HY 150 BISK THE SOVIET UNION AND AFGHANISTAN http

HY 150 BISK

THE SOVIET UNION AND AFGHANISTAN
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskafghanistan.htm

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For Ages, Afghanistan Is Not Easily Conquered
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
New York Times
2002

LONG HISTORY OF CONFLICT
Afghanistan, a poor and landlocked country, seems positioned for another round of what 19th-century imperialists called the Great Game. This was the battle for influence by outsiders, once mostly the Russians and the British, over a defiant land that a British viceroy once called a poisoned chalice. The country, populated by warrior clans, has for centuries been a mountainous obstacle astride the roads from Persia and the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent and much of Central Asia. For the British Empire in India and, more than 100 years later, for the Soviet Union, Afghanistan became a killing field remembered for horrific massacres and vengeful holy war.

AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN INTERESTS IN AFGHANISTAN
This time, it seems, the Russians and the West, now led by Americans, are on the same side. For the first time after years of disputes over other issues like the Balkans and Iraq, Moscow and Washington have found a common enemy in the Taliban, the radical Islamic movement that now controls most of the country. Their motives are different. Russia sees links between Afghanistan and rebellions in its own Muslim areas, while he United States focuses on Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of terrorism. Their common cause, however, in reining in and perhaps dislodging the Taliban appears strong for now.

ANGLO-RUSSIAN CONFLICT IN AFGHANISTAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Historic precedent is not encouraging. After Afghanistan emerged from periods of rule by ancient Hellenistic, Greco-Afghan, and Buddhist empires, its ethnically and linguistically separated regions and peoples—the dominant Pathans, the Hazara, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks—eventually settled into a kind of collective independence. This continued until the age of European colonialism. An army of the British East India Company, still in charge of imperial India, moved into Kabul in 1839 to checkmate the Russian advances—real and imagined—in Central Asia, the Himalayas and Tibet. In 1841, disaster struck.

FIRST ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR
A mob besieged Britain's envoy in Afghanistan and the son of a ruler the envoy had deposed shot him. The Afghans allowed the British garrison to disband and retreat through the Khyber Pass to what is now Pakistan. Along the route, the Afghans massacred the 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 noncombatants, including the wives and children of British officers—save one Dr. Brydon left to tell the tale. It was "the greatest military disaster in the history of British India."

SECOND ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR
A second Anglo-Afghan war came three decades later and included another massacre. But this time, the British achieved their political goals. These included drawing a border to separate British India from Afghanistan and ensuring some security for the unruly northwest frontier, a province that newly independent Pakistan inherited in 1947 and has never been able to control.

THE SOVIET UNION ENTERS IN 1973
A century later, the Russians came back—as the Soviet Union. In 1973, Mohammad Daud overthrew his cousin, King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan. The new government appeared willing at first to do Moscow's bidding. Instead, the Daud government threw out the pro-Soviet faction and refused to take orders from Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader. Brezhnev tried to tell him what to do, and Daud spit in his eye. Afghan Communists overthrew the Daud government in 1978, but the Kremlin was still not satisfied. In December 1979, the Soviet Army invaded.

SOVIET INVASION AND CIVIL WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
A decade-long holy war followed, pitting Afghan Muslim warriors, the mujahedeen, against well-equipped Soviet troops, with the fiercely anti- Communist holy warriors sustained by lavish support from the United States and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan, dependent on both countries, had little choice but to become the base for that battle. It has never recovered. The mujahedeen, when they were finally able to capture Kabul in 1992, three years after the Soviet withdrawal, proved to be as incompetent, corrupt and fractious as the worst of any earlier Afghan regime.

They did not support women's rights, and they threatened and sometimes massacred people from minority groups. In 1996, the Taliban drove them from power. Many of the new movement's youthful leaders were born in the refugee camps spawned by earlier war or in small rural villages. They knew nothing of the world and a primal orthodoxy learned in religious schools and a determination to take back Afghanistan for the Afghans motivated them. The United States refused to deal with the Taliban except perfunctorily.

AMERICA’S ROLE
But American interest in aiding Afghanistan was strong under the last monarchy. Generous United States grants built airports, roads, schools and other public amenities and services. In developmental terms, that was modern Afghanistan's golden age. More recently, neglect has characterized America's approach to the country. As the United States plans a battle strategy against Afghanistan, it can draw many lessons from the country's history. The Soviet Union bombed, mined and strafed the terrain with helicopter gunships, yet lost the war. Sending troops into ragged, barren mountains where the opposition is at home would only move the disadvantages of Vietnam to a new and harsher setting. "If they're talking about going in and trying to occupy Afghanistan, that's a pretty iffy proposition," one expert said. "There has to be an alternative Afghan force." That means a painstaking job of rounding up the remnants of the opposition front—led by Ahmed Shah Massoud until his death—along with whatever forces the Afghan royalists might recruit and, most important, Taliban defectors. King Zahir Shah, deposed more than a quarter-century ago, is still alive in exile, waiting in the wings.

I. A BRIEF HISTORY OF PREWAR SOVIET INVOLVEMENT IN AFGHANISTAN
A. THROUGH WORLD WAR II
Soviet Russia and Afghanistan recognized each other in 1919. Amanullah, trying to reduce British influence, signed a Treaty of Friendship with Soviet Russia in 1921. Despite this treaty, the Soviets assigned a low priority to Afghanistan until after the Second World War.

A rebel regime under Bacha-i-Saqqua Amir (Habibullah) took over in 1929. The Soviets allowed Amanullah’s supporters to organize troops on Soviet soil to move against Habibullah and between 800 and 6,000 Soviet soldiers helped with the invasion. The move failed in 1929, and Soviet troops left the country. Bacha-i-Saqqua was deposed and executed in October 1929.

The new king Nadir Khan wanted to reduce Soviet influence. In 1930, the two signed a Nonaggression and Neutrality Treaty. The king was assassinated in 1933.

