This summer over 2,300 years ago, Alexander the Great, after conquering most of the known world, barely makes it out of Afghanistan into India through the Hindu Kush with less than a third of his army by marrying the daughter of the Northern Afghan Chieftain. When you look at a map of the conquests of Genghis Kahn in the Thirteenth Century—the lands conquered in blues and greens—everything from China, the Russian Steppes through the Middle East, and half of Europe is in color except a tiny white circular dot below the Himalayan mountains that represents today’s Afghanistan.
In 1842, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, all of the 20,000 British troops sent there in what Kipling called “The Great Game of Politics” were killed in the mountain passes above Kabul with only one officer, a physician, making it out of those mountains.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979 and left nine years later in February of 1989. The Russians had ended up with over 250,000 troops in Afghanistan with absolutely no rules of engagement. They could kill anyone and destroy any village they chose—and they did.
Over that nine-year period, a million Afghans were killed and another 3 million became refugees, and yet, like every other invading army, the Russians eventually had to leave. Afghanistan is a tough place to fight and even a tougher place to win. The landscape is set up for war.
In recently released transcripts of Politburo meetings in the winter of 1986, three years before the Soviet leaders pulled the Russian Army out of Afghanistan, Sergei Akhromeyev, commanding the Soviet Armed Forces, explained the problems his soldiers were facing fighting in the hills around Kabul, as well as in the Kandahar and Helmand Provinces now occupied and patrolled by U.S. troops.
“Our soldiers are not to blame,” Marshall Akhromeyev made clear. “They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless, much territory stays in the hands of the terrorists.”
“We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize. To occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills. … 99 percent of the battles and skirmishes that we fought in Afghanistan were won by our side. The problem is that the next morning there is the same situation, as if there had been no battle. The terrorists are again in the village where they were—or we thought they were—destroyed a day or so before.”
Marshall Akhromeyev went on to request extra troops and equipment.
“Without them, without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time.”
Before the invasion, the Chief of the Soviet Defense Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, had raised doubts about the invasion. He had told Dmitri Ustinov—then defense minister —“that the experience of the British and Czarist armies in the Nineteenth Century should encourage caution.”
A review of history should have cautioned anyone thinking of invading those mountains or those plains of Afghanistan. Why it didn’t cause us to hesitate remains an abiding mystery. It may simply be Arthur Schlesinger’s warning about those four most dangerous words in the English language, “This Time It’s Different,” again being ignored.
The Russians continued their war for three more years before they finally withdrew from Afghanistan and went home. In fact, before the withdrawal in 1989, there had been a military recommendation for a “surge,” Soviet style.
The equivalent of the head of the Russian Joint Chiefs of Staff had suggested sending in the whole of the Russian Army. The transcripts reveal that Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become the Russian leader in March of 1985 and had privately begun calling Afghanistan “our bleeding wound,” would have none of it. There was to be no surge. Gorbachev eventually opted to pull out the troops and go home. At the same time that Gorbachev was trying to decide how best to deal with his disastrous war, Anatoly Chernyayev, his chief foreign policy aide, was writing in his own personal diary that Afghanistan had become “Our Vietnam. But worse.”