Afgantsy

Afghan army garrison. Still others said it was stirred up by agents from Iran.

Whatever the basis for these stories, the peasants of the neighbouring villages gathered at their mosques on the morning of Thursday, 15 March, and moved towards the city carrying religious slogans and brandishing ancient rifles, knives, and other improvised weapons, destroying the symbols of Communism and the state as they marched. They were rapidly joined by the people of Herat itself. The mob flooded down the pine-tree avenues that led to the city, past the great citadel and the four ancient minarets in the north-western corner, through the Maliki Gate, and into the new suburbs to the north and east where the provincial governor’s office was situated. They stormed the prison, sacked and torched banks, post offices, newspaper offices, and government buildings, and looted the bazaars. They tore down the red flags and the portraits of the Communist leaders. They beat people not wearing traditional Muslim clothes. Party officials, including the governor himself, were hunted down and killed.⁶ So were some of the Soviet advisers who were working in the city and were unable to make their escape. By noon most of the city was in rebel hands. That evening there was dancing in the bazaars.⁷

In the months and years that followed, the story of what happened in Herat on those March days grew mightily in the telling, fanned by the reports of courageous but uncritical Western journalists who had no way of checking what they were told. The mutilated bodies of a hundred Soviet advisers, their wives and children, were said to have been paraded through the streets. It was confidently asserted that Soviet long-range bombers had pounded the city for two days. Up to twenty thousand people were said to have died in the rebellion and its aftermath.

As so often during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, facts were hard to establish, and hard to distinguish from myth-making. Most of the figures about the Herat rising have been much exaggerated. But whatever the truth of the matter, the immediate reaction of the Communist government in Kabul was to panic, and to ask Moscow to send military forces to put the rising down. The Soviet Politburo debated the question for four whole days and then came to a very sensible conclusion. They would not send troops, though they would supply the Afghan government with additional military and economic aid. As the Soviet Prime Minister, Alexei Kosygin (1904–80), told the Afghan President, Nur Mohamed Taraki (1913–79), ‘If we sent in our troops, the situation in your country would not improve. On the contrary, it would get worse. Our troops would have to struggle not only with an external aggressor, but with a part of your own people. And people do not forgive that kind of thing.’

In the event, the Afghan government was able to put down the Herat rising on its own. But a slow-burning fuse had been lit. Unrest and armed resistance continued to spread throughout the country. Infighting within the Communist Party grew increasingly bloody, until it culminated in September with Taraki’s murder by the Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin (1929–79).

For the Russians this was the last straw. Driven step by step, mostly against their will, they tried to get a grip. Their decisions were bedevilled by ignorance, ideological prejudice, muddled thinking, inadequate intelligence, divided counsel, and the sheer pressure of events. Needless to say, the experts who actually knew about Afghanistan—and there were many of them in the Soviet Union in those days—were neither consulted nor informed.

In December 1979 Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan. Soviet special forces seized key objectives in Kabul, stormed Amin’s palace, and killed him. The intentions of the Soviet government were modest: they aimed to secure the main towns and the roads, stabilise the government, train up the Afghan army and police, and withdraw within six months or a year. Instead they found themselves in a bloody war from which it took them nine years and fifty- two days to extricate themselves.

The Afgantsy, the soldiers who did the actual fighting, came from all parts of the Soviet Union: from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic States. Despite the great differences between them, most thought of themselves as Soviet citizens. That changed towards the end, as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, and men who had been comrades in arms found themselves living in different and sometimes hostile countries. Many took years to find their feet again in civilian life. Some never did.

None shook free of the memories of their common war.

PART I The Road to Kabul

The country is extremely well adapted to a passive resistance. Its mountainous nature and the proud and freedom-loving character of its people, combined with the lack of adequate roads, makes it very difficult to conquer and even harder to hold.

General A. Snesarev, 1921¹

– ONE – Paradise Lost

It took the Russians two hundred and fifty years to get to Kabul. The British started later, but got there sooner.

Both were driven by the same imperial logic. The Russian Foreign Minister, Prince Gorchakov (1789–1883), set it out in December 1864: ‘The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilised states which are brought into contact with half-savage nomad populations possessing no fixed social organisation. In such cases it always happens that the more civilised state is forced, in the interests of the security of its frontiers and its commercial relations, to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whose turbulent and unsettled character makes them undesirable neighbours.’ In their turn these newly pacified regions had to be protected from the depredations of the lawless tribes beyond them. The Russian government therefore had to choose between bringing civilisation to those suffering under barbarian rule and abandoning its frontiers to anarchy and bloodshed. ‘Such has been the fate of every country which has found itself in a similar position.’ Britain and the other colonial powers, as well as Russia, had been ‘irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward march’. The greatest difficulty, Gorchakov rightly concluded, lay in deciding where to stop.¹

Gorchakov’s defence of Russian policy was of course self-serving, though his analysis was plausible. The Russians soon resumed their southward movement. This provoked a hypocritical outrage among other imperial powers engaged in much the same pursuit in other parts of the world. The British, in particular, were incensed: in the last part of the nineteenth century they created the romantic myth of the ‘Great Game’, brilliantly fuelled by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, in which gallant British officers rode into the Himalayan mountains and the desert lands to their north, and risked their lives to frustrate the knavish tricks of sinister Russian agents seeking to subvert the Indian jewel in the Imperial British Crown.

Afghanistan in the Modern Era

Afghanistan, the country on which the Russians and the British had both set their eye, is one of the oldest- inhabited places in the world, a crossroads between the Central Asian empires to the north, the Indian subcontinent to the south, Persia to the west, and China to the east. Alexander the Great ruled there briefly. Buddhist and Persian empires followed, until all were swept aside by Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227) and Tamberlane (1336–1405) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Babur (1483–1530), a descendant of both men, established the Mogul empire in the sixteenth century. Delhi was its capital, but he chose to be buried in Kabul. Despite successive wars, ‘the bulk of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage remains intact (albeit under threat): it is still