His son, Muhammed Zahir Khan, came to power and wished to start a modernization program. Friendly to Germany, Afghanistan remained neutral in World War II to the upset of both the USSR and USA.

B. POST-WAR MODERNIZATION
The modernization goals pursued by the Afghan royal family and later by the Daoud regime before the 1979 coup crucially affected the Soviet-Afghan relationship. The modernization drive stimulated an "aid" competition between the superpowers in the 1950s and 1960s, which the Soviets won, largely because of American halfheartedness.

With the emergence of India and Pakistan after World War II, and especially with American aid to Pakistan, the USSR saw a threat and increased aid to Afghanistan. Faced with American hostility, the Soviets provided trade agreements that allowed Afghanistan to transship goods through the USSR, now that Pakistan blocked the road to the sea. By 1954, the USSR was giving substantial aid to Afghanistan (its first victory in the Muslim world) and could wield great influence. In August 1956, the Soviets and Afghans signed their first arms agreement. Soviet advisers reorganized, and thereby gained great influence within, the Afghan military.

During the 1960s, the Soviets worked on various economic projects in Afghanistan. The Hindu Kush Highway linked Kabul with northern Afghanistan to promote trade with the USSR. Other modernization projects and economic aid (65% of Afghanistan’s total) brought more Soviet influence to the country.

C. AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE MONARCHY
The Afghan monarchy ended in July 1973 when Muhammed Daoud overthrew King Zahir. Supported by Nur Muhammed Taraki, head of the Afghan Marxist Party, Khalq, he declared himself as president. The USSR recognized the new government and increased its military and economic backing. Afghanistan under the leadership of Daoud remained nonaligned. In return for extensive Soviet military aid, Daoud supported Soviet foreign policy, although he also sought to diversify the country’s foreign relations.

Daoud’s "Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan" was rife with factionalism and was unable to control dissent within the country, even through harsh repression. Daoud was neither willing nor able to subject the country to total Soviet control. To complicate matters, there were two pro-Soviet factions, the Parcham (Flag) wing, headed by Karmal, and the more independent Khalq (Mass), headed by Hafizullah Amin. Moscow pursued a duplicitous policy, keeping on good terms with both Daoud and the pro-Soviet factions.

In April 1978, Daoud and his family were killed in a bloody coup by Taraki, who had united the two pro-Soviet factions in 1977. Taraki became president, prime minister, and head of the armed forces, with Amin as foreign minister. The Soviets immediately recognized the new regime and increased the number of Soviet advisers in the country. However, Taraki was not subservient to Moscow, and in July 1978 he purged the Parcham faction.

The Taraki regime’s modernization drive exacerbated popular unrest and increased the regime’s dependency on Soviet aid, to the extent that Moscow was acquiring a new satellite state. Widespread guerrilla warfare and a major uprising in Herat compounded the government’s problems. Government troops began deserting.

In March 1979, Hafizullah Amin became prime minister and launched a bloody campaign of repression, forcing the regime into even greater dependency on the Soviet Union. He stirred up the tribal people. Taraki tried to remove Amin but was assassinated in September 1979 by a rival Marxist group led by Amin.

Both Amin and the Soviets blamed the unrest on interference from outside Powers. Pravda specifically mention the United States, China, and several other states for providing of aid to the counterrevolutionaries. By the winter of 1979, the Khalq was heavily dependent on Soviet support, and there was serious doubt about Amin’s future.

Following his fact-finding mission to Kabul in late 1979, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet ground forces, General Pavlovskii, who had commanded the Soviet invasion force into Czechoslovakia in 1968, advocated military intervention to avert the regime’s downfall. However, Amin refused to agree to Soviet intervention, despite Soviet pressure. The Kremlin suspected that Amin was seeking to heal the rift with the West.

In December, the Soviets increased their troops on their border with Afghanistan from three to five divisions. The Soviets also sent a military mission headed by General Paputin of the Soviet Internal Security Forces to gain Amin’s permission for Soviet military aid, which Amin rejected, or to prepare the ground for his overthrow

III. THE SOVIETS GO TO WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
A. THE EVENTS
Soviet troops in country increased from 3 to 5 divisions. They reinforced the 1600 military advisers aiding the Afghan army against the Muslim insurgents, the mujahedeen. On December 27, 1979, 200 military transports landed in Kabul in a massive surprise attack. The Soviets invaded with 90,000 troops and quickly took over the country. The Soviets killed Amin and put Babrak Karmal in power. He had been serving in Czechoslovakia as ambassador since July and probably did not arrive in the country until a week after the invasion. This was the first time since World War II that Moscow had deployed combat units outside the Warsaw Pact area.

A small group within the Soviet Politburo—Brezhnev, defense minister Ustinov, Andropov, and Gromyko—made the decision to intervene. There was little sign of the extended debate within the Soviet leadership or within the bloc of states, which had taken place before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Nor was there the extended campaign of verbal pressure of the kind employed against the Czechs. Indeed, in the month preceding the invasion, Soviet media coverage of developments in Afghanistan was distinctly thin.

B. MOSCOW’S JUSTIFICATION
The Soviet explanations of its actions in Afghanistan embraced several arguments:

1. INVITATION
The Soviets claimed that they undertook military intervention in response to an official request for help by the Afghanistan government. Their explanations, however, were often vague and contradictory. The "invitation" rationale advanced in December and January, which was the linchpin of the Soviet case, received a resoundingly bad international press, perhaps worse than the Soviets expected.

2. FULFILLMENT OF TREATY OBLIGATIONS
A second explanation advanced by the Soviets was that the Soviet Union was fulfilling treaty obligations under the terms of the Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty of December 1978. However, the treaty was a friendship treaty, not a military alliance and did not contain a mutual assistance clause of the type the Soviet Union had concluded with the bloc states. Nor did it refer to "socialist internationalism." Indeed, the treaty affirmed the independence of the two states and did not detract from Afghanistan’s nonaligned status.

