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BACK WHEN THE COLD WAR WAS HOT
By William Terdoslavich
East is East and West is West,
And never the twain shall meet.
—RUDYARD KIPLING
Life was so much simpler during the Cold War. It was us vs. them, with no shades of gray.
The world was unnaturally divided between democratic free-market states and Communist kleptocracies with controlled economies. Dictators were free agents who allied with the side offering the best deal.
Any nation, no matter how poor or small, was significant. If the US picked one up as an ally, it was a loss for the Soviets, and vice versa. South Vietnam, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Somalia—all acquired outsized importance because of this.
That zero-sum game would be played to the death in Afghanistan.
What Brezhnev Wants, Brezhnev Gets
Soviet Communist Party chairman Leonid Brezhnev was on his last legs in the late 1970s. A lifetime of vodka and cigarettes was finally catching up to him. The other old men in the Politburo were in better shape—barely.
These old men were not like the Russian Communists of old. They were more rigid and bureaucratic than revolutionary and ruthless. Despite this, the Soviet Union was having a good decade in the 1970s. Communism picked up South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Nicaragua. The US got nada.
The SALT II treaty locked in another decade of nuclear parity with the US. The Helsinki Accords recognized Soviet spheres of influence while making empty promises about human rights. President Jimmy Carter was a pushover.
But there was one problem: Afghanistan. Fighting between two factions in the Communist Party there got out of hand in 1979. Red rule was imperiled. The US had a chance to overthrow the government. There was only one solution for the Soviets: stage a coup, invade Afghanistan, and take full control.
All this was cloaked as “the Brezhnev doctrine.” Wherever communism had advanced to, it shall not retreat from. This rule automatically committed the Soviets to backing any Communist regime anywhere in the world, at any cost. The Soviets had plenty of guns, but weren’t exactly rolling in money. Their flimsy economy was a poor foundation for an evil empire.
You Break It, You Buy It
The 40th Motor Rifle Army was tapped to do the dirty work of invading Afghanistan. It numbered fifty-two thousand men. More soldiers would come later to double the size of the deployment.
A quick assault by airborne and special forces decapitated the incumbent Soviet-backed government and installed a replacement regime. Armored forces traveled down Afghanistan’s national ring road, taking control of every city. It was just like Hungary in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Afghanistan turned out differently, though. Once the invasion was completed, the new regime in Kabul tried to impose its atheistic, secular values on the rural Muslim Afghans. The Afghans took up arms to fight back.
The Red Army would conduct operations in groups of ten thousand to fifteen thousand, trying to maneuver entire brigades to surround, then overrun, guerrilla-held areas. This never worked. The Afghans never stood their ground if they could help it. When confronted by superior forces, they retreated into the mountains. When they could mass against isolated Soviet garrisons or convoys, they attacked. Fighting at close range negated Soviet advantages in artillery and airpower.
Politically, the enemy proved to be a hydra-headed monster. There were thirteen major factions fighting the Soviets to one degree or another. Some groups were ethnic-based, formed of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras, or Pashtuns. About seven groups based out of Pakistan were the prime recipients of American CIA aid, channeled by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI). Saudi Arabia and the rich Gulf states also funneled in cash and arms. And Afghanistan was a good place to send Arab extremists who would be a threat to ruling governments back home. Let them fight for Islam elsewhere.
The Russians found they could not “kill” their way to victory. They generated six million Afghan refugees, who sheltered either in Iran or Pakistan, becoming recruitment pools for the resistance. The Soviets could not invade these sanctuaries, unless they wanted to fight a bigger war that was beyond their means. The CIA’s covert supply of American Stinger antiaircraft missiles only added to their misery by negating the Soviet airpower advantage.
No Country for Old Men
This strategic stalemate continued until the mid-1980s, as Soviet search-and-destroy missions could not pry the grip of the mujahideen from their land. Strategic thinking at the top changed with Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985. (This followed the death of Brezhnev and two other successors in the preceding three years.)
Gorbachev understood the deteriorating position of the Soviet Union. American rearmament was outstripping the Soviets’ ability to keep pace. The war in Afghanistan was draining his country’s strength, as were the smaller ancillary wars in Ethiopia and Angola. Gorbachev had to cut his losses. Afghanistan was the best place to start.
The Russians equipped and financed the Afghans to fight their own war against the mujahideen. By 1988, the last Russian unit crossed the Amu Dar’ya River to Termez, marking the end of the Soviet War in Afghanistan. (A civil war continued for another six years.)
The Soviets lost about 15,000 men, with another 40,000 or so wounded. Mujahideen losses were around 140,000 to 200,000 killed or wounded. Soviet forces may have peaked at around 100,000 or so combatants, compared to 90,000 for the Afghan resistance. And the mujahideen had no trouble maintaining force size.
More worrisome were the thousands of Arab volunteers who fought in Afghanistan. The rise of Islam did not fit the “us vs. them” Cold War worldview, so it did not draw much notice. An entire covert network of Arab recruitment and funding still existed, waiting to find another purpose. One such organization was al-Qaeda (the Base), run by an obscure person named Osama bin Laden. What would he do next?
Skipping Afghanistan
Would things have turned out better if the Soviets had not invaded Afghanistan? The political necessities of the Cold War did not allow a Soviet client state to switch sides. That would have made it look like the US was winning.
It would have taken a major change of thinking for Brezhnev and his wheezy old men to handle Afghanistan adroitly. The Afghan Communist Party was racked by infighting, but eventually one faction would win out. The Russians could have supported the winners, but more importantly, they could have restrained them from imposing atheistic Communist rule on the countryside.
This would have required foreigners to understand Afghanistan and accept it for what it is: a country divided between many tribes and factions, none of whom are obedient to any central authority. Just leave them alone.
The Soviet Union was still in decline, but without an Afghan War, the downward pressure against the “evil empire” would have lessened. There would have been no multifaction Afghan guerrilla uprising, no CIA interference, and no Arab volunteers bringing radical Islam into the region. The rebirth of Islam would still have happened. But that historical current would have followed different channels.
The post-Soviet Afghan Civil War would not have happened. Therefore, the Taliban never would have come into existence to seize the country in 1994. And no invitation for al-Qaeda to take up residence in 1996 would have been forthcoming.
It was from Afghanistan that bin Laden approved the 2001 attacks on the United States. But without the chain of events that brought him to Afghanistan, what would have happened? His path to infamy would have taken a different route, with perhaps a different outcome. What that path would have been is too hard to say.
There would have been one definite side effect, though: 9/11 never would have happened. New York’s World Trade Center would still be standing. The Pentagon would have been spared a jet hit. And Shanksville would still be just another small town in Pennsylvania.