radio. Some of the most successful Soviet operations involved combined operations including air assault forces in support of a mechanized ground attack. Helicopters bearing small contingents of these troops would insert them deep in the rear and flanks of resistance strongholds to pin them, prevent their withdrawal, destroy their bases, and threaten or cut off their lines of communication. Ground forces would then advance to join up with these heliborne forces and engage trapped Mujahideen forces and destroy them with superior firepower. Heliborne forces performed best when inserted no deeper behind rebel lines than the distance of supporting artillery range, unless of course their own guns accompanied them. Operations undertaken without artillery support often ended in high casualties for the Soviets.
As guerrillas received and employed new weaponry and developed new tactics, they obliged the Soviets to adapt in turn. For a large conventional force already trying to cope with shifting political circumstances in the country, this pressure proved an unwelcome addition to their existing woes, demanding as it did new approaches to seemingly intractable problems in the field—not simply the modification of tactics, but variations to uniforms, weapons, and equipment to suit charging requirements.
The 40th Army comprised a professional cadre of officers and other ranks, but conscripts and reservists—frequently, like so many American draftees destined for service in Vietnam in the 1960s, reluctant or downright unwilling to serve in a war whose purpose they did understand in a country about which they knew nothing—formed the bulk of this formation. “We were drafted at age eighteen,” the disillusioned Vladislav Tamarov recalled. “We had no choice. If you weren’t in college, if you weren’t disabled, if your parents didn’t have a lot of money—then you were required to serve. Some young men broke their legs, some paid money [for exemption from service]…” Those with time on their hands, such as the thousands of soldiers based in rear areas involved in maintenance, logistics, or communications, could easily fall prey to narcotics addiction—heroine of course being readily available in a country where poppies flourished—with predictable effects on morale, though to be fair home-sickness and boredom afflicted rear units more than drug-taking.
Naturally, the Soviets possessed elite forces, as well, but never in adequate numbers. While, for instance, ground reconnaissance troops tended to be better trained and of a higher quality than the typical conscript belonging to a motorized rifle unit, the critical shortage of high-quality infantry led the Soviets often to employ reconnaissance personnel in combat rather than in reconnaissance roles. This, in turn, detracted from the duty of intelligence-gathering on the ground, which commanders foolishly substituted by relying too heavily on intelligence acquired though aerial reconnaissance, radio intercepts, and what little access they had to agents in the field. These sources did not always yield much of tactical use and by assigning reconnaissance units to combat duties the Soviets neglected to make best use of their skills and consequently frequently failed to locate Mujahideen forces. The most famous elite forces were the Spetsnaz or “forces of special designation,” highly trained special forces used in long-range reconnaissance, commando, and special force functions such as night-time ambushes; they would be helicoptered in and then proceed on foot to the ambush point, there to lay in wait for their unsuspecting victims.
Most of the infantry carried the AK-47 (7.62 mm), while airborne forces carried the AKS-74 (5.45 mm)—the latter creating more substantial injury. Soviet heavy weapons included two kinds of rocket launchers: the GRAD (“hail”) and the URAGAN (“hurricane”). Smaller weapons included the DShKs—a heavy machine gun—as well as guided missile launchers, unguided NURS missiles, SHMELs, and mortars. The Soviets deployed various types of aircraft, including the MIG fighter, SU and AN aircraft, as well as Mi-8 helicopters for the transport of troops, ammunition, water, and food. Combat helicopters included the Mi-24 gunship, which could provide rapid and accurate firepower for ground attack as well as for covering troops. These proved extremely effective against the resistance and were greatly feared; on the other hand, they suffered from vulnerabilities like all weapon systems, and as helicopters are most vulnerable when they are on the ground or hovering over a position, the Mujahideen tended to achieve reasonable success against such aircraft if they caught them in range while landing or disembarking troops.9
The forces of the DRA did not enjoy much respect from their Soviet counterparts—and for good reason. Afghan officers could apply for training in a Soviet military college, sometimes within Afghanistan or occasionally in the Soviet Union itself, but they seldom reached a high standard. Apart from volunteers, ordinary soldiers were often acquired by the crude method of virtual kidnapping: troops entered a village and rounded up men of appropriate age. Exceedingly high rates of desertion and numerous instances of DRA soldiers selling their Soviet-supplied weapons to the resistance did nothing to enhance their appalling reputation.10 Vladimir Tamarov probably reflected the opinion of many of his comrades when he recorded this disparaging impression:
Frankly, they were lousy soldiers. They tried to stay behind us and were never in a hurry to overtake us. There was nothing surprising about this: many of them, like many of us, were not in this war of their own free will. We had nothing to lose but our lives, but they were fighting their own people on their own land. Our newspapers depicted them as brave and valiant warriors defending their revolution. There were some volunteers who fought on our side to avenge the deaths of their families murdered by the Mujahadeen. Just as there were those who fought on the side of the Mujahadeen to avenge the death of families killed by our shelling. This is what a civil war is about.11
The Mujahideen tended to avoid direct contact with Soviet forces of superior numbers and firepower lest they risk annihilation. Unlike the Soviets, they very rarely fought from fixed positions and if threatened with encirclement simply withdrew. Similarly, in the grand tradition of guerrilla operations, the Mujahideen always sought to achieve advantage through the element of surprise. They benefited enormously from local, intimate knowledge of the ground, possessed years of experience in scouting and reconnaissance-gathering and could transmit intelligence on the movement and strength of Soviet units in rapid fashion and across substantial distances by crude but effective means, including signalling devices that the Soviets could neither interpret nor suppress. The Mujahideen were extremely adept at night-fighting, rapid movement, and virtually undetected movement over difficult terrain, and in maintaining a large network of intelligence-gatherers across the country.
Boys as young as 11 or 12, carrying Kalashnikovs, fought, together with their fathers and grandfathers, out of various motives, in rare exceptions simply for money but overwhelmingly for the sake of defending their country. Without question, fighting on behalf of Jihad or Holy War, motivated most of them. As one fighter explained to Sandy Gall, a British journalist travelling with the Mujahideen,
Jihad embraces the whole Muslim world. All Muslims are obliged to take part in it by sending money, or demonstrating their support in some other way. Any writer or poet should write only about the Jihad. A merchant should work longer hours to make money for the Jihad. Not to take part in Jihad is a sin.
A small minority served in the Mujahideen out of compulsion: fighters simply arrived at a village and threatened to destroy the houses unless men came forward to serve in their ranks, a process that simultaneously prevented DRA forces from adopting the same practice. The number of Mujahideen actively engaged in fighting varied, but an estimated 85,000 served during the final stages of the Soviet occupation in 1988–89.
The Mujahid prided himself on exhibiting bravery in action and often demonstrated a careless disregard for his own life. He was highly motivated, functioned on very little food, moved great distances on foot without complaint, generally performed great acts of endurance over rough and mountainous terrain, and adopted a fatalistic attitude that rendered him the most formidable of fighting men. John Lee Anderson, who accompanied a unit of Mujahideen, noted:
Just as they can be harsh when deciding the fate of other people’s lives, they can also be stoic when it comes to their own. This stoicism comes out of their culture, in which war enjoys an exalted status, and from their faith in the Islamic idea that after death, a better life awaits. If they are to die, so be it, as long as they do well in battle in the eyes of God. They are mujahideen, holy warriors. They live to make holy war, to kill the enemy, and if necessary be martyred themselves. These are facts they accept. Most of them would have it no other way.13
In true guerrilla fashion, the Mujahideen possessed no heavy weapons in the form of aircraft or artillery. Nevertheless, they did employ heat-seeking, Soviet-made, Egyptian-supplied SAM-7 anti-aircraft missiles, though with very poor results. However, because aircraft tried to fly at higher altitudes for protection, the rebels acquired, at the end of 1986, American-made Stingers—rocket launchers used in a ground-to-air target role as well as Blowpipe missiles. They also possessed recoilless mountain guns, mortars, and heavy machine guns, the last known as DShKs (Degterev-Shpagin). Some of their weapons were Second World War Soviet weapons passed to the Chinese and thence found their way to Afghanistan.
They deployed anti-transport mines such as the 15lb Italian-made TS-6.1, as well anti-personnel mines, some of which that popped up and exploded and others activated by the vibrations of footsteps or by radio or those set off by mine-detectors. The Mujahideen discovered them to be even more effective by planting bombs underneath the mines to increase the strength of the explosion. These were pervasive and sometimes severely impeded the Soviets’ movement. As Tamarov explained: “Without minesweepers along, no group ever went into the mountains, no car ever drove off the base, and no transport column ever set out along the road. There were mines everywhere: along the roads, on mountain paths, in abandoned houses.”
Space precludes an examination of the deep roots of the conflict and the history of Afghan-Russian relations, but extensive literature exists on the subject.14 In seeking an understanding of the short-term origins of the Soviet-Afghan War, one must look back 20 months from the point of Soviet intervention when, on April 27–28, 1978, a coup staged by a group of Soviet-trained, largely communist army and air force officers overthrew President Daoud, who had himself come to power by deposing the king, his cousin, in 1973. The king, Zaher Shah, had gone into exile in Italy, while Daoud, who had been prime minister from 1953 to 1963, cultivated close relations with the Soviet Union and introduced communists into the government. Soon after taking power, however, Daoud began to change his policies, removed communists from his government, and purged leftists from the military. When Daoud’s interior minister, Mir Akbar Khyber, was murdered on April 17, 1978, a large pro-communist demonstration occurred in Kabul, prompting Daoud to order the arrest of communist leaders, including Nur Mohammed Taraki, the founder of the party, who was detained on April 26. The coup began the following day, led in particular by Abdul Qadir, Aslam Watanjar, Sayid Muhammad Gulabzoi, and Muhammad Rafi. Rafi and Qadir belonged to the Parcham faction of the Afghan Communist Party, while Gulabzoi and Watanjar came from the Khalqi wing. Armor under Watanjar’s orders approached the presidential palace (known as the Arg) with support from MiG-21 fighters and Su-7 fighter-bombers flown from Bagram air base north of Kabul. The palace guards put up fierce resistance in room-to-room fighting until, at about 4 or 5 a.m. on the 28th, the troops reached Daoud and his entire family, whom they murdered. The coup leaders instigated widespread arrests, especially amongst the middle class of Kabul—activists, nationalists, and intellectuals—as well as two former prime ministers. No serious evidence supports the theory that the Soviets inspired the coup and while KGB officers in the Soviet Embassy appear to have known of the intended coup beforehand they were unenthusiastic about it. Rather, it appears to have been the workings of Afghan communists themselves, though clearly it enjoyed Moscow’s blessings, for Soviet advisors in the country immediately offered assistance to the new regime.
The coup leaders soon included key civilian political figures from the PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan), with Taraki appointed president and prime minister, Hafizullah Amin as foreign minister, Qadir as defence minister, and Babrak Karmal as deputy prime minister. In so doing, the regime mixed Parcham and Khalqi activists, a risky decision that developed into a potentially explosive relationship, owing to the fierce antagonisms existing between the two groups. Indeed, within a few months those antagonisms began openly to emerge. In a meeting on June 18, 1978, which included Taraki, Karmal, and others, an argument broke out, which resulted in the president ordering Karmal out of the room, and in an effort to shunt him off to marginalize his influence, Taraki posted Karmal as Afghan Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, along with several of his Parcham associates. Other Parchamis found themselves sent abroad to fill diplomatic posts and sensibly refused to return home when the Taraki regime redoubled its purge of the Parcham faction, including even members of the coup like Qadir and Rafi, who probably owed their narrow brush with execution to their Soviet connections. But many thousands of others enjoyed no such protection and found themselves in the hands of the secret police, or AGSA (Department for Safeguarding the Interests of Afghanistan), who imprisoned, tortured, and executed thousands in a campaign of terror meant to intimidate real or potential opponents and consolidate loyalty around the new regime, now dominated by Khalqis.