Although the Soviets claimed that they would stay for only a short time, they began building depots, etc., which suggested interest in a longer stay. They were not terribly interested in a Communist state per se. Rather, they demanded a friendly one and knew that to keep Amin in power they needed many troops to fight the rebels supported by China, the USA, and other Muslim countries, especially Iran. Thus they had brought in Karmal, who was more moderate and might have been able to stop the militant opposition of the people.

C. WHY DID THE SOVIETS INVADE?
1. SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS
The downfall of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul would have altered the strategic balance in favor of the Kremlin’s principal adversaries, the United States and China. Most Soviet commentators mentioned the danger to the Soviet Union. Brezhnev spoke of the danger of a military bridgehead, expressing the fear of antisocialist encirclement, with perhaps the United States, China, and Pakistan forming an anti-Soviet alliance.

2. CORRELATIONS OF FORCES ANALYSIS
Soviet correlation of forces analysis provided the Soviet Union with a reason for defending this key strategic zone. Soviet officials were self-confident after the invasion. Military leaders said that the global correlation of forces had changed in favor of socialism.

Some Western analysts linked such assessments to Soviet "probing" strategies outside Europe in Angola, Ethiopia, and South Yemen. The ascendancy of hard-liners in the Kremlin gave to Soviet policy a decisiveness it had often lacked.

3. "STRATEGY OF DENIAL"
Some have suggested the invasion was part of a "strategy of denial" toward the rimlands of the Middle East oil-producing states, which would risk the west’s oil supplies.

4. AMERICA AND IRAN
The Soviet may well have worried about the danger of a stronger American presence in Iran.

5. LOSS OF PRESTIGE
a. The fall of a socialist-oriented country on the borders of the Soviet Union would have been a blow to the main support of progressive forces struggling against imperialism.
b. It would have weakened the credibility of the Soviet doctrine of the irreversibility of socialist revolution, even though Afghanistan was not fully socialist.
c. It would have been a corrective to the Soviet theory of the inexorable expansion of the world socialism. It would have been more serious than the fall of the Marxist Allende in Chile, because Chile was clearly in the American sphere of interest. The Soviet were far more committed in Afghanistan with advisers and heavy investment than they had been in Chile.

6. SPILLOVER
Although developments in Afghanistan seemed unlikely to spillover in Eastern Europe, the success of Muslim fundamentalism in Afghanistan could have unsettled the Soviet Union’s own Muslim population. If Afghanistan had detached itself from Soviet control, the Soviet would have confronted four hostile Muslim states in the area.

D. EXPLANATION OF JAWID AHMADULLAH
Mr. Ahmadullah was the Afghanistani Interior Minister at time of the Soviet invasion; he arrived in USA in 1980. I spoke with him in Kansas in 1989. He said that nobody knows for sure why the Soviets invaded. There are no natural resources to speak of and the Soviets didn’t need the land. His suggestions:

1. THE SOVIETS FORGOT THE PAST
Moscow assumed the invasion would be a quick walkover like its interventions in Eastern Europe, for example, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Soviets, however, forgot that no one had ever conquered the Afghans. Alexander the Great, the Persians, Ghingis Khan, Great Britain, all failed.

2. GEOSTRATEGIC POSITION
a. The Persian Gulf
Ahmadullah believes that Moscow hoped to set up a base in Southwest Afghanistan, only 15 minutes by air from the Persian Gulf. A base there might serve as a jump off point for control of the Persian Gulf.

b. South and Southeast Asia
From Afghanistan, the Soviets could reach through Pakistan, India, Burma, even as far as Thailand without firing a shot. Indira Ghandi, head of India, was pro-Soviet; therefore the task would have been easy.

c. Self-Defensive Move Against Fundamentalist Contamination
Ahmadullah rejects the notion that the Soviets moved to prevent fundamentalist Islamic contamination from Iran through Afghanistan into Soviet Central Asia. Ninety-five percent in Afghanistan are Sunni and hate the Shiites of Iran. Shiites practiced their faith in secret. The war did not improve their position.

E. SPECULATION IN THE WEST
There was notable speculation in the west about the invasion’s significance: Did it portend further Soviet expansion or did it suggest more limited security objectives? The Soviet stressed the defensive nature of the "assistance" and sought to reassure the West on continuing oil supplies. The traditional expansion theory of Soviet foreign policy—that the Soviet Union, like the tsarist empire, had an inexorable desire to expand and did so whenever a power vacuum appeared on its borders—supported the former view. However, the "expansion or defense" debate hinges on a false dichotomy, because an intervention can be defensive in its aims, but offensive in its effects.

Besides the motives outlined above, the Soviets were "pulled" into the Afghan quagmire—that is, once they had become embroiled in Afghan politics, they could not disengage.

F. THE BREZHNEV DOCTRINE
Another Soviet justification for military intervention—the imperative of international duty—transcended arguments about formal requests for help. Brezhnev said that to act otherwise would "have meant abandoning Afghanistan to imperialism, enabling aggressive forces to repeat their success in Chile." The Soviet Union’s duties to "socialist internationalism" required it to defend "revolutionary gains.

Afghanistan’s invasion led to speculation in the West that Moscow had extended the Brezhnev Doctrine in two principal ways:

1. In a geostrategic sense, to embrace "extra-bloc" interventions in geographical zones outside Europe, where the rules of the game remained unsettled between the superpowers upset the West. Many speculated that Soviet foreign policy had entered an expansionist phase and that "limited sovereignty" had become an offensive and global, rather than a defensive and regional doctrine. This seemed plausible given the Soviet Union’s rise to the status of a global power in the 1970s. The invasion provided insights into the optimistic Soviet assessments of the "correlation of global forces" in the 1970s.

2. To embrace regimes which, in Soviet theory, were not members of the socialist community of states seemed an expansion of the Brezhnev Doctrine. At the time of the invasion, Afghanistan was still a "non-aligned" country, despite its increasing dependence on the Soviet Union. In May 1978, Taraki, then head of the Khalq government, had declared that Afghanistan would not become a satellite of any country and would remain fully independent and non-aligned. Nor did Afghanistan have a mutual assistance treaty with the Soviet Union. The treaty signed between the two countries in December 1978 was a friendship treaty, not a military alliance. Besides, Afghanistan had never been part of the Tsarist Empire.

