Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan, 30 Years Later
By Srdja Trifkovic
Thursday, 11 Feb 2010
From Cronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, March 2010
Hoping to bolster its geopolitical position, a great power sends troops to Afghanistan and installs a puppet leader. Resistance soon grows into a fully-blown insurgency and leads to reprisals by the occupying forces. The vicious circle becomes untenable, the great power withdraws in ignomy, and Afghanistan reverts to its usual state of Hobbesian pre-modernity. That, in short, is the story not only of the Soviet intervention which started on Christmas Day 1979, but also of the British intervention known as the First Afghan War (1839-1842). It, too, started as a limited mission to impose a new ruler, and ended in disaster. After two miserable years 16,000 soldiers and camp followers retreated from Kabul in January 1842; only one British survivor made it back alive. Scottish poet Thomas Campbell left the war’s fitting epitaph:
Few, few shall part, where many meet!
The snow shall be their winding sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier’s sepulchre.
Another British intervention came four decades later, when this same land – hardly a “country” in any meaninful sense – was seen in London, yet again, as central to the security of the Rajamidst the ongoing “Great Game” in Central Asia. This episode, known as the Second Afghan War, is remembered, if at all, through Kipling’s grim verses:
When you’re wounded and left,
On Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out,
To cut up your remains,
Just roll on your rifle,
And blow out your brains,
And go to your Gawd,
Like a soldier.
The Soviet intervention of December 1979 repeated all of the British mistakes of 1839 but the consequences were more serious. The ensuing war in Afghanistan did not ‘cause’ the collapse of the Soviet Union any more than the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand ‘caused’ the First World War, but it was a catalyst that revealed and exacerbated major structural weaknesses of the Soviet system. Over half a million impressionable young men did tours of duty and became Afghantsi, disillusioned with authority and in many cases hostile to the system itself. Like their counterparts in Vietnam, they believed that politicians got them into a quagmire but denied them the means to win. The war may have been unwinnable from the outset – it’s the nature of the beast – but Moscow’s objectives remain unclear to this day. Last December 28 the Rossiiskaya Gazetamarked the thirtieth anniversary of what it called “the large-scale military operation the goal of which was a mystery to all.” Neither the Politbureau nor the military had a clear set of objectives, the Gazeta wrote, let alone an exit strategy. Former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer in his book The Great Gamblegives credence to the claim of a Soviet general staff officer that “no one ever actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan” –itjust happened through inertia and confusion under the sclerotic Soviet leadership of the time.
In the preceding decade it seemed that Moscow’s influence in Afghanistan was steadily growing at the modest cost of a few infrastructure projects. After four decades of uneventful rule, King Mohammed Zahir Shah was dethroned in a 1973 coup by his cousin and former prime minister Mohammad Daud who abolished the monarchy. Unlike the ineffective king, President Daud was a despot intolerant of any dissent. In 1975 rebellious Islamic fundamentalists were repressed and their leaders fled to Pakistan, which gave them political and financial support. While continuing to receive economic aid and arms from the Soviets, Daud also clamped down on the small but influential pro-Moscow People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. In April 1978, after one of its leaders was killed, the PDPA temporarily overcame its factional squabbles and colluded with sympathetic army officers to stage a coup. Daoud and his family were killed and Afghanistan became a “democratic republic” under PDPA secretary-general Nur Muhammad Taraki.
What followed was a compressed Marxist version of the Shah’s experiment in neighboring Iran, minus the petrodollars: massive modernization from above, imposed on a society steeped in Islamic tradition. Within months a series of decrees presumed to abolish traditional Sharia practices such as arranged marriages and polygamy, ban usury (endemic in the villages), and mandate shool attendance for girls. The local village elite, Muslim clergy and landowners, were treated with disdain or outright hostility. The young PDPA activists, mainly students, were sent into the countryside to “reeducate” the people.
Then came the politically explosive decision to announce the cancellation of farmers’ debts to landowners and the start of an ambitious agrarian reform program. Although meant to benefit them, such measures could not buy the support of mainly illiterate peasants whose world view was founded on village traditions accentuated by Islam and a historic hatred of foreigners. Yet those same measures caused dismay among the powerful landowners and tribal leaders who were not offered a compensating stake in the new order. In the summer of 1978 the Nuristani elders started a rebellion in eastern Afghanistan, invoking Allah against Taraki’s “infidel” regime. The change at the helm in September, when Taraki was killed in a palace coup by his PDPA rival Hafizullah Amin, made no difference. The insurgency soon spread to other ethnic groups. The government tried to respond firmly, executing captured rebels and their suspected sympathizers. The army rank-and-file proved unreliable, however. As tens of thousands of soldiers deserted or joined the rebels, Kabul appealed to Moscow for military assistance. Instead of being integrated into the “socialist community of nations,” Afghanistan was turning into a liability.
Starting in early 1979 the Soviets provided military advisors, helicopter pilots, tank drivers, and presidential guards, but Moscow was reluctant to commit large regular units. The U.S. decision in July 1979 to arm the rebels – which became known later as Operation Cyclone – may have forced the Kremlin’s hand. As President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said many years later, “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan… [b]ut the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise.” The goal of the policy, he said in a 1998 interview, was to provoke a Soviet military response: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap.” A delighted Brzezinski wrote to Carter a note on the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, declaring “We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.”