Accordingly, the infamous Pul-e Charkhi prison in Kabul became notorious for mass killings without a semblance of legal proceedings. The PDPA possessed no real ability to rule the country, for owing to political turmoil and repression, it neither controlled nor established and experienced state bureaucracy nor enjoyed widespread support for its ideas and ambitious plans for restructuring the country along Marxist lines. While employing coercion to instil fear proved effective in protecting the regime, its failure to govern once it had secured its power base caused considerable uneasiness in Moscow. The Khalqi movement instituted radical reforms via decree, with wide-ranging land reforms and alterations to women’s rights to such an extent as to horrify conservative rural sensibilities, in turn encouraging resistance on religious grounds. Gennady Bocharov, a Soviet journalist, eloquently described the disastrous effect caused by functionaries who obtusely believed they could apply Marxist philosophy in the context of a society living almost as it had 500 years before:
The revolutionary government reached a revolutionary decision: to give the landowners’ property to the peasants.
To the peasants, the revolutionary government was as remote and incomprehensible as a government on another planet. The peasant acknowledges only one authority: the mullah. And mullahs have been saying for hundreds of years that the land belongs to the master. If you take so much as a handful of the harvest without permission, then Allah’s wrath is inescapable. And now this incomprehensible, distant government is saying—take all the land, not just a handful of grain.
The result was that the land lay untilled. Unseeded. Land without hands to tend it. Land running wild…
The revolutionary government decided to introduce co-education in all the schools.
Fathers killed daughters who stepped into a room with boys. Young wives who found themselves in classrooms with strange young men had their throats cut by enraged husbands.
The authorities in Kabul tried to introduce a communist subbotnik, or day of voluntary, unpaid labour, on a Friday, the most important day of the week for Muslim prayer. Attendance at the mosques plummeted, resulting in riots.15
Even the gradual introduction of such reforms risked an unpopular reception; but the government’s rapid approach guaranteed a hostile response to a regime whose representatives, unknown to the peasantry yet emanating out into the countryside to espouse and implement such radical ideologies, often did so at great personal risk. In turn, the regime set upon recalcitrant villages with pathological heavy-handedness.
Thus, if the new government enjoyed at least some support amongst the military, it possessed precious little from amongst the population as a whole, most of which consisted of small-holding peasant farmers, on behalf of whom the coup leaders instigated the revolution. By painful irony, the peasants in particular—but some workers, too—rejected the call to Marxism, which instead fomented armed resistance across the country, encouraged by the poor combat readiness of the Afghan Army, reeling from a wave of bloody officer purges, which, together with large-scale desertions, reduced the officer corps to half its normal size. Some personnel from the lower ranks also abandoned their units, either returning home or joining the resistance, taking their arms and skills with them. On March 15, 1979, owing to brutality committed by Khalqi activists, a mass revolt erupted in the western city of Herat where most of the 17th Infantry Division joined the rebel cause, slaughtering untold numbers of government officials as well as some Soviet advisors—which numbered about 550 across the country by this time—and their families. Units loyal to the government moved against the city and eventually occupied it while the air force bombed the city and the 17th Division. A staggering 5,000 civilians are believed to have died in the onslaught. This extremely brutal approach by the regime determined many other soldiers to desert to the resistance, some as individuals but others as entire units and even entire brigades, reducing army strength by the end of the year to fewer than half its official strength of 90,000 personnel.
The riots and massacre in Herat triggered an uprising across whole swathes of the country, with opposition preached by mosques and village elders who condemned Marxism as atheistic and anti-Muslim. Religious leaders declared a Jihad (Holy War) and as fighting spread across the country the disruption of government business and the harassment of army units and state officials by the Mujahideen rapidly amounted to an intractable problem. Indeed, over succeeding months, as the resistance movement gathered pace, there appeared some prospect of its actually overthrowing the regime, reversing the communist revolution and installing an Islamic government in Kabul. In light of the Islamic Revolution’s recent ascent to power under the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran—immediately to the west of Afghanistan—the Soviets naturally wished to prevent this eventuality, not least because of its obvious threat to the key principle underpinning the Brezhnev doctrine: that once communism achieved a foothold in government, the process was irreversible. To the USSR, any instance of a Marxist “roll-back” anywhere in the world was anathema on grounds of the potential precedent it set for Eastern Europe, not to mention the Soviet republics themselves.
The Herat uprising caused a serious degree of alarm in Moscow, which began to pay closer attention to events in Afghanistan. If Taraki managed to maintain his grip on power the Soviet Union could rest fairly easily with a friendly satellite state on its southern borders—a state of affairs critically important in light of the USSR’s Muslim republics situated there: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Unrest in Afghanistan, Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, feared, could spread elsewhere in Central Asia, so threatening the territorial integrity of the USSR. On March 17, the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, argued to the Politburo that Afghanistan must not fall from the Soviet orbit, while Aleksei Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers and later a successor to Gromyko in the foreign ministry, stated that the Afghan regime was dangerously enflaming internal opposition and actively attempting to conceal its wide-scale acts of repression from the Soviets. Taraki hysterically requested the intervention of Soviet troops to help maintain order in Afghanistan, but when Kosygin met with him in Moscow on March 20 to outline the Soviet position on Afghan internal affairs, he refused direct military aid: Soviet intervention would worsen matters by enflaming opposition to the regime and arousing international condemnation. The meeting suggests that the Soviets contemplated no long-term strategy to wage war in Afghanistan; it is therefore instructive now to examine how and why the Kremlin’s volte face occurred between March and December 1979.16
Matters shifted radically in Afghan politics when in September Taraki and his prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, fell out, and the latter, suspecting that Taraki and the Soviets were plotting to oust him, seized Taraki and had him executed on the 14th. This untimely development did not please the Soviets, and Brezhnev, in particular, who was affronted by his protégé’s demise under Amin’s orders. Significantly, the coup led to nothing less than a fundamental shift in the USSR’s attitude toward, and foreign policy respecting, its southern neighbour, with the relationship between the two beginning to deteriorate so rapidly that the notion of a Soviet invasion began from this point to become a viable option for the Kremlin.
In the event, Amin’s reign of terror—led by KhAD, the secret police17—proved worse than Taraki’s, with the ruthless pursuit of thousands of genuine and perceived dissidents appearing the regime’s only answer to the president’s failure to stabilize the domestic situation. The Soviets, angered that this merely exacerbated Amin’s internal woes, distanced themselves from his regime, leaving him with no hope of developing closer relations with other powers such as the United States, who looked particularly unfavorably at the regime when in February its security forces had botched a rescue attempt to recover the U.S. ambassador in Kabul from the hands of unidentified kidnappers. Besides, the U.S. presidency, under Jimmy Carter, found itself so diverted by events in Iran—where revolutionaries seized the entire American diplomatic corps from the Tehran embassy on November 4—as to pay little attention to Amin’s predicament.
Thus, by the autumn of 1979, with the Afghan economy on a downward spiral, the regime rent by political infighting, the country racked by full-fledged civil war, and the Mujahideen’s increasingly effective opposition looking certain to end in Taraki’s downfall, the Soviets felt compelled to act. In the months prior to the invasion, Soviet military and KGB advisors toured the country under various pretences to determine the best method of ensuring a rapid subjugation of the country with a minimum of interference from Afghan forces. But the actual decision to invade did not apparently come until December 12, during a meeting of the Politburo chaired by Gromyko and attended by Party General Secretary Brezhnev; Andropov, the KGB chairman; and the Defence Minister, Ustinov. The first deployments appear to have begun when the 105th Airborne Division, under Marshal Sergei Sokolov, shifted its troops from Termez in Uzbekistan to Bagram air base, north of Kabul, beginning on November 29, followed a fortnight later by a large armored unit. Late on the evening of December 24, further contingents from the 105th set down at the civilian airport in Kabul, while other units arrived at Bagram, the air base at Shindand near Herat, and at Kandahar, the last of the major airfields in the country. In addition, units of the 360th Motorized Infantry Division crossed the border near Termez en route to the Afghan capital. By launching the invasion around Christmas the Soviets hoped to lessen the likelihood of any concerted Western objection.
Although the Soviet-Afghan War may be divided into distinct phases—although several historians have established different criteria with which to bring some semblance of understanding to such a fluid conflict with no established fronts—it is vital to appreciate that the nature of insurgency defies strict adherence to convenient divisions artificially determined on the model of a conventional conflict, complete with set-piece battles marking out the war’s parameters through distinct campaigns and battles—not least decisive actions indicating its changing course—which seldom if ever occur in asymmetric warfare. In short, it is in the very the nature of an insurgency—characterized by low- and medium-intensity fighting and the enormous disparity between the protagonists’ capacities—that neither side stands capable of inflicting a decisive blow on its opponent via one, much less several, decisive encounters. As with all unconventional conflicts, the outcome of the Soviet-Afghan War would depend upon the cumulative effect of years of steadily applied power; that is, in an attritional contest the winner of which has ground down his opponent through unacceptable losses and a broken will.
Before examining the operational phases of the war,18 a brief discussion of the basic nature of the fighting may be instructive. From the outset of the war fighting took place throughout Afghanistan, with the highest pitch reached in the east, a fact confirmed by the large proportion of refugees and internally displaced Afghans who fled the area over the course of the nine-year conflict. As this area adjoined the Pakistani border, across which the bulk of foreign aid would flow to the resistance over this period, the country’s eastern provinces naturally became the focus of Soviet attention, with the establishment of a buffer or cordon sanitaire their principle objective. To that end, the normal course of fighting served well in encouraging—or in many cases forcing—civilians to abandon the region for the safety and refuge provided by nearby Pakistan. Only later did the Soviets institute a deliberate policy of depopulating vast stretches of territory in a bid to deny the Mujahideen the support of the local population in various forms including food, shelter, and basic intelligence. From the beginning of the war and indeed for most of its course, most of the operations conducted by the resistance remained consistent with their limited offensive capacity; that is, a series—albeit a series of seemingly relentless—of small-scale attacks conducted across most parts of country—the central region of the Hazarajat figuring as a notable exception—in the form of raids, hit-and-run attacks, and moderately sized strikes against Soviet and Afghan regime bases, reconnaissance parties, and small convoys. Bocharov described one such attack against a column of APCs:
He clambered out of a hole and opened up with a grenade launcher. The first shot ricocheted off Nikolai’s APC and exploded a little way ahead. The next one hit the turret dead-on …
And there did seem to be a lot of spooks, all toting grenade launchers and submachine guns.