The similarity between Soviet explanations of the interventions in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan was plain. The West and, indeed, the international communist movement greeted the Soviet use of the Brezhnev Doctrine to buttress its explanations with alarm in. Could Moscow use these justifications to intervene in Yugoslavia, Albania, or Finland? The line of argument used in 1956 and 1968, that is, that external forces threatened a successful socialist revolution did not transfer well to the Afghan case. The Yugoslavs attacked the Soviet application of the Brezhnev doctrine to Afghanistan.

The Kremlin may have downplayed the Brezhnev Doctrine to reassure the West that the intervention was not part of a new offensive strategy. However, given Brezhnev’s and Chervonenko’s statements, it seemed less than convincing. Nevertheless, in the early 1980s the Soviets adopted a less assertive international posture, no doubt influenced by the Afghanistan imbroglio, the Polish crisis, setbacks in Africa, and tougher American policy. Although, in February 1981, Brezhnev assured Castro of "full support," this fell short of a cast-iron pledge of "fraternal aid." Moreover, this vague commitment was long-standing and did not represent a departure in policy. The invasion showed that Moscow could apply the doctrine outside Europe and outside the accepted Soviet sphere of interest. Moscow could apply the doctrine against regimes outside the category of socialist states as defined by the Soviet Union. Did the doctrine extend to other states of socialist orientation? The precarious stability of many of these regimes meant that no one could rule out the possibility of other Soviet extra-bloc interventions in the future.

In the 1980s, there was greater emphasis in Soviet theory on the extent to which revolutionary democratic parties fell short of being Marxist-Leninist parties. From around 1980, the Soviet began a reassessment of Third World radical movements, which led to a revision of the optimistic forecasts of the 1970s on the revolutionary potential of the "newly freed" countries. Beyond "scientific socialism," some revolutionary democratic parties were chasing "petty bourgeois and even utopian ideas." The Soviets admitted that these were not necessarily mass organizations and that "sometimes, movement from below does not match the revolution from above." They were in an embryonic, preparatory phase of development.

A literal interpretation of the implications of the doctrine’s application to Afghanistan suggests:
1. A regime classified by the Soviets as "socialist" or "socialist-oriented" could get Soviet military help. Soviet armed force would prevent Capitalist restoration.
2. Any state threatened by imperialist aggression could be subject to the Soviet Union’s call to proletarian duty.
3. The Kabul regime got power under dubious circumstances. This meant that, on the pretext of a request from the target state’s government, the Soviet Union had the right to intervene in any country in the world, to thwart the plans of "aggressive imperialist forces."

In practice, Soviet assessments of costs and benefits, including the risk of confrontation with the United States, determined the extent of Soviet backing. The United States easily repelled Moscow’s extra-bloc probe into Granada in 1983, when the Soviet Union declined to give fraternal assistance to prevent "capitalist restoration." Far from being a neat "surgical intervention," the Soviet "surgeon" began to suffer a debilitating bleeding wound in Afghanistan.

Gorbachev decided to pull out of Afghanistan with an agreement signed in April 1988 for withdrawing all Soviet troops by February 1989. He did this because of the dismal prospects for victory over the mujahedeen and the war’s unacceptably high economic and political costs to the Soviet Union. The war was seriously impeding Gorbachev’s reform objectives both domestically and internationally. Withdrawal would remove a thorn in the side of Soviet relations with China and the Muslim world and would undermine Western "Soviet aggression" propaganda.

By 1988, the Soviets were openly admitting the invasion decision had been a serious miscalculation.

G. FOREIGN REACTIONS
The Soviets must have braced themselves for a fierce reaction from the West. There was also to be hostile response in the Third World resulting in a United Nation’s General Assembly resolution (passed by 104 to 18 with 18 abstentions) condemning the intervention as inconsistent with the principle of sovereignty. There were to be boycotts of the Moscow Olympic Games and of the Soviet-hosted International Islamic Conference in September 1980.

1. THE WEST
Compared with the United States’ response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Washington’s reaction was robust: the rules of the game did not apply to an "extra-bloc" country like Afghanistan. The Americans had warned the Soviets several times against military intervention, most forcefully after the assassination of the American Ambassador to Kabul in March 1979. The United States saw the invasion as threatening its vital interests in a key strategic area accounting for most of the West’s oil supplies. Washington imposed a wide range of economic sanctions, boycotted the Moscow Olympics, and postponed ratifying the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) II.

The invasion also led to the Carter Doctrine: in his State of the Union address on January 23, 1980, Carter declared: “Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the USA and . . . will be repelled by any means necessary including military force.”

Britain followed the Americans in applying harsh measures, although the reaction of other Western powers was less robust.

2. REACTION AMONG COMMUNISTS
a. Several communist states: Romania, China, Yugoslavia, and Albania criticized the intervention. The Yugoslav Ambassador to the United Nations attacked the intervention as unjustifiable and accused the Soviets of violating the United Nations Charter. Romania did not forward a congratulatory telegram to Karmal. Many non-ruling parties, including the British, Italian, and Spanish opposed the invasion.
b. Others, such as Cuba and North Korea, equivocated. Poland and Hungary were more lukewarm, no doubt fearing the invasion might adversely affect their valued contacts with the West.
c. Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia supported the invasion. The three bloc states, which had enthusiastically embraced the Soviet idea of "socialist internationalism" (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria) gave the Soviets full support. The non-ruling parties in France and Portugal supported the invasion.

IV. FIGHTING THE WAR: COUNTERINSURGENCY
A. MILITARY COUNTERINSURGENCY
The military expected all to be over in two weeks; poor intelligence exacerbated the dangers of a narrow circle of leaders making decisions without spreading their net wider for information and advice. The Soviets originally sent Muslim reservists from Central Asia to Afghanistan, but they soon prove themselves more willing to smuggle Korans back to the USSR than they were to fight. Despite the men and material committed, the Soviets never held more territory than when they first invaded.

