Yevgeni Kiselev, a military interpreter who later became a well-known TV presenter, was on duty in Kabul that night. There were two other duty officers: a colonel and a junior lieutenant. At about seven o’clock the Chief of Staff to General Magometov, the new Chief Soviet Military Adviser, came to the duty officer’s room for a private talk with the colonel. Afterwards the colonel, puzzled and anxious, told Kiselev and his colleague to go round the homes of all the senior military advisers—about three dozen of them—and tell them to assemble at the headquarters by nine o’clock to await orders. The orders never came, and the officers were allowed to go home. A few days later a young KGB officer told Kiselev that there had been a plan for a coup, but that it had been called off at the last minute.2
What had happened was that General Magometov and other senior Soviet representatives had discovered what was going on. They were appalled. They had not been consulted about the KGB plan. It was worthless, they told Moscow, and could not be carried out with the limited forces available. Without more military muscle, the plan might well fail, and the Soviet position in Afghanistan would be seriously compromised.
The operation was therefore postponed until a bigger force could be put together. Disagreement flared among the Soviet military and the politicians in Moscow about how large a force was needed. In 1968 the Soviet Union had deployed eighteen divisions, backed by eight Warsaw Pact divisions—some five hundred thousand men— to invade Czechoslovakia, a country with a much more forgiving terrain and no tradition of armed resistance to foreigners; a country moreover where, unlike Afghanistan, there was not already a civil war in progress.3 The government and the KGB initially believed that the job could be done with some 35– 40,000 soldiers. The generals naturally wanted more. During the planning phase, under pressure from General Magometov in Kabul and others, the number was increased, and the force which crossed the frontier at the end of December consisted of some eighty thousand soldiers.4 Even this was nothing like the number that the soldiers believed would be necessary: Russian military experts later calculated that they would have needed between thirty and thirty-five divisions to stabilise the situation in Afghanistan, close the frontiers, secure the cities, road networks, and passes, and eliminate the possibility of armed resistance.5
As the pace of preparations accelerated, an ‘Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR’ was established on 14 December under Marshal Sergei Sokolov, the First Deputy Minister of Defence, a man already over seventy, tall, with a big bass voice and a calm, fatherly manner.6 It began work in Termez, the last town on the Soviet side of the Afghan border, but before long moved to Kabul, where it remained. The group set up a new army, the 40th, in the Turkestan Military District, under General Tukharinov, who had arrived in September as the district’s deputy commander. Since its objectives, its size, and the amount of time it spent in Afghanistan were all intended to be limited, the force was publicly referred to as ‘The Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan’ (Ogranichenny Kontingent Sovietskikh Voisk v Afganistane, or OKSVA). This bland name was retained throughout the war for propaganda purposes, sneered at by foreign and domestic critics of the war, and is still often used even today.
The chain of military command which was thus created was riddled with contradictions. The 40th Army operated inside Afghanistan, but was formally subordinated to the Commander of the Turkmenistan Military District in Tashkent, who was himself responsible to the Chief of Staff in Moscow. Much of the military planning for operations within Afghanistan was done by the staffs of these three organisations. But the most senior officer in Afghanistan was the head of the Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence, and he too could and did take on himself the responsibility for managing operations, communicating directly with Moscow without taking too much notice of Tashkent. In addition there was the Chief Soviet Military Adviser to the Afghan government, who headed the large numbers of Soviet military advisers attached to the Afghan army, was responsible for coordinating the operations of that army with those of the 40th Army, and believed that he too had a responsibility for operational management. All this further added to the confusion which already surrounded the Soviet handling of policy in Afghanistan because of the divided counsels in Moscow and among the various Soviet representatives in Kabul. Forceful personalities—Gorbachev; General Varennikov (1923–2009), as head of the Ministry of Defence’s Operational Group the most senior general in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1989; Yuli Vorontsov, the ambassador in the last months of the Soviet military presence—could knock heads together from time to time. But the problems caused by these tortured and contradictory arrangements never entirely went away and they compounded the difficulties which already existed because of the longstanding rivalry between the army and the KGB.
Thanks to some heroic feats of improvisation, the 40th Army was more or less ready to move by the end of 24 December. In his directive to the commanders, Ustinov justified the action as follows: ‘In view of the political and military situation in the Middle East the latest appeal by the government of Afghanistan has been considered positively. It has been decided to introduce a few contingents of Soviet forces, deployed in the southern regions of the country, on the territory of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in order to provide international help to the friendly Afghan people, and also to create favourable conditions for the prevention of possible anti-Afghan actions on the part of neighbouring states…’7 This was to remain the Soviet government’s official justification for the war.
At midday on 25 December Ustinov issued the formal order to move: ‘The state frontier of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan is to be crossed on the ground and in the air by forces of the 40th Army and the Air Force at 1500 hrs on 25 December (Moscow time)’.8 The Soviet intervention had begun.
What is surprising is not that there was a good deal of chaos, which of course there was; but that the formidable administrative and logistical difficulties were overcome, and the army deployed into Afghanistan on time. Indeed the Soviet general staff had always been very good at moving and supplying very large armies in very difficult situations. The methods were often crude in the extreme. They could cause great hardship to the soldiers themselves. But they had worked in the Second World War. In Afghanistan, despite the last-minute improvisations and the formidable obstacles of terrain and climate, they worked again, though some of the soldiers went hungry because the system had hiccuped.9
The main route for the invasion was the great road which runs around the periphery of Afghanistan, avoiding the mountains and linking the country’s great cities, from Balkh, destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1220, through Mazar-i Sharif, with its great shrine devoted to Ali, the cousin and brother-in-law of the Prophet, and onwards anti-clockwise to Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul. This was part of the Silk Road, the road along which trade and armies passed for thousands of years, along which the British feared the Russians—or the Persians, or the French—would burst into their Indian empire. In those days the eastern arc of the circle did not exist; until a new road was built by Nadir Shah over the Salang Pass in the early 1930s, there was no proper road through the mountains of the Hindu Kush from Kabul to Mazar-i Sharif. In the 1950s the Americans and the Russians competed to modernise the road. The Americans built the southern stretch from Kabul to Kandahar, and the Russians built the rest. It became a road along which you could drive cars, lorries, and if necessary tanks. The Soviet soldiers called it the
The plan was that the 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division would enter Afghanistan along the western route through Herat and Shindand. The 108th Motor-rifle Division would cross the Amu Darya at Termez. The 103rd Guards Air Assault Division and the remaining battalions of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment would fly into Kabul and Bagram. The three divisions would be accompanied by the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, and a number of other units. In the course of the next six weeks they would be joined by another motor-rifle division, the 201st, and further smaller units.10 The troops would secure the highway and garrison the main administrative centres along it. Tabeev, the Soviet Ambassador, had already informed Amin that the troops were coming. To ensure that their movements were properly coordinated, the commander of the 40th Army, General Tukharinov, met the commander of the operational division of the Afghan general staff, General Babadzhan, to discuss the details at Kunduz, the first Afghan town on the road from Termez.
The move began during the night of 24 to 25 December, when Soviet aircraft landed practically non-stop at Kabul and Bagram airports, carrying the soldiers of the 103rd Guards Air Assault Division from Vitebsk and the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment. Seven thousand seven hundred men, nine hundred items of