Another missile went under the front wheels and exploded below the first axle. A searing flame burst through from under Nikolai’s seat. He felt his entire back to be on fire …
He rolled out onto the body of the vehicle—awful, awful—everything burning all around, no sign of any of the others, just the chatter of automatic fire. He fell to the ground just as two missiles turned the APC into a useless heap of metal.19
Two further APCs were hit, killing and wounding several soldiers. Then support arrived in the form of Mi-24 helicopters: “The choppers swooped over the line of foxholes … spitting out pinkish-blue streaks of fire and missiles. Mud, sand, and rocks fountained up, showered down on the trenches, and obscured the sky. The earth groaned with explosions and gave birth to dead men.”20
The Mujahideen proved masters at launching such attacks from places of concealment, as Bocharov again recounts:
Attacks on Soviet armoured groups were usually carried out without any prior warning. The spooks would emerge out of camouflaged manholes and open fire. Then they would disappear into the depths of their “kirizes,” a network of underground tunnels dug for irrigation purposes, but now serving as perfect bolt holes. Some of the tunnels were large enough to allow movement of vehicles as well as people. They stretched under fields, alongside roads, and underneath villages. Kirizes under villagers drove the Soviet soldiers mad. One minute you’d have concentrated fire coming from a village, but when you entered it, there wouldn’t be a soul to be seen: everyone would have gone to ground in the kirizes, and the village would be deserted.21
Yet allusion to such examples is not to assert that the Soviet-Afghan War must only be seen in the light of elusive guerrilla attacks followed in their wake by the hammerblows of a superpower wielding numerically superior numbers and advanced technology, for the resistance did not always hold the initiative. Indeed, as early as March 1980 the Soviets launched their first major offensive with a sweep through the Kunar Valley, which left approximately a thousand Mujahideen and Afghan civilians dead, yet achieved little more than temporarily driving out to other valleys resistance fighters who, in the wake of imminent Soviet withdrawal, reassumed their initial positions. Indeed, this pattern strongly characterized the course of the war—overwhelming force applied to enable ground troops to establish temporary control of an area after inflicting perhaps sizeable—but seldom crushing and therefore meaningful—casualties on the enemy, with those troops only to be withdrawn with little (and therefore vulnerable) or no presence left behind, and thus enabling those same opponents to reestablish their former presence over territory that Soviet and/or regime forces must clear again—a frustrating and costly affair that inevitably favored the insurgency.
Much of the fighting involved insurgent ambushes directed against patrols and convoys, for in the case of the former, the Mujahideen possessed better knowledge of the ground and often struck under cover of darkness, while in the case of the latter, they took full advantage of the limited routes available to Soviet and government forces, who found their freedom of movement, even over short distances, hampered by a shortage of roads, particularly paved ones. Regular troops—at least not large numbers of them—trained to confront opponents operating according to similar doctrine, tactics, and methods of supply and evacuation could not hope to proceed across hundreds of miles of trackless, often mountainous, ground without commensurate support in terms of air power, artillery, and supply. Thus, large formations necessarily depended upon the existing network of rudimentary roads—ironically, most of these constructed by fellow Soviets after the Second World War.
From the Soviet point of view, the war may be divided into four phases: the first involving invasion and consolidation from December 1979 to February 1981; the second, the Soviets’ elusive pursuit of victory between March 1982 and April 1985; the third, during the period of fighting at its height from May 1985 to December 1986; and the fourth, the period of withdrawal, covering the period from November 1986 to February 1989. These will be examined in turn.
The Soviet invasion amounted to a coup de main employing a strategy modelled on that used in their last cross-border intervention during a period of unrest—Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968. Hostilities began in Kabul on December 27 when airborne and Spetsnaz forces seized the Salang Tunnel and key government and communications points in Kabul, where Colonel Grigorii Boiarinov, leading Special Forces, specifically sought out President Amin, who had recently relocated from the Arg to the Tajbeg Palace in the southern part of the capital. There the Soviet assault force surrounded and stormed the building, killing Amin and most of his family, but losing Boiarinov in the process. During the assault the city’s telephone system shut down after a deliberately timed explosion, and on the evening of the 28th, the Soviets employed a powerful radio transmitter on their own soil to broadcast a recording of Babrak Karmal announcing Amin’s overthrow and naming himself successor. As far as the Soviets were concerned, their seizure of key points across the country, together with the successful installation of Karmal in power, ought to have signalled the practical end of their major military operations in Afghanistan.
Soviet strategy concentrated on a few key objectives. First, the army was to bring stability to the country by protecting the main thoroughfares, placing large garrisons in the major cities, and protecting air bases and points of logistical significance. Once ensconced in these positions, Soviet forces planned to relieve Afghan government forces of garrison duties and redirect their efforts against the resistance in rural areas, where the Soviets would provide support on a number of fronts: logistics, intelligence, air power, and artillery. This would enable the Soviet forces to take a secondary role in the fighting, thereby both minimising their contact with the Afghan population and keeping their casualties to an acceptable level. Finally, they planned to strengthen Afghan government forces to the extent that once resistance ceased the Soviets could withdraw their own troops and leave governance and security matters to the “puppet” regime left in their wake.
The fact that the occupying forces did not anticipate serious resistance may be discerned from their original rules of engagement, which specified that troops were only to return fire if attacked, or to rescue Soviet advisors in insurgent hands. By necessity, these rules rapidly came to be altered, owing to the rise in casualties from the very beginning. On February 21, 1980, approximately 300,000 people crowded the streets of Kabul shouting antigovernment and anti-Soviet slogans. The demonstrations continued into the following day and the crowds flowed into the main streets and squares and appeared before the Arg, where President Karmal made his residence. Thousands laid siege to government buildings, threw projectiles at the Soviet Embassy, and killed several Soviet citizens. After the rioters looted scores of shops, overturned and burned cars, and set ablaze a hotel, General Tukharinov, commander of the 40th Army, received orders to block the main approaches to Kabul and stop the demonstrations. This he achieved, but the rising in the capital marked the proper beginning of a resistance movement, now extending its remit to foreign forces acting on behalf of an illegitimate regime.
This left the 40th Army with the unenviable task of defeating the insurgency across the country—a task for which, owing to its original remit of the previous December, it was not properly equipped or trained. In the course of this first phase of the war, that is, the two months from the end of December 1979 to the end of February 1980, the 40th Army had already suffered 245 fatal casualties, largely attributable to regular attacks launched against columns of troops and supplies on the main roads from the Soviet Union. The response lay in the establishment of mutually supporting guard posts (zastavas) at regular intervals, which secured the main roads, principal cities, airports, bridges, power stations, and pipelines. These posts observed the insurgents’ movements, supported convoy escorts, and could call in air or artillery strikes as necessary. By the end of February 1980, 862 zastavas dotted the landscape, scattered across Afghanistan, containing garrisons amounting in total to more than 20,000 troops—a fifth of the 40th Army’s manpower—and as such committing troops to a necessary yet static function when the Soviets required substantial numbers actually to pursue and engage the insurgents; that is, maintaining the initiative or at least denying it to the enemy. In short, insurgencies are not broken by sitting on one’s thumbs. General Valentin Varennikov described one zastava, situated on apex of a mountain near Kabul, thus:
The territory of the zastava was shaped like an irregular rectangle. On three sides it was surrounded by a solid wall of sandbags brought in by helicopter. There was no fourth wall, because it was here the helicopter would touch down with one “foot” on the land. There were two heavy DShK machine guns at either end of this square, which was about six square metres in area. Steps led down to a little square below. Here there was a 120 mm mortar, with a mountain of shells piled up beside it, and a shelter from the weather.
From the little square, a path ran downwards at about 45 [degrees], a set of steps hacked out of the granite rock, on both sides of which was stretched a stout rope instead of banisters. At the bottom there was another little square, about the same size as the one above. Here there was another heavy machine gun and this was where the tiny garrison—12 men in all—had their living; a place to relax, a kitchen, somewhere to wash and so on, the furniture—chairs, tables, sleeping places—all made out of ammunition boxes.22
During this period both the 40th Army and the Mujahideen modified their tactics in light of the painful lessons already drawn from the first two months of conflict. No longer would the resistance take on the Soviets in direct confrontations; instead, they turned to guerrilla tactics, with frequent, often small-scale hit-and-run attacks against outposts, convoys, and small units, always seeking to employ the advantage of surprise, particularly in the context of an ambush. The insurgents also planted booby traps and mines along frequently travelled patrol and convoy routes, as well as in abandoned villages. But the Soviets could sometimes play the game, too, laying ambushes along their opponents’ supply routes, as Bocharov witnessed:
They lay facing the track, a gentle slope at their backs. The squad had been split up into two groups. The track wound from afar, and was the only possible route for the caravan to take …
A spray of bullets punctured the camels’ bellies and brought them to the ground, clumsily, onto their fore-legs, roaring with pain. One camel flipped over completely and skidded along the sand on its hump and the boxes strapped to it. The spooks, robbed of cover, sprinted in different directions. One escaped, but they got the other one. Bullets raked through his pelvis just as he got to the lip of the ravine.23
The Mujahideen also became increasingly ingenious in their methods of laying mines, as Bocharov recalled respecting an APC moving between Bagram and Kabul:
They bypassed the combined anti-tank and anti-personnel minefields, and negotiated the most dangerous spot … without incident. Two stray rocket missiles whistled by harmlessly. On one of the sharp turns, the telescopic antenna that cut through the air above the APC slashed a branch of an overhanging tree. A deafening explosion echoed around the valley, sending stabs of pain through the soldiers’ eardrums. Despite its weight of many tons, the APC was flung forward like an empty tub. …
There had been a mine fixed to the tree branch, and the antenna had hit it, setting it off. The mine had been put there with APC radio antennas in mind: they were long and flexible, striking branches and rocky overhangs on the mountain roads.24
But the resistance did not rely exclusively on the remote actions of their explosive devices, however numerous and cleverly planted or laid, for they supplemented these measures with audacious attacks, as when in the summer of 1980 they bombarded with rockets the 40th Army’s headquarters only four miles from Kabul. The Soviets did not remain idle, striking at resistance positions often located from the air and launching the first of many large-scale operations—notably the full-scale sweeps of the Kunar and Panjshir Valleys between February and April 1980—the last of which marked the largest single Soviet operation since 1945. This dislodged insurgents from a wide area, but only temporarily, while smaller units left themselves vulnerable to Mujahideen attacks of their own, such as in August when the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 201st Motor Rifle Division fell into an ambush at Kisham, near the frontier with Tajikistan, and lost 45 troops.
The Soviets struck again in the Panjshir Valley in September 1980, followed by other sweeps against guerrillas in November and from January to February 1981. This region, north of Kabul, held particular strategic significance, owing to its proximity to the road running north–south, which connected Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif through the Salang Tunnel and Pul-e Khumri. This represented the stronghold of Ahmad Shah Masoud, the best known Mujahideen leader to emerge during the war. Soviet and DRA forces made substantial efforts—no less than nine in fact—to clear and hold the Panjshir but never succeeded. Other sizeable operations in 1981 included a largely Afghan Army operation, which in July succeeded in securing the Kabul–Jalalabad road near Sarobi; yet it is instructive to observe that regime forces suffered from low morale, performed poorly, and depended heavily on Soviet cooperation or shamelessly left the execution of major operations entirely to their patrons. This policy applied equally to the Soviets’ fourth major offensive into the Panjshir, in August. This, like the others before it, failed, largely owing to paltry troop levels that rendered holding ground all but impossible for any substantial period. As before, the resistance troops simply reestablished themselves across ground from which the Soviets temporarily drove them by dint of superior firepower. Resistance casualties certainly mounted, but replacements were always to be found amongst those driven from villages destroyed from the air, living in squalid refugee camps over the border or preparing for Jihad in one of the thousands of madrases (Islamic religious schools) in Pakistan whence thousands of displaced Afghans joined the resistance with the promise of martyrdom the reward for the fallen.