They could not count on the Afghan army, with defections ranging from 120,000 troops in April 1978 to 40,000 troops in September 1980. Entire units defected with their weapons.

The Soviets used poor tactics at the beginning. Inherently, there are problems for a modern army, trained to fight in mass formations on the plains of Europe against other regular units, when fighting a limited war against guerrillas. The military leadership reevaluated their strategies and tactics. The army systematically used horrific brutality almost from the beginning and soon began a policy of atrocities to depopulate the countryside. In this way, the Soviets hoped to break the connection between the guerrillas and the local population.

The army developed counterinsurgency units. They were good and made up 20 percent of total forces available in Afghanistan. They undertook most operations.

The other 80 percent performed as occupational forces. These soldiers were not good. They suffered morale and discipline problems. They refused to go out at night. There were fragging incidents. Drugs and alcohol became a serious problem, as were desertions. The army had to replace half of its officer corps.

The Soviets tried the equivalent of strategic hamlets, just as had the Americans in Vietnam. And as in Vietnam, in Afghanistan the Soviets had a hard time telling friend from foe. Moscow had a hard time getting their Afghans to fight. Pakistan became a sanctuary for mujahedeen just as Cambodia had been one in Vietnam. The Soviets copied many of America’s Vietnam tactics, for example, they used helicopters as gunships and for mobility.

Back home draft resistance increased as husbands and sons returned in zinc coffins. The secrecy enshrouding the war upset the military, which increasing became resentful that the government would not publicize its sacrifices. The need for medical and psychiatric care was beyond the abilities of the USSR to satisfy. Eventually in 1980s, American veterans groups made private contacts with Soviet veterans of the Afghan war. They taught the Russians about delayed stress syndrome and helped form self-help groups, such as twelve-step programs for drug and alcohol addiction. They provided prosthetic devices.

Soviet tactics depended on unchallenged air supremacy. American Stinger antiaircraft missiles in the fall of 1986 challenged that supremacy. The mujahedeen achieved and amazing 44 percent hit ratio with Stingers, which had a 77 percent rate in tests. After losing several hundred aircraft, the Soviet air force began to operate only at night, at high altitudes, and far from areas suspected of harboring the weapons. Helicopter gunships left the war. The Afghanis use British Blowpipe missiles against tanks with deadly accuracy. Chinese long-range 122mm artillery enabled rebels to directly attack Soviet and Afghan army garrisons. Like the Vietnamese twenty years before, the Afghans proved they could handle modern weapons.

B. ECONOMIC COUNTERINSURGENCY
The Soviets began a scorched earth policy to depopulate hostile areas and offered incentives to the peasants under their control. The policies did not worked well.

C. POLITICAL COUNTERINSURGENCY
1. Soviet political counterinsurgency also failed. Moscow failed to divide its rival. Moscow failed to win over key native leadership. Moscow failed to create strong native communism and a strong communist party. Moscow failed to create strong Afghan force to turn the war into a civil war. The Afghan government maintained an extremely narrow base of support inside the country and did not erase the factionalism that had split the party since its inception in 1965. The mujahedeen began to show signs of greater unity and combat effectiveness.

2. In its policy external to Afghanistan, the USSR ultimately failed in its efforts to take Afghanistan off the international agenda. Moscow failed to intimidate or co-opt Pakistan or to get US agreement to a Soviet-style solution. The USA and China continued their support, and, despite bullying, so did Pakistan.

By 1987, the choice was withdrawal or permanent occupation.

V THE DIMINISHING PROSPECTS OF VICTORY
The USSR was not losing the war, yet the mujahedeen controlled 75 percent of the countryside. The USSR could have continued with no increased commitment to control cities, major highways, etc.
1. USSR tried large-scale offensive assaults backed with massive firepower.
2. They tried attacks against resistance sanctuaries and supply lines inside Pakistan,
3. They attempted assassination of key mujahedeen figures
4. They tried a "national reconciliation" plan that would have included opposition participation in a post-Soviet coalition.
5. Improved counterinsurgency had improved dramatically by 1986. Specially trained air-assault forces were carrying out successful at-tacks.
6. A brutal depopulation campaign had increased hostility toward USSR, but it did almost destroy the mujahedeen logistical structure.
But by late 1986 it had become clear to Gorbachev that USSR was not going to create and preserve a regime in Kabul with legitimacy, viability, or survivability.

A. THE COSTS OF LEAVING
1. THE HUMILIATION OF FAILURE
Leaving would show the USSR as unable to keep its position in a vital interest area and incapable of using effectively its vast military power as a political instrument. Because of geographical contact, a Soviet withdrawal would be worse than America’s Vietnam withdrawal. The USSR, however, did not want to face an embarrassing helicopter withdrawal from the roof of its embassy as the USA had had in Vietnam. Would the world community see withdrawal as only first step in a larger retreat? Perhaps it would show the USSR as a superpower in decline. Was Gorbachev presiding over the dismantling of the Soviet empire?

2. GEOSTRATEGIC POSITION
a. From a client state, a post-Soviet Afghanistan would be nationalistic, Islamic, and anti-Soviet.
b. Moscow would lose its presence astride the eastern flank of Iran and the western flank of Pakistan, only 300 miles from the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. This is not to claim that the purpose in the invasion was a drive for "South Asian hegemony" or "warm-water ports," but it would decrease capabilities toward Iran, Persian Gulf, Pakistan, India, and China.

3. CLIENT CREDIBILITY
Cuba, Vietnam, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, and East Europe watched Afghan events closely. They were unsure of Soviet dependability and might begin to look elsewhere for support. These countries might switch sides as had Egypt in the mid-1970s. Such a foreign policy setback would weaken Gorbachev in his internal power struggles.