In addition the Soviets were concerned that President Amin was losing control. The KGB residents in Kabul warned his “harsh repressions” would consolidate the opposition and that Amin’s reliability as an ally of Moscow was becoming uncertain. The Soviet objective at the start of the intervention appears to have been no more than change of leadership and temporary presence to consolidate the new ruler while the client Aghan army reasserted government authority in the rebel areas. Amin was killed on the first day of the operation by Soviet special forces, Kabul radio announced that the country was “liberated” from his misrule, and one of the PDPA’s founders, Babrak Karmal, was flown in from Prague to take over. The immediate military objective of securing Kabul was completed swiftly and efficiently, but the pacification in the provinces did not go smoothly.
First of all, the Soviet army was not made for an anti-insurgency role. Its doctrine, tactics, training, and order of battle were predicated on a war against NATO forces on the plains of northern Central Europe. It was ill prepared to fight an elusive enemy in an unfriendly terrain and without a clear set of objectives defining success. It invariably achieved tactical successes against the Mujahedeen but failed to translate them into strategic gains even after deep penetration oftheir strongholds, notably in the Panjshir Valley.In the 19th century the Tsarist army knew how to do counterinsurgency effectively, in Central Asia as well as in the Caucasus. A century later those old skills needed to be re-learnt and a new combat doctrine developed. By the mid-1980’s specially trained air assault and spetsnaz forceshad the skills,but it was too late to compensate for the absence of doctrine.
Secondly, the Mujahedeen had supply bases and sanctuaries in the neighboring Pakistan and (to a lesser extent) Iran, which provided them with logistic and, just as importantly, moral support. Assured of Western backing, they felt that they could not lose – short of the Soviets engaging enormous forces and chasing them across Afghanistan’s southern, eastern and western borders, which was diplomatically out of the question. External support coupled with the traditional martial spirit, hatred of foreigners and invocation of Islam, provided a steady influx of motivated recruits to different “Muj” groups all over the country. Those groups remained fragmented and tribally based but they could not be defeated in detail. Pacification of one area usually coincided with a fresh flare-up in another, previously “pacified.” Paradoxically, the decentralized nature of the “Muj” resistance meant that there was no center of gravity where a massive concentration of superior Soviet forces could secure a decisive outcome.
Thirdly, the Soviet Union was no longer as indifferent to the outside world’s disapproval as Khrushchev had been in October 1956, when he crushed the Hungarian revolution. The U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics was psychologically more effective than many Americans realized at the time. In Brezhnev’s dotage the Soviet leadership lacked the ruthlessness and singularity of purpose which it displayed just over a decade earlier, in 1968, in Czechoslovakia. The Kremlin’s reluctance to unleash the army and allow it to use indiscriminate reprisals would have seemed quaint, as well as treasonous, to J.V. Stalin.
Fourthly, in spite of the Soviet regime’s control of the media and public discourse, no domestic consensus on the war could be constructed. Long used to communicating its foreign policies in terms of Marxist dogma – “internationalist duty,” “response to foreign aggression,” etc. – the Kremlin could not bring itself to present the intervention in simple geopolitical terms: that having a friendly regime in Afghanistan, in the southern backyard of the USSR, was a national security prerequisite of the highest order which made all associated sacrifices justified. Had it done so, the public (in the Union’s Slavic heartland, at least) could have responded more favorably. Realpolitical arguments were invoked years later, when it was too late. The Soviet Union lacked the political will to fight a war in Afghanistan at both ends of the hierarchy.
Fatally for the Soviets, the political solution was impossible. Babrak Karmal did reverse some of the contentious policies of his doctrinaire predecessors, invoked the name of Allah in his speeches, replaced the irritating red flag introduced by Taraki with the traditional Afghan tricolor, and released thousands of political prisoners. Nothing worked for him, however: he was fatally tainted by the fact that he was installed by foreigners and depended on them. The same problem applied to his more ruthless successor, Mohammad Najibullah, who took over from Karmal with Soviet approval in 1986. He was able to retain limited control for a couple of years after the completion of Soviet withdrawal in 1989, but his long-term destiny was sealed.
The most enduring legacy of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is the growth of political islam and jihadist terrorism as a global phenomenon, but the decision to turn militant Islam into a tool of policy was made in Washington. Brzezinski’sunstated assumption was that militant Muslims could be used and eventually discarded. In his now famous interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998, asked if he had any regrets about the consequences of his policies almost two decades later, Brzezinski was indignant:
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea… Indeed, for almost ten years, Moscow had to carry on an unsupportable conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, giving arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What matters more to world history, the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But isn’t Islamic fundamentalism a world menace today?
B: Nonsense! There is no global Islam.
The rest, as they say, is history. Let us end by noting the almost hysterical exaggeration in Brzezinski’s conceited claim. Afghanistan was not the graveyard of the Soviet system. Most fighting was Afghan on Afghan: the Soviet commitment was limited; the casualties (15,000 killed in combat) were not very serious on an annual basis and were certainly not regime-threatening. The Afghan blunder was bad for military morale and expensive, but not fatar. It is more reasonable to assert that all the conviction had leached out of the Kremlin well before Brezhnev was dead. The USSR was the husk of a dying system before a single Soviet soldier crossed the Afghan border.