In the west, around Herat, Soviet and regime forces engaged in heavy fighting with the Mujahideen in October 1981, with the air base at Shindand, south of Herat, the strong focus of resistance attention. Such actions proved that, despite inhospitable terrain and the great distances across which they conveyed supplies by mule, donkey, and horseback through the treacherous passes connecting Afghanistan with Pakistan, the Mujahideen could still undertake operations frequently and on a respectable scale—a circumstance partly rendered feasible by the large exodus of residents from Herat appalled by the regime’s suppression of the rising of March 1979 and consequently drawn to the anti-Soviet cause. Further major encounters in and around Herat between the resistance and Soviet and Afghan forces took place in December 1981 and into January of the following year, with continuous, low-level fighting occurring thereafter.
The Afghan regime’s ineptness came to the fore in April 1982 when Mujahideen penetrated Bagram air base and destroyed 23 Soviet and Afghan Air Force aircraft. The following month, another major Soviet-Afghan offensive into the Panjshir, followed by another—perhaps the largest of all the nine conducted in that area—in August and September, failed to make inroads against Masoud’s strongholds despite the enormous scale of the operation. As a consequence of the stalemate reached there, the regime negotiated a cease-fire with Masoud, which held from December 1982 to April 1984 on what appeared mutually beneficial terms, enabling the Soviets to release thousands of their troops for potentially more successful operations elsewhere, while simultaneously providing some relief to Masoud’s exhausted forces, but particularly to the gravely stricken local population, whose humanitarian needs the insurgents could not in the midst of the Soviet offensive adequately meet, especially when compounded by the severe winter of 1982–83. Moreover, Masoud’s forces had suffered heavily during the offensive and the cease-fire probably enabled him to recover and regroup before pursuing new operations further north, such as in the Shomali Valley, north of Kabul, where it is thought he struck, in conjunction with other commanders, at Soviet positions near Balkh.
In 1983 the Soviets altered their strategy fundamentally, embarking on a deliberate policy of clearing the Afghan population from rural areas and driving them either to seek refuge in the cities—where the Soviets or DRA forces exercized more or less total control—or to other, less strategically vital areas within the country, or over the border into Iran or Pakistan. At the same time, the Soviets continued to conduct major operations against areas where the resistance appeared in concentrated numbers—a painstaking, exhausting, and frequently fruitless undertaking. Often, owing to poor intelligence, they directed the focus of their attention in the wrong area of the country, as in the case of the north in the spring of 1983, where Abdul Qader (known more commonly by his nom de guerre, Zabiullah) led as many as 20,000 men and continued to conduct the sort of small-scale operations initiated by him three years before, including attacks, raids, and ambushes in and around Baghlan to the southeast, Balkh to the west, and Kunduz to the east. Amongst numerous Mujahideen successes during this phase in the war, the victory achieved in May in Mazar-e Sharif, the principal northern city of Afghanistan, figured prominently. Mazar, whose flat and treeless surroundings rendered guerrilla operations particularly difficult, nevertheless witnessed a bold Mujahideen attack that brought down the civilian airport’s control tower.
As was common throughout the country, Zabiullah operated with other local, albeit less powerful, commanders who vied for control of their respective immediate areas—or indeed tried to lay claim to territory well beyond their normal areas of operation. Indeed, it is vital to appreciate that the Mujahideen did not operate as a unified fighting force with any more common objective beyond that of ousting the Soviets from Afghan soil and overthrowing the communist regime, whether headed by Taraki, Karmal, or Najibullah. Rivalry between different Mujahideen units, which could consist of a merely a dozen to several thousand fighters, sometimes led to open feuds over contested ground; indeed, observers did not rule out the fact that Zabiullah’s death, caused by a mine in December 1984, may have constituted assassination rather than a simple vagary of war. Although commanders could agree on a common foreign enemy, they still retained an eye on Afghanistan’s long-term political future and their place in it.
During the course of 1984, in line with their policy of depopulating regions presumed sympathetic to the Mujahideen, the Soviets conducted a wide-scale bombing campaign in the west, particularly around Herat, in so doing driving untold thousands across the border into Iran. In the Panjshir, with the cease-fire over in April, they opened yet another major offensive in that valley, which continued into May, with another following in September—again employing their new strategy of depopulation through a combination of intensive shell fire, regular bombing raids, and mine-laying. In August, the Soviets sought to relieve the siege of the garrison at Jaji in Paktia. There followed further efforts against the resistance in the east from January 1985 with the purpose of clearing areas in order to create bases along the Pakistani border, both to interdict the movement of supplies into Afghanistan and to weaken the flow of resistance fighters seeking a temporary safe haven in the tribal areas of western Pakistan or in that country’s province of Baluchistan further to the south. During this second phase, which ended in April 1985, the Soviets suffered 9,175 fatal casualties—an average of 148 per month.
During this period Gorbachev opened negotiations in an effort to withdraw Soviet forces while simultaneously attempting to reduce the level of casualties during a period when discontent with the war steadily grew. Soviet troops sought increasingly to pass responsibility for making hostile contact with the resistance to their Afghan regime allies, depending themselves more on air and artillery operations and employing motor-rifle units to support DRA forces both operationally and in terms of morale. As Soviet and Afghan government forces continued to struggle in the east of the country, in June 1985 the resistance struck Shindand air base in the west, destroying about 20 aircraft. Fighting in nearby Herat in July grew so intense as to oblige the governor to leave the city, while at the same time the Soviets launched their ninth and last major offensive in the Panjshir Valley. The DRA regime also continued its efforts: in January 1986 its forces attacked Zendejan, inflicting heavy casualties on resistance elements but failing to consolidate its own tenuous control over the region. In the spring, anticipating a Soviet offensive against Zhawar, near the Pakistani border, the Mujahideen reinforced their base there, strengthening their anti-aircraft positions, and placing them about 5 miles outside their base, complete with defences in depth. They mined the approaches while small arms, RPGs, mortars, and recoilless rifles covered the area. Communications in the form of field telephones and radios kept the various outposts in contact with one another. The Soviets, in turn, provided one regiment of air assault troops together with 12,000 troops from the Afghan Army. Only 800 Mujahideen defended the base at Zhawar, but they received advanced warning of the attack by the presence of two waves of helicopters, which approached ahead the main assault. Air strikes and an artillery bombardment followed, though the attackers could not be certain of the insurgents’ positions.
At 7 a.m. heliborne troops touched down at scattered landing zones near Zhawar. The defenders shot down two helicopters in the process, but Soviet fixed-wing air support hampered further Mujahideen success and destroyed several of their positions, including 18 men killed. Their commander, Serajuddin Haqqani, and 150 of his men were trapped by debris blocking the cave in which they lay in wait, but by a quirk of fate the carpet bombing that followed cleared the entrance and facilitated their escape. With no answer to the air strikes, the defenders opted to move on to the offensive, thereby remaining close enough to the attackers to avoid fire from the aircraft. Haqqani managed to overrun four landing zones, taking several hundred prisoners in the process—a circumstance that led the Soviets later to alter their tactics to avoid setting down helicopters in the midst of resistance positions, which could shower descending aircraft with RPG and machine gun fire. But the Mujahideen could do no more: Soviet and Afghan forces managed to outflank Haqqani’s position, forcing his men to fall back, and as reinforcements continued to appear around Zhawar, the resistance declined to maintain what amounted to an impossible defence and scattered.
DRA troops held Zhawar for a few hours but unaccountably neglected either to carry off the arms and ammunition that remained for the taking or even to destroy them. Likewise, they made a feeble attempt to destroy the caves with explosives, while their opponents, refusing to withdraw without registering a final act of defiance, fired rockets at regime forces as if to signify the hollow victory that Zhawar represented for Kabul. Indeed, within a few weeks the base returned to operational status, garrisoned once again by resistance fighters, whose losses in the defence of Zhawar amounted to 281 killed and 363 wounded, with government forces suffering similar losses. As commonly practiced—though of course utterly forbidden by International Law, the Mujahideen executed all of the officers they captured and compelled the soldiers to submit to two years’ manual labour in rear logistical areas, with the promise of release after serving their time. Zhawar demonstrated that the resistance could not, in fixed positions, hold out against the concentrated firepower of Soviet and DRA forces. Nevertheless, in turn, although outwardly successful, their opponents could not muster the numbers to hold positions seized in the operation.
The capture of the major resistance base at Zhawar signified a welcome development for regime forces in an otherwise frustrating campaign against opponents who proved exceedingly difficult to pin into position and seldom entered an engagement except where the ground, weather, numbers, or other factors played to their advantage. But successes such as Zhawar failed to conceal the fact that Soviet and DRA forces could rarely exert more than a temporary impact over a limited area before insufficient numbers and military priorities elsewhere obliged their withdrawal back to their bases of operation. Thus, taking ground posed comparatively few problems for conventional forces enjoying vastly superior firepower; holding that ground, on the other hand, required a far greater commitment in manpower than the Soviets were prepared to commit. Withdrawal inevitably left in its wake a vacuum, which the Mujahideen quickly filled.
In the south, the regime largely controlled Kandahar, but it could never hold down the region permanently against resistance units under such talented commanders as Haji Abdul Latif or the numerous other smaller rebel factions formed and held together by tribal loyalties or clustered around a particularly charismatic leader. If fighting in southern Afghanistan, particularly in and around Kandahar, tended to manifest itself in skirmishing in contrast to the large-scale operations conducted in the east by Soviet forces, it nonetheless occupied the attention and energy of regime forces for years. The absence of set-piece battles, coordinated campaigns, and great sweeps may belie a sense of tranquillity; but nothing could be further from the case. Low-intensity warfare by definition does not yield heavy casualties in the short term: there is no Somme, El Alamein, or Stalingrad; but gradual, mounting losses inflicted by the Mujahideen slowly ground down Soviet morale, encouraging the cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity so characteristic of irregular warfare. Indeed, both sides committed barbarities against each other until they became commonplace. The Soviets sometimes cold-bloodedly dispatched prisoners by dropping them from helicopters after interrogation or simply shot them in the head, and both the Soviets and the DRA regime committed numerous massacres amounting to genocide.25 The resistance, for its part, sometimes tortured its captives by means of castration, disfigurement, or skinning alive. Death could come slowly by securing the prisoner to pegs planted in the ground, fixed there to die slowly under a baking sun, or could come quickly via beheading.