4. THE DANGER OF FUNDAMENTALIST SPILLOVER
A pullout would not likely strengthen the long-term stability of Muslim Soviet Central Asia, which many regarded as the most serious long-term threat to the cohesion of the USSR.
a. It would show that the Soviet army was not invincible and was incapable of beating impassioned Muslim holy warriors fighting for national independence.
b. Some fundamentalist mujahedeen were talking of extending the jihad to Samarkand and Bokhara, deep inside the USSR, and the mujahedeen conducted many small hit-and-run attacks inside the USSR in the last few years of the war. Problems to be sure, but there was little evidence that fundamentalism had (or has) grabbed imaginations in predominantly Sunni Central Asia. Chechnia is another story.
c. On the other hand, a continued war in Afghanistan could worsen tensions in Central Asia. Some Soviets even doubted that fundamentalists could come to power in Afghanistan. Besides, the Afghan government had so far deserted Communist goals that it no longer deserved support.

5. IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
The fall of a Marxist-Leninist regime would challenge the notion of the inexorable march of Marxism in history. But the damage might be easily manageable. Soviet commentators began to claim that Afghanistan was not ready for socialism and that the government there had not been a truly Marxist-Leninist state.

B. THE COSTS OF STAYING
1. THE HUMILIATION OF FAILURE
Continuing the war as it was would have also denigrated the USSR as a superpower. On image, there is not much different for a superpower between losing and failing to win a war against a Third World power. Guerrillas win if they do not lose and conventional armies lose if they don not win. Withdrawal puts the pain up front; staying leaves the bleeding wound. One of Vietnam’s greatest costs to the USA was simply the international skepticism about the wisdom of its national purpose. To stay indefinitely in Afghanistan would have shown a similar lack of judgment.

2. OTHER CLIENT CONFLICTS
The economic costs to the USSR were great. The USSR was subsidizing five clients engaged in civil wars with local resistance forces: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, and Vietnam in Cambodia. One of Gorbachev’s emerging Third World policies was a hardheaded budgetary austerity, questioning whether the benefits of subsidizing weak, illegitimate, Marxist-Leninist basket cases exceed the enormous economic costs. Gorbachev hoped the Afghan agreement would serve as a precedent for settling other regional disputes. The withdrawal did help in extricating Vietnamese forces from Cambodia, and a settlement of the fourteen-year-old conflict in Angola.

3. SINO-SOVIET RELATIONS
Moscow largely accomplished its long-sought military encirclement of China by 1990 with the:
a. Occupation of Afghanistan.
b. The steady Soviet help to Indian military power.
c. Setting up a reliable client in Vietnam.

Topography and lack of anything important in western China limited Afghanistan’s geostrategic importance toward China. Even so, Beijing long identified Afghanistan as one of the three obstacles to normalization of Sino-Soviet relations. The enormous improvements in Sino-Soviet relations, which resulted in the first summit between the two communist giants in three decades with Gorbachev’s May 1989 visit showed significant Soviet movement on all three of the obstacle issues.

4. THE ISLAMIC WORLD
Muslims feel vast satisfaction knowing that the Islamic jihad expelled the Soviet army from Afghanistan.
a. Soviet withdrawal ought to improve Moscow’s ability to improve relations with Muslim nations from Morocco to Indonesia.
b. Especially promising were prospects for a long-sought Soviet role in the Middle East peace process.
c. Improved prospects for establishing diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.
d. Improved relations with Iran should result.

5. EFFECTS ON THE SOVIET MILITARY
The war gave the Soviet military its first combat experience since World War II. There were problems, however. These included widespread drug use and addiction among the ranks, alcoholism among the officers, low morale, fraggings, and smuggling and corruption. Tensions often escalated to brawls between Soviet soldiers of different ethnic backgrounds (especially Slavs and Central Asian Muslims). Many Soviet soldiers deserted despite the horrible atrocities inflicted on Soviet POWs by mujahedeen captors. There was significant draft evasion and an explosion in assignment peddling. Anti-military sentiments surfaced, questioning military values, privileges, professionalism, and competence.

There was much discontent in the army because the government was not publicizing its valor.

6. GORBACHEV’S DOMESTIC AGENDA
Gorbachev needed popular support to push through his domestic reforms. The USSR could no longer cover up problems in Afghanistan, and after 1986 the Soviet media published increasingly open accounts. The press revealed widespread public loathing toward the war. There was public upset at exemptions given to those well-placed. About 700,000 soldiers spent time in Afghanistan over nine years, so millions had friends or relatives whom the war had touched. By the end of 1987, nearly half of the urban adults opposed the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Wheelchairs and zinc coffins led to disillusionment and alienation.

7. NEW THINKING AND THE NEW SOVIET INTERNATIONAL IMAGE
a. International Problems
For the first time, Soviet leaders began to realize that their actions had produced negative reactions in the rest of the world, which cemented cooperation among Soviet enemies. The Soviet military buildup in the Far East drove Washington, Beijing, and Tokyo into a loose but real anti-Soviet alignment with talk of at least a tacit military alliance. Soviet actions had revitalized NATO, halted detente, and led to the American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics and a grain embargo. Soviet expansionism contributed to both Ronald Reagan’s election and the American military buildup on the 1980s.

b. Domestic Problems
While the necessary economic reforms depended mainly on internal circumstances, external forces were important too:
1. The need for major Western economic and technological input.
2. The need to achieve significant arms control agreements to divert resources away from the military sector.
3. The need for a peaceful international environment so that the USSR could concentrate its attentions on its formidable domestic challenges.

C. THE DECISION TO LEAVE
In balance, the Kremlin under Gorbachev decided that leaving would cause fewer problems than staying. Since 1986, military situation had shifted to rebels. Gorbachev began to pursue foreign and domestic policy agendas radically different from his predecessors and the Soviets reevaluated the costs.

Soviet statements in April 1988, announcing Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, did not refer to "defending socialism." Rather, they stressed "traditional friendships" between the two countries.