Vladislav Tamarov, a young Soviet conscript, observed one of the common instances of atrocity committed by both sides:
I saw houses burned by the Mujahadeen, as well as disfigured bodies of prisoners they’d taken. But I saw other things too: villages destroyed by our shelling and bodies of women, killed by mistake. When you shoot at every rustling in the bushes, there’s no time to think about who’s there. But for an Afghan, it didn’t matter if his wife had been killed intentionally or accidentally. He went into the mountains to seek revenge.26
Often the combatants simply refused to offer quarter, as Tamarov recalled in the case of one Mujahid with his arms above his head in token of surrender:
According to the rules of war, I should have taken him prisoner. But there were no rules in this war. I had no choice—there were only three of us, and we didn’t know how many of them were left. To this day, I remember the fear in his eyes; it was so strong, that it was hard for me to take aim. All I could do was close my eyes and pull the trigger.27
The Soviets, far from pursuing a “hearts and minds” campaign in order to encourage the population’s sympathies with the government in Kabul, committed atrocities with shocking regularity against villages suspected of aiding the resistance or in retaliation for ambushes, but such ruthless, counterproductive acts at best forced them out—denying the Mujahideen the rural support so vital to their operations—or at worst drove the survivors into the hands of the guerrillas. Thousands joined local Mujahideen groups, while most fled across the Pakistani border to join the resistance at its base in Peshawar before returning—trained, armed, bitter, and vengeful. A young refugee Afghan boy of about eight graphically related an account of the Soviets arriving in his village:
The mujahideen went back to the mountains. They [the Russians] came in our direction. We were all in bed. They broke down the door and came in. The door was smashed. We were all frightened and jumped up. My brother didn’t get up but they forced him to stand up. They shot my father and my brother. They lifted me up and wounded me with their bayonets … I lay down and cried. I was sad because my father had been killed. My father was dead and was lying on the ground. They took us outside. I saw lots of people had been taken out of their houses into the alleyways and killed. We went to the bazaar. The shops, the shops had been burnt. People had been killed. Everywhere women had been killed, men had been killed, even boys … They didn’t leave a single one alive.28
Appreciating at last that such counterproductive methods only galvanized the population’s defiant stance and increasingly aware that their military prospects were in decline, in the summer of 1986 the Soviets eased their campaign of driving civilians out of rural areas in favor of seeking to secure their cooperation with, if not allegiance to, the regime in Kabul. This very belated policy yielded few dividends from a people marginalized by brutality, the forced conscription of their menfolk into the ranks of the DRA army, as well as by the presence of foreign troops supporting a deeply unpopular regime. Thus, war merely continued as before. On July 6, the resistance conducted a coordinated and successful attack against an enormous Soviet convoy near Maimana, while in August the Soviets, supported by Afghan security forces, conducted substantial sweeps into the Logar Valley. On the 26th of the same month the Mujahideen set off massive explosions near Kabul when they fired 107 mm and 122 mm rockets into ammunition dumps at Kargha. Arriving to secure the area and the local town of Paghman, Afghan government forces met heavy opposition, which after fierce fighting left the area in ruins. At about the same time, intense fighting took place in Herat.
During this third phase of the war the Soviets made more use of Special Forces in the form of Spetsnaz and reconnaissance units, which sought to interdict weapons, ammunition and supplies destined for the Mujahideen via Pakistan, but the frequency of contact during this particularly bloody period of the conflict cost the Soviets 2,745 personnel killed, at an average of 137 a month. These elite units performed well, and their deployment in greater numbers demonstrated the Soviets’ eventual recognition that such forces could fulfil the pressing operational need for highly mobile, highly trained, specialist troops conversant with the tactics of counterinsurgency. But the Spetsnaz and other elite forces never accounted for more than 15% of Soviet combat power and simply could not sustain the extremely punishing levels of continuous deployment imposed on them. Indeed, even as the number of Special Forces reached their height in Afghanistan, 15,000 other troops withdrew in the summer of 1986, in line with Gorbachev’s decision to bring home all the Soviet troops by early 1989.
With the war clearly going badly and the Soviets now committed to withdrawing, they were keen to bolster the new president, Mohammed Najibullah, the brutish former head of the vicious KhAD, and particularly Najibullah’s “Policy of National Reconciliation,” a plan to reconcile the government with moderate political and religious leaders of noncommunist persuasion, while simultaneously strengthening the numbers and capacity of Afghan forces and security personnel in recognition of the somewhat disconcerting fact that the regime would soon depend largely upon its own wits and resources to defeat the insurgency after final Soviet withdrawal.
Soviet forces naturally continued to support the efforts of the Afghan Army, but by now commanders sought to preserve the lives of men soon to be dispatched home. Part of this process included increasing attacks by air, such as with heavy bomber strikes originating from the Soviet Union against Mujahideen positions around Faisabad, Jalalabad, and Kandahar, from which ground troops had already evacuated. The Soviets also unsuccessfully launched raids against insurgent rocket batteries, shelling Kabul on a regular basis and, as their last forces were withdrawing, aircraft hitting the Panjshir Valley in an effort to keep Masoud’s forces distracted from shifting their operations to the Afghan capital. But in this fourth, and final, phase the Soviets largely occupied themselves with completing their withdrawal, which they carried out in two stages: between May and August 1988 and between November 1988 and February 1989.
Apart from Soviet troops’ withdrawals, this fourth phase of the war is notable for two other features: the introduction into resistance arsenals of the Stinger ground-to-air missile whose effectiveness, though often exaggerated, nevertheless inflicted a serious blow on Soviet air power; and the increasing frequency of raids conducted by the Mujahideen over the Soviet border.
With respect to the Stinger, Bocharov witnessed the weapon’s effectiveness first-hand:
Suddenly, the chopper shuddered, as though it had collided with something, pitched over to one side, and seemed to halt in midair. Then, describing an imperfect parabola, it seemed to head back for the ground. But it wasn’t flying back—it was falling, falling like a stone. A [missile] had pierced its stabilizer, wrecked the metal, and set the fuselage on fire. The pilots made desperate efforts to pull out, but it was useless. The chopper, with its full load of wounded, roared toward the ground.29
Observers dispute the number of Soviet aircraft downed by the Stinger, but it may well have accounted for hundreds.
Although the Mujahideen inflicted only small degrees of damage in cross-border raids into the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics, they palpably established the fact that not only had the Soviets failed to bring the insurgency under control, but that the resistance could penetrate enemy territory almost at will, such as that conducted 12 miles north of the Amu Darya River when insurgents bombarded a factory with rockets in April 1987.
As before though, such small-scale operations functioned in tandem with much larger engagements, such as the renewed heavy fighting that took place in Herat on April 7, when encounters in the streets resulted in over 50 casualties inflicted against Soviet and Afghan Army personnel. The following month the Soviets launched an operation specifically intended to relieve the besieged garrison in Jaji in Paktia Province. Although a success, the Mujahideen struck back to ensure their opponents did not establish a permanent presence in the area, forcing them out in mid-June. The following month, on the 27th, particular trouble erupted in the south—never a tranquil place, even before the Soviet invasion: a Mujahideen missile brought down a plane containing senior Soviet and Afghan officers while attempting a landing at the airport in Kandahar. At about the same time, the small Soviet garrison at Bamiyan abandoned the city after holding off a Mujahideen attack, while the resistance stepped up their campaign of terror in Kabul when on October 9 they planted a car bomb that killed 27 people—one of many urban terrorist attacks committed by the resistance in towns and cities across Afghanistan.
Further proof of the Soviets’ inability to hold much more than the ground on which they stood took place after the successful relief of the besieged city of Khost, in which 18,000 troops, of whom 10,000 were Soviets, succeeded between November and December 1987 in reopening to convoys the road between Gardez and Khost. The Soviets eventually abandoned these positions at the end of January 1988—another striking example of their inability to secure even positions of significant strategic value while burdened by other pressing demands on troops and supplies. Shortly thereafter, as part of their policy of withdrawal, the Soviets left Kandahar.
With Soviets forces evacuating the south of the country, activity continued in other regions, where resistance fighters, emboldened by their opponents’ withdrawal, struck in Kabul on April 27, 1988, exploding a truck bomb that killed six and wounded several times more during the tenth anniversary of the communist takeover. Bombs planted in vehicles formed but one form of the Mujahideen’s renewed attacks in Kabul; on May 9 they fired rockets into the city, killing at least 23 civilians, with many more similar attacks to follow over the coming months. Such acts of terror failed to weaken the regime’s grip on the city, but they exposed in stark terms the futility of the authorities’ efforts to protect the inhabitants from indiscriminate violence and thus to demonstrate a capacity to maintain security even within urban areas—much less within the seat of government itself. In short, by operating in and around Kabul seemingly at will, the Mujahideen sought to underline the inevitability of the regime’s downfall.
Elsewhere, in May and June 1988, renewed fighting took place in Kandahar—a city no longer garrisoned by Soviet troops—between local resistance forces and government troops, but with no decisive results. Still, the Mujahideen succeeded on June 17 in seizing Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul Province, a place of symbolic importance as the first such city to fall to the resistance. The victory proved short-lived, however; straddling the main road between Kabul and Kandahar, Qalat enjoyed a level of strategic significance, which the regime could not ignore lest its retention by the Mujahideen signal the general defection of other towns and cities across the country. As such, the Afghan Army took particular pains to retake the city four days later.
The operational record of the war reveals that the Soviets completely failed to accept that their doctrine and training ill-suited them for the type of war into which they plunged themselves. Fully capable of undertaking operations on a grand scale and in a conventional context, apart from their Special Forces, Soviet troops were not armed, equipped, or trained for a platoon leaders’ contest, which entailed locating and destroying small, elusive, local forces that only stood their ground and fought when terrain and circumstances favored them—and otherwise either struck quickly before rapidly melting away. There were no fixed positions, no established frontlines and no substantial bases of operation for the insurgents. Whereas the Soviets could perform extremely well at the operational level—complete with large-scale all-arms troop movements—these could not be easily adapted to circumstances on the ground, where the war was a tactical one in which Soviet tactics did not conform to the requirements of guerrilla warfare. Soviet equipment, weapons, and doctrine suited their forces well for a confrontation on a massive scale on the northern European plain, a context in which they were confident in employing massed artillery to obliterate NATO’s defensive positions before driving through the gaps created to crush further resistance and pursue the remnants of shattered units.
Soviet tactics did not accord with their opponent’s fighting methods. No benefit accrued to massing artillery to carry out a bombardment of an enemy who seldom concentrated in large numbers and who dispersed at will, reforming elsewhere for the next ambush or raid. Soviet conscripts and reservists could dismount from a personnel carrier and deploy rapidly for the purpose of laying down suppressive fire on an enemy unit or subunit of like composition, but the tactics and standard battle drills of the typical motorized rifle regiment failed to meet the needs of a highly mobile, fluid enemy who refused to fight on terms consistent with Soviet doctrine. Airborne, air assault, and Spetsnaz forces learned to adapt their tactics to meet the demands of a guerrilla war, and in this regard they achieved some success. But the level of innovation required to defeat such a wide-scale insurgency proved beyond the means of Soviet forces as a whole, and thus must be seen as one amongst many factors that doomed them to ultimate failure.
The Soviets laboured under the illusion that because the heavy application of military force had succeeded in the past, it was bound to succeed as before. Important precedents existed to support this view, including the numerous campaigns conducted against independence movements as long ago as the Russian Civil War and into the 1920s, when Bolshevik forces put down revolts in the Ukraine, Central Asia, the Transcaucasus, and even the Far East. Even during the Second World War—quite apart from the herculean efforts first to oust the Germans from home soil and then to drive on Berlin—Soviet forces quashed serious opposition from Ukrainian and Belorussian nationals, some of whom carried on the struggle after 1945. After all this—and when their forces easily put down the risings in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—Soviet forces could be forgiven for thinking that their might stood invincible against all foes, conventional and unconventional alike.
Afghanistan revealed this fallacy, and even when they adapted to new circumstances, the Soviets failed to deploy sufficient numbers of forces to fulfil the mission. They could not possibly hope to defeat the insurgency when spread across such a vast area. The defence of bases, airfields, cities, and lines of communication alone committed the bulk of Soviet forces to static duties when circumstances demanded unremitting strike operations against the insurgents, thereby maintaining the initiative and obliging the resistance to look to their own survival in favor of attacks of their own. Soviet regiments, companies, and platoons routinely stood understrength, with regiments often down to single battalion strength and companies little more than oversized platoons. Much of this occurred despite the large biannual troop levies that certainly furnished the men—but whose numbers needlessly dwindled enormously due to poor field sanitation practices and inadequate diet, both of which contributed to the widespread dissemination of disease throughout the armed forces. A staggering one-quarter to one-third of a typical unit’s strength was accounted for by amoebic dysentery, meningitis, typhus, hepatitis, and malaria, leaving actual field strength woefully low and so operationally compromised that commanders deemed it necessary to create composite units on an ad hoc basis.
In assessing the tactics and the fighting capacity of the 40th Army, one is struck by the generally poor performance of its regular units. As discussed earlier, they were trained to fight NATO forces in the plains of central Europe, with a strict adherence to orthodox formations and methods of attack. This obliged them to remain close to their armored vehicles as they advanced down valleys in which the Mujahideen took full advantage of the ground, much of it familiar to them. Performance improved amongst Soviet units as they examined their mistakes, but the problem of understrength units regularly dogged their efforts and little could be done to counter the continuous drain on their morale, caused by the anxiety imposed by the continuous threat of attack by guerrillas who sought out the Soviet’s vulnerabilities by day—but especially by night—so wearing down morale and causing physical and mental exhaustion. The war required immense physical efforts to make contact with an elusive opponent, whereas many Soviet soldiers lacked the stamina to cross the great distances necessary to come to grips with their enemy, not least across inhospitable terrain. Their training and equipment proved inadequate, and security and intelligence, particularly at the tactical level, proved poor to the extent that even when attempting to surround groups of insurgents, Soviet troops often failed to close the ring, thus allowing the enemy to escape through gaps or otherwise fight their way out. Overly confident in its fighting capacity—an attitude perhaps reinforced by a reputation of military invincibility earned as a consequence of the army’s performance in the Second World War—and with no combat experience acquired since that time—the 40th Army found itself the victim of breathtaking hubris: ill-trained for the type of warfare in which it engaged and incapable of achieving the unrealistic aims set for it by Moscow, it launched into the fray regardless.
Over time neither overwhelming military force nor the internal reforms undertaken by the Soviets and their Afghan protégés could hope to crush the insurgency. While some Afghans, particularly those in the cities and above all the educated classes, collaborated with the Soviets, the Afghan Army stood distinctively subordinate to its counterpart and in that role—and given its consistently poor operational record—morale necessarily suffered and declined. Neither Soviet nor Afghan leaders could offer a political solution to continued resistance, and with an impasse in the field stretching far longer than ever anticipated, stirrings in Moscow began to encourage withdrawal, not least because the Mujahideen demonstrated no inclination to negotiate under circumstances where compromise offered them nothing.30
Accordingly, beginning in 1985 Moscow began to appreciate that the war had become unwinnable. Chernenko and Andropov, both of whom succeeded Brezhnev as party secretary for brief periods (November 1982–February 1984 and February 1984–March 1985, respectively), suffered from ill-health during their entire periods in office, in the course of which they failed to exercise the energy and leadership required to keep the insurgency under control, much less destroy it. This obliged the Central Committee to appoint a younger man to finish the job. Coming to power on March 10, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev inherited an intractable war, as the Chief of the General Staff explained:
In the past seven years Soviet soldiers have had their boots on the ground in every square kilometre of the country. But as soon as they left, the enemy returned and restored everything the way it was before. We have lost this war. The majority of the Afghan people support the counter-revolution. We have lost the peasantry, who have got nothing from the revolution. 80% of the country is in the hands of the counterrevolution. And the position of the peasants there is better than it is on the territory controlled by the government.31
Gorbachev represented a fresh start in Soviet foreign policy as well as domestic politics; a leader whose policy of glasnost (openness) had from the beginning of his time in office already tolerated internal—and even public—criticism of the war, and who recognized the strategic failure committed by his country. His desire to extricate troops from Afghanistan centered on three key motives: first and foremost, the failing prospects of the war rendered further operations pointless; second, withdrawal would provide a mechanism by which to improve the Soviet Union’s relations with the West, particularly at a time when the issue nuclear disarmament remained high on both countries’ agendas; and third, with domestic discontent partly assuaged by the troops’ return and military expenditure reduced, he could concentrate on the economic and political reforms urgently needed within the USSR.
The origins of the decision to withdraw require brief examination. At a Politburo meeting of October 17, 1985, Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, claims that Gorbachev declared, “It’s time to leave,” to which the other members raised no objection. They fixed no date for final withdrawal, but the die had been cast. Debate continues about the degree to which this meeting represented the first concrete decision to bring an end to the war, but any doubts may be cast aside by the decisive results of the Politburo meeting held on November 13, 1986, in which Marshal Sergei Akhromeev made the devastatingly prescient and unchallengeable assertion that, “We have lost the battle for the Afghan people.” Gorbachev proposed that the Soviet Union should withdraw its forces over a two-year period, with half removed in 1987 and the rest to leave the following year—a recommendation to which the other members gave their assent. Herein lay the idea in principle; now Gorbachev needed the mechanism by which to implement it.
To lay the groundwork for troop withdrawal, Soviet authorities sought to expand the Afghan Army so as to enable it to take a more active combat role, though this did not achieve the desired effect since DRA forces continued to perform unreliably against their compatriots in the resistance, leaving Soviet troops to continue to bear the greatest burden in combat. This compounded anxiety over the likelihood of a smooth transition of security affairs over to the Kabul regime, already looking grim in light of the regime’s continuing failure to successfully implement its programme of reforms. Gennady Bocharov was probably not alone in expressing anxiety about the competence of the Soviet advisors serving in Kabul:
As a rule of thumb, party advisers were Soviet city and regional party secretaries.
They knew absolutely nothing about the east. Their conception of Afghanistan was hazy, to say the least. That is not to say that there were no real specialists on the east in Kabul … But the standard party advisers dealt with practical matters. They were not interested in consultations. As for those who were charged with devising strategy and tactics—they frankly ignored the opinions of any specialist…
The trouble with the advisers was not just that they didn’t know Afghanistan. They did not know something even more important: how to run things in their own backyard, let alone a foreign country.32
In short, it became clear that Moscow would eventually have to withdraw from Afghanistan in as honourable a fashion as possible and thus leave Najibullah to his own devices—albeit heavily subsidized by his sponsors with food, weapons, equipment and supplies.
The United Nations stood as the obvious intermediary between the belligerents upon whom Gorbachev depended to achieve this, with the Afghan government effectively representing Soviet interests and Pakistan acting on behalf of the Mujahideen, since Islamabad supported the resistance even if unofficially, while the United States by extension supported the resistance through Pakistan. As such, negotiations conducted by the United Nations, if successful, stood to benefit the interests of all the principal parties to the conflict, belligerents and nonbelligerents alike. Having said this, accords brokered by the United Nations necessarily set some limitations on its freedom of action in light of the Soviet Union’s position as a permanent member of the Security Council. That fact had protected the aggressor in 1979 since the Soviet Union could veto the United Nation’s original condemnation of its invasion. Now, nearly a decade later, for the sake of extricating them from an unwinnable war, the Soviets were happily prepared to regard the United Nations as a third party in the process of “conflict resolution” by offering its “Good Offices” and assisting with shuttle diplomacy. Specifically, the secretary general, by the authority of the United Nations, could engage in negotiations unilaterally, supported by the UN Secretariat and its personnel in support.
The Geneva Accords were signed on April 14, 1988, by which the Soviets agreed to remove their forces from Afghanistan. Other essential elements established for Afghanistan and Pakistan a policy of mutual noninterference and nonintervention with respect to sovereignty, economic stability, and territorial integrity. According to one section of Article II, neither side could train, equip, finance, or recruit mercenaries, whatever their origin, for the purpose of engaging in hostile activity in either party’s territory, including the maintenance of bases for purposes of supporting outside forces. As such, the DRA was to be left to its own devices with respect to subduing its own domestic insurgency and could not accept foreign intervention—though this did not preclude money and weapons.
For the various parties concerned, this represented a reasonable outcome, notwithstanding the fact that no delegates directly represented the Mujahideen. Attempting to negotiate with such disparate groups as composed the resistance—represented by seven different political parties, all based in Pakistan—would probably have been futile as any accord would inevitably have required separate agreements with rival groups, a course almost certain to prolong the conflict and lead to fighting between factions within the Mujahideen competing for power in a post-communist Afghanistan. But while the settlement enabled the Soviets to claim that they had finally accorded with international calls for their withdrawal, they obviously could not ensure a peaceful outcome between their surrogates in Kabul and the resistance. Thus, the Geneva Accords merely brought to a close one dimension of the Afghan civil war; if anything every prospect existed for that bitter struggle—which, it is important to recall, had begun in 1978, before the Soviet invasion—to continue in the wake of Soviet withdrawal.
That withdrawal signalled the international isolation of Najibullah’s regime, formalized when diplomats from key Western nations closed their embassies in Kabul. West Germany began the process on January 21, 1989, followed on the 27th by France, Britain, Japan, and Italy. The United States withdrew its diplomatic staff three days later, only reopening its embassy in December 2001 when its troops retook Kabul from the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 bombings. Meanwhile, the passing of Soviet troops back over the border went largely unchallenged by the resistance, though the Soviets themselves, anxious to prevent attacks on their troops as they withdrew, staged a campaign of terror, largely with concentrated artillery fire, against villages along their route toward the frontier so as to intimidate the Mujahideen into restraint. Thousands streamed away from their villages as vast Soviet columns trundled through the smoke of the devastation left in their wake. Finally, on February 15, General Gromov, commander of the 40th Army and the last Soviet soldier to leave the country, crossed the bridge at Termez and so putting an end to a tragic adventure fraught with human folly and misguided ambition.
In the immediate wake of the Soviet’s departure, the Mujahideen largely ceased their operations, preserving and expanding their resources and manpower for the day when they would oppose other factions vying for sole control of government machinery in Kabul. Civil war was, in fact, encouraged by the fact that rival groups expected some influence over the war’s outcome in compensation for the effort expended since its beginning. Indeed, internecine fighting was bound to continue until a sole victor emerged. Any power-sharing stood unlikely, for rival factions possessed no mechanism for building trust between rivals; no agreement existed to divide responsibility for the rebuilding of the country’s devastated infrastructure, for control over the military and security forces, or for the distribution of political power, amongst many other issues. As a natural consequence of these and many other factors, the fighting continued for another three years. During this period the Soviets continued to fund Najibullah’s government, leaving in its hands an enormous stockpile of weapons and ammunition, which enabled the president to maintain, albeit temporarily, his grip on power until 1992. In the postwithdrawal period the Soviet Union established the greatest airbridge since the Berlin Blockade of 1948, furnishing aid to the DRA estimated at a staggering $300 million a month, with one report indicating that weapons alone delivered in the six months after February 1989 carried a value of $1.4 billion.