The pullout decision, based on the "New Thinking" in Soviet foreign policy, raised interesting questions on the Soviet commitment to the doctrine of the irreversibility of socialism. It was the first example of a Soviet withdrawal following a full-blooded attempt to render "fraternal military aid" to another socialist state. Did it mean that the Kremlin would no longer seek to secure the survival of socialism within the Soviet bloc by military means?

The pullout decision was a rational Soviet response to the problem of imperial overextension. By reducing its burdens in Afghanistan, the Soviet regime placed itself in better shape to respond to centrifugal forces within its critical defense zone in Europe.

The pullout agreement did not concede capitalist victory, because it allowed for "positive symmetry" between Moscow and Washington in the supply of arms to the government and rebels. Even with a total mujahedeen victory, Afghanistan would be likely to become a non-aligned, faction-ridden Muslim state rather than a pliable invasion platform for the West.

Before the intervention, Afghanistan was a non-aligned, economically backward socialist-oriented country rather than a fully-fledged socialist state. In 1988, a leading Soviet specialist on countries of socialist orientation admitted that wishful thinking had distorted Soviet theorizing on this subject in the 1970s and early 1980s. Many countries included in this category of socialist orientation had been in no sense socialist.

By splitting doctrinal hairs, the Soviets argued the pull out had created no precedent for Eastern Europe. However, no amount of rationalization could disguise that a Soviet application of the Brezhnev Doctrine had failed. In fact, Afghanistan was the start of Gorbachev’s general disengagement from commitments to communist allies.

The USSR completed its withdrawal on schedule on Feb. 15, 1989.

IX. THE COSTS OF THE WAR
Cost to Afghanistan:
50% reduction in agricultural production
50% less livestock
70% of paved roads damaged
60% of rural health centers destroyed
35% of villages destroyed
40% of population displaced
06% of population killed (1 million)
2 million flee countryside to city
5 million flee to neighboring countries
35,000 Soviet soldiers killed or wounded

Afghan Websites:

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Russia@msu.edu

Vladislav Tamarov
AFGHANISTAN: SOVIET VIETNAM
San Francisco: Mercury House, 1993.

Reviewed by Jeff Roberts, Tennessee Tech University, for
H-Russia

Vladislav Tamarov's Afghanistan: Soviet Vietnam was one of the most engaging books I read in 1994. This firsthand account of the experiences of a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan is unique, disturbing, and thought-provoking.

While the personal perspective at times allows for odd interpretations (for example, the author believes the Moscow was fighting the war to preserve drug traffic), the book repeatedly drives home the foolishness and inhumanity of the Afghan campaign. The political leadership, Tamarov claims, "told us that Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan were planting trees and building schools and hospitals." Instead, "We came to a place that we didn't know for a reason that we didn't understand."

Tamarov has even more contempt for the army high command, whom he derides as "old children playing toy soldier." His description of training would be comical were it not so tragic. Trained as a paratrooper, in Afghanistan he became a minesweeper. "Why did they train us to jump with a parachute when no one used parachutes in Afghanistan?" he asks. One has to wonder. Thanks to a caring commander, who not only provided useful lessons to his apprentice minesweeper, but who also had a sixth sense that warned of imminent danger, Tamarov made it out alive. Apart from that individual, his description of the Soviet military hierarchy defines incompetence.

Tamarov's attitude toward the Afghans is an interesting combination of hatred and respect. He reserves most of his contempt for Afghan government forces, who often sold their weapons to the mujahedeen, "creating a meat grinder, in which our own weapons fired at us." Some of the mujahedeen, he claimed, were simply bandits fighting to make money or secure territory. They often butchered prisoners in hideous fashion. Only Soviet journalists, Tamarov claims, ever wrote about these "mujahedeen."

On the other hand, Tamarov has a grudging admiration for Afghans who took to the mountains to defend their homeland. If someone had invaded Russia, he notes, the Russian people would defend their own land as their predecessors did against Napoleon and Hitler. Aliens who come into Afghanistan will always face a similar fate, be they "Soviet, American or Martian." The Soviet press, Tamarov notes, diligently ignored this parallel.

Vietnam parallels are plentiful. Tamarov claims not to remember anyone who did not at least try drugs. "Most of us smoked only when we felt really bad about something—usually everything." On his return, he suffered from "Afghan nightmares," and while awake he on occasion phased in and out of reality. At times, his problems were slightly comical, for example, when he dove under some bushes after a truck had a flat. Far more often, he evokes sympathy for the Afghantsi. Tamarov couldn't keep a job, got divorced, took to the bottle, and became distanced from his parents. He did come to understand why grandpa, who fought in World War II, never liked watching war movies. His conclusion, that the war produced only "thousands of mothers who lost sons, thousands of cripples, thousands of torn-up lives," could easily conclude a Vietnam piece.

Tamarov also notes one disturbing difference between the two wars. "In the United States, there are 186 psychological rehabilitation centers to help Vietnam veterans. The USSR has not even one." Americans, he claims "didn't just write dissertations on post-traumatic stress syndrome . . . they treated people for it, too."

The writing and translating are excellent throughout this work. The descriptions are vivid and the prose flows along nicely. An occasional humorous anecdote or witty phrase will often prompt a smile. The dozens of accompanying photographs, however, are what make this book exceptional. One of the most poignant is of an enormous column built by Alexander, "the same Alexander the Great who said "one can occupy Afghanistan, but one cannot vanquish her." Others display the beauty of the Afghan landscape, or the sheer brutality of war. The most haunting are those of his young comrades. A brief caption often accompanies the many pictures: "This is so-and-so. He was my friend. He died 12 hours later when he stepped on a mine," or something to that effect.

Though often disturbing, the book is strangely uplifting as well. Despite his travails, Tamarov manages to preserve an air of dignity and humanity about himself as well as his love of animals, notably his fat orange cat. He does not categorize or judge except individually. War, he says, doesn't make a creep into a better person. The implication is that the good need not be destroyed by its horrors.