But matters continued to deteriorate for the Afghan regime, a fact underscored by the attempted coup staged by General Shah Nawaz Tenai in April 1990, after which Najibullah quite understandably took an increasingly dim view of the loyalty of his security forces, which declined in strength from as many as 400,000 (including army, paramilitary police, and KhAD) in 1989 to 160,000 in 1991. His subsequent actions betrayed a man narrowly clinging to power: his desperate appeals to rural leaders for stability and cooperation rejected, he turned to raising sizeable militias to achieve the objectives, which his unreliable regular forces could not. In Herat, a hotbed of resistance, government militia increased from about 14,000 in 1986 to 70,000 in 1991, largely through attractive offers of arms and money to Mujahideen leaders prepared to defect with their fighters to the government now that the Soviet threat had passed and Kabul could supply their needs. A fifth of former Mujahideen groups shifted to the government side and recast themselves as government militia, while a further 40 percent accepted offers of a cease-fire. The rest remained irreconcilable. Ironically, these new units proved to be the president’s undoing, for they grew so large—170,000 in 1991, accounting for over 50 percent of government forces—as to become practically self-governing in their own areas of operation, and when, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow immediately ceased funding the DRA, the various militias refused to obey orders from Najibullah’s now transparently tottering regime. In many cases these rogue forces established themselves as independent units under the more powerful militia commanders who fashioned themselves into warlords—some controlling extensive areas almost as fiefdoms, collecting taxes and administering their own laws—operating in an increasingly chaotic and unstable state. Less powerful militia groups mimicked this practice, either vying for control over smaller areas theoretically under government authority or over other militia groups—and in so doing inaugurated a new period of the existing civil war, which followed the fall of Najibullah’s regime in April 1992, and which continued even after the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996—by which time the loss in human life may even have exceeded that of the period of Soviet occupation.
Earlier chapters have revealed the Soviets’ many military shortcomings in frank terms. It is now time to examine the impact of those shortcomings on the troops themselves and to assess the political impact of the war on the USSR.
Statistics connected with the Soviets’ role in the war make for depressing reading. Total forces deployed over the whole course of the conflict amounted to approximately 642,000 personnel. Of these, approximately 545,000 served in the regular forces while another 90,000 came from armed KGB units. Perhaps 5,000 belonged to the MVD (Main Department of Internal Troops, i.e., internal security troops). Statistics for the dead and missing vary according to the source consulted, but range between 13,000 and 15,000 personnel. A total of 10,751 soldiers became invalids, many as amputees. Yet these already substantial figures must be seen in light of the 469,685 sick and wounded—or over 70 percent of the total force—discharged and repatriated. Statistics for those stricken with disease tell an even more revealing story: a staggering 415,932, of whom 115,308 men suffered from infectious hepatitis and 31,080 from typhoid fever. The sheer scale of this suffering reveals the dreadful state of hygiene prevalent within the Soviet forces and their appalling conditions in the field. The pressure on Soviet hospitals—particularly with respect to the long-term sick and the disabled—can only be reckoned to have been enormous, with correspondingly serious social implications for society as a whole—unquantifiable yet palpable. In sharp contrast to their fathers who had defended the motherland against the German menace during the Second World War, soldiers returning from Afghanistan received no hero’s welcome but also often felt shunned by a public detached from, if not actually hostile to, the war. The loss in matériel and hardware also helps place in perspective the scale of the conflict and offers a sharp lesson to those who adhere to technology alone as some sort of magical recipe for success: 118 jets, 333 helicopters, 147 tanks, 1,314 APCs, 433 artillery pieces and mortars, 1,138 radio sets and CP vehicles, 510 engineering vehicles, and 11,369 trucks.33
There is no question that the Soviet war effort suffered from poor or virtually nonexistent political direction. The series of either ineffective political masters in Moscow or the regularity with which they sickened and died off during the 1980s contributed in no small way toward Soviet failure. General Secretary Brezhnev, not healthy at the time of the invasion, became incapacitated the following year and did not succumb to his illness until November 1982, leaving all decisions to committees rendering collective leadership. His successor, Yuri Andropov, lasted less than two years, and upon his death in February 1984, Konstantin Chernenko carried on for little more than a year until his own demise. During this whole period the war was allowed to carry on with little in the way of decision-making over substantial issues concerning the conduct of operations or the overall objective of the war. When, at last Mikhail Gorbachev took the helm and found that the war could not be brought to conclusion within a year—in fact Soviet casualties rose to record levels during that period—he sought a means to withdraw in a dignified fashion—which as we have seen the United Nations provided.
Even before the troops returned the impact of the war at home had become palpable. The Soviet military experience in Afghanistan amounted to a slow, attritional effort, which not only demonstrated the declining combat effectiveness of the USSR’s armed forces, but also revealed stark, irreparable cracks developing within the Soviet political infrastructure. Society itself underwent change, owing to the rotation of conscripted troops in and out of Afghanistan, whose disappointments, stories of hardship, and frustration permeated Soviet society, undermining morale and sowing the seeds of doubt regarding both the war effort and the people’s confidence in the political and economic system as a whole. Thus, problems experienced in Afghanistan manifested themselves back home—or one could contend that internal disintegration reflected back on Soviet troops’ morale in theater. The two, in any event, proved mutually destructive, albeit within a process that must be seen as gradual—rather like that of the growing body count of the war.
While only a small percentage of the population served in the war or were touched by it as a consequence of the loss of son, brother, or husband, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan created a large body of disaffected veterans of the conflict known as the afgansty, whose disillusionment at home manifested itself over a range of emotions from unexpressed derision of Moscow to outright criticism of the Soviet system in general. Such veterans did not organize themselves into any form of political movement or lobby, but in light of Gorbachev’s growing liberalization of Soviet society as a consequence of his policies of glasnost and perestroika, the attitudes of Afghan veterans nevertheless played some part in influencing public opinion and contributing to the general atmosphere of disgruntled citizens now prepared to question decisions made at all levels of government, including the Kremlin. In short, the war became a metaphor for systemic problems within Soviet society, and thus accelerated the rate of social and political change under way since Gorbachev came to power at the end of 1985. The cost of the war almost exacerbated such problems, for the cost of the war ran into the billions and placed an enormous strain on the Soviet economy, a burden that continued with the flow of supplies to the DRA after the troops returned home.
Criticism of communist rule, or at least the existing form, also developed from within, for the war led to a loss of faith in the party leadership amongst the middle and upper echelons of the Communist Party itself. Whereas before and during the Brezhnev era the party elite tended to operate on the basis of intraparty consultation, this practice had rapidly declined during the years of intervention in Afghanistan, prompting those of a reformist disposition to use the failing military effort as a means to push through their agendas and thus speed the process of change. Many analysts point to the declining Soviet economy, the inability of the state to continue to bear the burden of subsidizing communist allies around the world, and the impossibility of trying to match the United States in the nuclear arms race as the prime movers in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the end the Soviets had intervened on the basis of supporting a notionally communist state; in reality, from 1978 the succession of Afghan regimes only attracted widespread domestic condemnation followed by open hostility and civil war. The fact of Soviet withdrawal in 1989, with little to show for it but a deeply unpopular satellite state condemned to hold down an insurgency, which even the Soviets had failed to contain much less defeat, went far in eroding at best, and delegitimizing at worst, the long-held Soviet doctrine that socialism represented a positive and irreversible movement for the political, social, and economic good of peoples across the globe.
Studies vary on unnatural, war-related Afghan deaths during the Soviet occupation, but range from between 900,000 to 1.3 million people. The scale of fatalities must not obscure the suffering caused to civilians injured and disabled. An estimated 1.5 Afghan civilians suffered physical disability as a result of the war, with the psychological trauma caused in the 1980s unquantifiable and virtually untreatable in a country with virtually no facilities or personnel capable of treating the affected not to mention a culture that does not properly recognize depression and stigmatizes those who fail to conceal the trauma associated with that condition.34 The Soviets sowed and left behind millions of mines that continue to kill and maim. On the basis of these bare facts the damage and suffering inflicted on Afghanistan exceeds than that meted out by the Germans on the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945. This speaks volumes for the colossal scale of this tragedy.
Vast numbers of Afghans became displaced as a result of the war, with over 6 million refugees—a third of the prewar population—beyond Afghanistan’s borders in Iran and Pakistan by the early 1990s. An estimated 2 million more became internally displaced refugees.35 Most benefited from the extraordinary efforts of both the Pakistani and Iranian authorities in providing aid to this massive influx of people, but in the end, the mere absence of these refugees from their villages left large numbers of people without skills otherwise acquired and practised in farming and cottage industry activity. Quite apart from those already possessing some skills, young people found themselves denied the ability to learn a trade, engage in agriculture, or manage and herd livestock. But to external refugees must be added those internally displaced. The population of Kabul grew enormously as rural dwellers flocked to the capital in search of protection from air attack in the countryside. Women and children suffered particularly badly, because while their menfolk were often away serving in government units or as resistance fighters, they were left to manage themselves, often in a refugee camp outside the country in light of the devastation caused by aerial mines and high explosives scattered over and around mud-brick homes and compounds whose simple structures offered no protection from such ordnance. Quite apart from the social isolation that thus arose, women suffered from the loss of the wages their husbands normally brought home to feed families in a society where the long-term absence or death of a father and or his sons could produce serious disruption to family life, financially as well as socially.
Apart from the damage inflicted on the population, the war saw severe disruption to the Afghan economy, largely through the physical efforts of bombing and artillery fire. The Soviets sought out targets representing important elements of the country’s infrastructure, while the absence of regular maintenance left other elements useless after years of neglect, owing to lack of parts or the absence of trained personnel to maintain machinery. As discussed, mud-brick housing offered no protection to high explosives, whether delivered on the ground or in the air, with the result that by the early 1990s 60 percent of schools lacked a physical structure. The country already possessed little more than a rudimentary road system—apart from the massive ring road that the Americans had built long before the war. What remained deteriorated during the 1980s, in turn adversely affecting trade and thus the economy as a whole—quite apart from making refugees’ journeys all the more arduous.
The war also severely disrupted agriculture—the mainstay of the country’s economy—to the extent that while prior to the coup in 1978 Afghanistan was unquestionably classed as a poor country, it did not qualify as one suffering from hunger. Thereafter, that fortunate position ceased to apply, such that by 1987 agricultural output had sharply declined to only a third of 1978 figures as a result of the loss of land suitable for cultivation, a decline by a half of land once available for cultivation but now unusable, owing, for instance, the wide-scale deaths of draught oxen. The bombardment of hundreds of villages and wide areas of cultivated land in order to force the population off the land and into the cities—or in any event away from areas considered vital to the Soviets—accounts for much of this deliberately inflicted damage.
Afghanistan also suffered a severe decline in its balance of payments, owing to a sharp rise in imports and a contrasting fall in exports. The country’s trade deficit rose in 1980 from $69 million—representing 9.8 percent of exports—to $649 million—that is, 276.2 percent of exports, ten years later. Foreign debt also rose, from $1.2 billion in 1980 to $5.1 billion a decade on. Inflation soared, with an increase of 980 percent during the 1980s. All these statistics translated into the reality of a sharp decline in the standard of living, with progressively higher prices for imported goods as the Afghan currency fell in value, in turn causing families to struggle against impossible odds to feed themselves and their children amidst all the other consequences of the war.36
The Soviet-Afghan War demonstrated that the Soviets embarked on an adventure based on unattainable goals. It sought to uphold a manifestly weak and unpopular government and in so doing, especially after violating Afghan soil to do so, shattered any degree of legitimacy that the regime might have hoped to garner from the Afghan people. When Taraki’s communist regime came to power in Kabul in 1978 it failed to recognize that the bulk of Afghan society, based as it was on tribal structures with nothing in common with Marxist ideology, did not desire fundamental change to their way of life—not least reforms foisted upon them from outside, which represented a direct threat to centuries of tradition and religious conviction. The threats posed by the Kabul regime and its PDPA apparatus, activists, functionaries, and KhAD agents spread across the country actively propelled Afghanistan into a civil war, with Soviet intervention as an aid in propping up illegitimacy, exponentially exacerbating an existing civil war to appalling levels of misery and physical devastation, splitting the country along even deeper factional lines than before and encouraging Islamic extremism to boot.
The British Army field manual, Countering Insurgency, concisely sums up Soviet errors:
Soviet activity failed due to several key strategic factors:
They failed to remove the extensive external support provided to the Mujahideen;
Inability of the Soviets to exploit internal weaknesses among the insurgents;
Absence of a stable government in Kabul commanding popular respect.
The Soviets failed to adopt an effective counter-insurgency strategy:
There was no integration of military and political objectives and tactics;
The immediate exploitation of intelligence;
They focused almost exclusively on search and destroy operations;
They had no understanding of the local community;
They failed to restrict the enemy supply lines and communications networks.
Numerical superiority was lacking—an estimated Soviet and Afghan Government force of 400,000–500,000 was required.
Endurance, will and moral commitment were lacking.37
The war also revealed, as had Vietnam for the Americans 20 years earlier, that victory remains elusive even for a superpower when it confronts an opponent driven by deep ideological or religious convictions and bolstered morally—but above all materially—by generous external allies. Like the Vietminh and Viet Cong in 1950s and 1960s, the Mujahideen proved themselves an exceedingly formidable force with which to reckon notwithstanding their initial acute deficiencies in weapons, ammunition, and supplies. But once adequately armed, equipped, and fed—and with limited access to safe havens providing training and rest—the motivation and drive of an exceptionally robust, utterly determined, ideological-driven foe employing tactics suited to the circumstances produces the most intractable of opponents: one with time on his side and a willingness to accept horrific losses—many times in excess of his adversary. Herein lay the ingredients of a superpower’s military demise and the concomitant ruins of its political ambitions in the region.
1. See, for example, Anthony Arnold, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Perspective (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985); D. Borer, Superpowers Defeated: Vietnam and Afghanistan Compared (London: Routledge, 1999); H. Bradsher, Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Mark Galeotti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War (London: Routledge, 2001); Riaz Khan, Untying the Knot: Negotiating Soviet Withdrawal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Sarah Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Tom Rogers, The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Analysis and Chronology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992); Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I. B. Taurus, 2004); Oleg Sarin and Lev Dvoretsky, The Afghan Syndrome: The Soviet Union’s Vietnam (San Francisco, CA: Presidio Press, 1993).
2. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden: From the Soviet Invasion to September 10th 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Account of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003); Larry Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Neamotollah Nojumi, The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); J.Prado, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivar R. Dee, 2006); Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Battle for Afghanistan: The Soviets versus the Mujahideen during the 1980s (Barnsley, Yorkshire, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2007).
3. Alex Alexiev, Inside the Soviet Army in Afghanistan (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1988); Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992); Jon Lee Anderson, Guerrilla: Journeys in the Insurgent World (London: Abacus, 2006); Sandy Gall, Afghanistan: Travels with the Mujahedeen (London: New English Library, 1989); Jan Goodwin, Caught in the Crossfire (London: Macdonald & Co., 1987); Russian General Staff, The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost, Translated and edited by Lester Grau and Michael Gress (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester Grau, Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters (London: Compendium Publishing, 2001); Ellen Jones, Red Army and Society: A Sociology of the Soviet Military (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985); Scott R. McMichael, Stumbling Bear: Soviet Military Performance in Afghanistan (London: Brassey’s, 1991); W. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Carey Scholfield, The Russian Elite: Inside Spetsnaz and the Airborne Forces (London: Greenhill Books, 1993).
4. Tom Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, 1978–1992 (London: Hurst & Co., 2000); Ralph Magnus and Eden Naby, Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx and Mujahid (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Angelo Rasanaygam, Afghanistan: A Modern History (London: I. B. Taurus, 2005); S. Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War against the Taliban (Philadelphia: Perseus Books Group, 2009); For a general background of the war, see also, David Isby, War in a Distant Country: Afghanistan—Invasion and Resistance (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1989), 11–16. The coup of 1978 and the beginning of the anti-government rising are covered by T. Hammond, Red Flag over Afghanistan: The Communist Coup, the Soviet Invasion and the Consequences (Lanham, MD: Westview Press, 1984), 49–78.
5. Arnold, Soviet Invasion in Perspective; Henry Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983); Joseph Collins, The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: A Study in the Use of Force (Heath Canada, 1986); Feifer, Great Gamble; Edward Girardet, Afghanistan: The Soviet War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); M. Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See, particularly, the Carter administration’s response in Hammond, Red Flag, 105–129.
6. Alexiev, Inside the Soviet Army; Anderson, Guerrilla; Gennady Bocharov, Russian Roulette: Afghanistan through Russian Eyes (London: HarperCollins, 1990); Arthur Bonner, Among the Afghans (Durham, NC: Durham University Press, 1987); Collins, Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan; Gall, Travels with the Mujahedeen; Goodwin, Caught in the Crossfire; Lester Grau, The Bear Went over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan (London: Routledge, 1998); Jalali and Grau, Afghan Guerrilla Warfare; Robert Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Vintage Books, 2001); McMichael, Stumbling Bear; Odom, Collapse of the Soviet Military; Russian General Staff, Soviet-Afghan War; Scholfield, The Russian Elite; Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier’s Story (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2005). For the development of Afghan resistance, see William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 48–70.
7. Basic texts on the war include: Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89 (London: Profile Books, 2011); André Brigot and Olivier Roy, The War in Afghanistan: An Account and Analysis of the Country, Its People, Soviet Intervention and Resistance (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988); Feifer, Great Gamble; Galeotti, Afghanistan; Girardet, Soviet War; David Isby, Russia’s War in Afghanistan (London: Osprey Publishing, 1986); T. A. Wilson, The Soviet-Afghan War (Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press, 2002).
8. These points are starkly shown by the case studies drawn up in Grau, Bear Went over the Mountain; McMichael, Stumbling Bear, 18–24, 38–44, 63–79, 97–129. Soviet strategy and tactics are well covered by Maley, Afghanistan Wars, 32–47; and Isby, War in a Distant Country, 49–60, with a discussion of weaponry on 62–76. For Afghan government forces, see Isby, War in a Distant Country, 61–62, 77–92. Soviet weapons and strategy are covered by Girardet, Afghanistan, 30–47. For an overview of tactics and military forces, see J. Bruce Amstutz, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation (Stockton, CA: University Press of the Pacific, 2002), 127–197.
9. McMichael, Stumbling Bear, 80–96
10. McMichael, Stumbling Bear, 45–51.
11. Tamarov, Afghanistan, 115.
12. Maley, Afghanistan Wars; McMichael, Stumbling Bear, 25–37; Isby, War in a Distant Country, 93–116.
13. Anderson, Guerrilla, 148–149.
14. Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 5–81; Kakar, Afghanistan, 1–31; For the Karmal period of Afghan politics, see Maley, Afghanistan Wars, 71–89; and for the Najibullah period, 71–89. For a discussion of the Andropov and Chernenko periods, see Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 91–184; and for Gorbachev’s years, 187–209. Historical relations between Russia and Afghanistan are covered by Amstutz, Afghanistan, 3–18, with growing Soviet involvement on 19–50, as does Hammond, Red Flag, 3–45.
15. Bocharov, Russian Roulette, 57.
16. Soviet plans and considerations are covered in Feifer, Great Gamble, 9–54; Kakar, Afghanistan, 32–50; Maley, Afghanistan Wars, 6–31; Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 13–49; Amstutz, Afghanistan, 40–50; and Hammond, Red Flag, 79–94 and 130–147. Girardet, Afghanistan, 12–29; and Hammond, Red Flag, 97–104, cover the invasion.
17. See for instance, Kakar, Afghanistan, 153–168; for other means of internal repression, see 169–209. “Sovietization” and repression are well covered by Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 122–145, Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 53–88, Hammond, Red Flag, 148–154 and Girardet, Afghanistan, 88–161. Guerrilla operations and other forms of resistance are covered by Girardet, Afghanistan, 48–87; for parties and propaganda, see 162–201. Amstutz, Afghanistan, 51–125, considers DPA government politics and resistance. Kakar, Afghanistan, 79–149; and Hammond, Red Flag, 155–172, are excellent on various forms of internal resistance. Amstutz, Afghanistan, discusses the secret police and human rights violations, 263–282; and Sovietization, 283–321.
18. Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 121–246; Feifer, Great Gamble, 55–217. See also, McMichael, Stumbling Bear, 1–17, 52–62; Rob Johnson, The Afghan Way of War—Culture and Pragmatism: A Critical History (London: Hurst & Co., 2011), 205–248. Isby, War in a Distant Country, 17–48, covers the operational history. External aid is discussed in Isby, War in a Distant Country, 117 and Amstutz, Afghanistan, 199–222.
19. Bocharov, Russian Roulette, 36–37.
20. Bocharov, Russian Roulette, 40–41.
21. Bocharov, Russian Roulette, 35–36.
22. Quoted in Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 141.
23. Bocharov, Russian Roulette, 24.
24. Bocharov, Russian Roulette, 32.
25. Kakar, Afghanistan, 213–251.
26. Tamarov, Afghanistan, 116.
27. Tamarov, Afghanistan, 126.
28. Sandy Gall, Afghanistan: Agony of a Nation (London: Bodley Head, 1988), 1.
29. Bocharov, Russian Roulette, 43.
30. For general treatments of the Soviet decision to withdraw and the diplomatic settlement, see Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 249–293; Feifer, Great Gamble, 218–254; Tom Rogers, The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Analysis and Chronology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992); Maley, Afghanistan Wars, 105–126; Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 146–183; Amstutz, Afghanistan, 323–369.
31. Quoted in Johnson, Afghan Way of War, 241; Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 245–312, 365–387.
32. Bocharov, Russian Roulette, 61.
33. Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 329–331; Feifer, Great Gamble, 255–267; Grau, Bear Went over the Mountain, xiv; Isby, War in a Distant Country, 62. Maley, Afghanistan Wars, 127–139, is useful for the general consequences of the war and the aftermath for Najibullah, 140–161. For the civil war after 1992, see Maley, 162–274 and Johnson, Afghan Way of War, 249–298; Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 184–280.
34. Braithwaite, Afgantsy, 331.
35. For discussion of refugees and their relief, see Girardet, Afghanistan, 202–232; and Amstutz, Afghanistan, 223–231. Amstutz also discusses, 233–262, the impact of the war on the economy.
36. Maley, Afghanistan Wars, p. 130.
37. UK Ministry of Defence, Army Field Manual, Volume 1: Part 10, Countering Insurgency (London: MoD, 2010), Section 3–15.