The book ends with Tamarov meeting some American veterans of Vietnam. Though none spoke Russian, and few of the Russians spoke English, "we knew we had found friends . . . blood brothers . . . [who] understood us a lot better than our own people did."

Read this book and you will gain a better understanding of the Afghantsi—Russians who served in Afghanistan. You will likely emerge with some degree of sympathy for the Soviet rank-and-file who fought it the war, something that one rarely gets from more analytical histories.

I recommend this book. At less than two hundred pages, with plenty of photos and wide margins, it can be read easily in a few hours. For those of you who are instructors, you may well wish to consider adopting this for your classes, for it is both an easy read and certain to provoke discussion.

JOURNAL 18

After reading the material above, please answer the following questions in your journal.
1. Why did the Soviet Union move into Afghanistan? Why did the Soviets find it so difficult to leave?
2. What was the international reaction to the Soviets’ war in Afghanistan?
3. What tactics and strategies did the Soviets use in Afghanistan? How successful with these tactics and strategies?
4. Why did Gorbachev ultimately decide to leave Afghanistan?
5. What similarities do you see between the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and the American experiences in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq?

February 6, 2004, Friday
New York Times
”In a Land of Female Repression, a Girl Survives as a Boy”
By A. O. Scott

OSAMA

One of the effects of the 9/11 attacks was to wake up the distracted Western public to the horror of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Now, with the Taliban out of power, ''Osama,'' the first film produced in Afghanistan since they took over in 1996, arrives to nudge us back into alertness. Remnants of the ousted regime continue to menace that nation's peace and stability and to trouble our sleep and our consciences.

Siddiq Barmak, an Afghan filmmaker trained in Moscow in the 1980's wrote and directed the film. Clearly influenced by the Iranian humanist cinema of the 90's, ''Osama'' begins with an apt epigraph from Nelson Mandela: ''I can forgive, but I cannot forget.'' Mr. Barmak is unsparing in his anatomy of the Taliban's cruelty, especially directed against women, but there is little feeling of vengefulness or hatred in the film, which makes it all-the-more devastating in the end.

The opening scenes, a trompe l'oeil documentary within the movie whose meaning becomes clear only much later, capture the violent suppression of a women's-rights demonstration in the sandy, war-blasted streets of Kabul. A scared young girl (Marina Golbahari) watches from a doorway as Taliban soldiers, using water hoses, live ammunition, and grenade launchers, scatter a crowd of women in blue and ocher burkhas.

This is only the most brutal and public manifestation of the pervasive terror under which women in Kabul must live. The Taliban raided the hospital where the girl's mother works, and the mother (Zubaida Sahar) is saved from arrest only when a man whose father is in her care says he is her husband. There is an almost absurd sadism to the Taliban's regulations of women's behavior. Even when a household includes no men—hardly uncommon after so many years of war—the women still may not be seen in public or earn a living. An uncovered foot or an unwelcome word can lead to harassment, or even severe punishment.

Despite all this injustice, the girl's kindly grandmother insists the sufferings of men and women are equal because the sexes themselves are equal. This leads her to decide that they may also be interchangeable, and so her granddaughter, with a short haircut and a dark skullcap, is sent out to work for a sympathetic shopkeeper. (She is later given the name Osama by a young beggar who knows the secret of her identity.) A similar masquerade was at the heart of Majid Majidi's film ''Baran,'' about an Afghan refugee in Tehran who disguised herself as a boy to work at a construction site.

Like Mr. Majidi, Mr. Barmak has a gently poetic visual sense: after her metamorphosis, one of the girl's severed braids is planted in a flower pot and watered by an intravenous drip her mother rescued from the shut-down hospital. He is also able to find moments of tenderness and humor in his bleak story. One sequence that stands out is a lesson in intimate hygiene taught to madrasa students by an elderly mullah—a glimpse at the radical Islamist approach to sex education.

Mr. Barmak's patron was the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose ''Kandahar'' is set in Taliban-era Afghanistan and whose daughter Samira's ''At Five O'Clock in the Afternoon'' takes place in Kabul after the American-led rout of the Taliban. Some of the surrealist touches in ''Osama''—gorgeous, haunting images that call for an adjective like Makhmalbafian—may be a result of this association. The orange glow that suffuses the landscape in all three movies may owe something to that they share the gifted cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafuri. This is not to take anything away from Mr. Barmak, who had the self-confidence to embark on this project with donated equipment, a tiny budget and a cast of nonprofessionals recruited from the streets of Kabul.

The mere existence of the movie, which received the Caméra d'Or special mention for best first feature in Cannes last year and the Golden Globe for best foreign film last month, would be impressive enough. But the movie's power and coherence are such that you forget about the hard circumstances of its making, which is nothing short of astonishing.

There is not much overt or explicit violence in ''Osama,'' which opens today in New York, but an unshakable dread shadows the bright alleyways of Kabul and seeps through the heavy wooden doors of the houses. Like ''The Pianist,'' Roman Polanski's tour of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, ''Osama'' is a meticulous and beautifully made inquiry into the ways that ideological evil can infect, and ultimately destroy, the intimacies and small pleasures of daily life.

Osama has no special resiliency or survival skills; her face is, at every moment, a study in suppressed panic and worried passivity. Her unvarnished vulnerability, with the director's combination of tough-mindedness and lyricism, prevents the movie from becoming at all sentimental; instead, it is beautiful, thoughtful and almost unbearably sad.

Written (in Dari Farsi, with English subtitles), directed and edited by Siddiq Barmak; director of photography, Ebrahim Ghafuri; music by Mohammad Reza Darwishi; set designer, Akbar Meshkini; produced by Barmak Films; released by United Artists. At the Lincoln Plaza, Broadway at 62nd Street. Running time: 82 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Marina Golbahari (Osama), Arif Herati (Espandi), Zubaida Sahar (Mother), Khwaja Nader (Mullah) and Hamida Refah (Grandmother).

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