the withdrawal of Soviet troops and their replacement by UN or neutral Muslim forces. He called for the widest possible boycott of the Olympic Games, which were shortly due to be held in Moscow, and castigated the militaristic thinking which had led first to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and now to the invasion of Afghanistan.11 He was exiled to the provincial city of Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod) for his pains. That summer, Tatiana Goricheva and Natalya Malachuskaya were expelled from the Soviet Union for appealing to conscripts to go to prison rather than serve in Afghanistan.12
Even inside the official machine, some were filled from the very beginning with a sense of foreboding, not only for the fate of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, but for the fate of the Soviet Union itself. On 20 January Academician Oleg Bogomolov of the Institute of the Economy of the World Socialist System, one of Moscow’s most prestigious think tanks, sent a stinging analysis to the Central Committee and to Andropov, the head of the KGB. The paper was entitled ‘Some Ideas about Foreign Policy Results of the 1970s (Theses)’ and it contained a substantial section on the consequences of the Afghan adventure. It pointed out that the rebels could now appeal to the Afghan people to fight the foreign infidels as well as the godless Communists in Kabul. The USSR had got itself involved in yet another confrontation, this time on its volatile southern flank. Aid to the rebels from the Americans, the Arabs, and the Chinese was increasing. The Soviet Union’s influence on the Non-Aligned Movement had already suffered. Detente and arms control had been blocked. Even some of the Warsaw Pact countries seemed unhappy. The invasion might even help to reconcile the USA and Iran, despite the crisis in which the two countries were now locked.13
All these disadvantages had, of course, been pointed out in the policy discussions which preceded the decision to invade. The paper was too late to influence events and produced no reaction from those to whom it had been addressed. But at least the authors were not punished.
The Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies had carried on the distinguished academic tradition of the Russian Orientalists of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Their Afghanistan department was strongly staffed with scholars who covered every aspect of the country’s political, economic, and social life. Many of the linguists were called up at the beginning of the war to serve as interpreters and specialist advisers. There was no way of hiding what was going on from the staff of the institute, where opinion was almost entirely against the war. But the politicians did not listen to them either.14
The British Foreign Office presented a Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister who visited them in January 1980 with a historical account of British failures in Afghanistan. He said, ‘This time it will be different,’ as people usually do when they set out to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.15
Many well-placed officials inside the government machine were appalled. Anatoli Chernyaev, an official in the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat, described in his diary on 30 December how the rest of the world had universally condemned the Soviet action. The Soviet Union’s claims to be promoting detente lay in ruins. ‘Who needed that? The Afghan people? Amin might well have turned the place into a second Cambodia. But was it merely out of a sense of revolutionary philanthropy and charity that we have taken a step that will be classed in world opinion with Finland in 1939 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? The argument that we had to act to defend our frontiers is laughable… I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of Russia, not even under Stalin, when such an important step was decided in such a small circle, without any hint of the slightest consultation, advice, discussion, consideration.’ A few weeks later, as he tried to work out how and why the decision had been taken, he concluded, ‘In a word—the very existence of the state, not only its prestige, is at stake because the whole system and the mechanisms of power have decayed, because of the psychological decay of the supreme leader, and the advanced years of the other leaders whose average age is seventy-five. And there is absolutely no way out.’ Speculation about who was behind the decision to invade was spreading among officials in Moscow. Chernyaev drew what he thought was the obvious conclusion: the KGB had exploited Brezhnev’s incapacity in order to launch this ‘crime’.16
Early in the New Year Anatoli Adamishin, an up-and-coming official in the Foreign Ministry, wrote even more strongly in his own diary: ‘A few days ago we moved our troops into Afghanistan. What an exceptionally ill- considered decision! What are they thinking about? It’s clear that they are showing one another how tough they are. OK, let’s show our muscle. In reality it is an act of weakness, of despair. To hell with Afghanistan. Why on earth should we get mixed up in a completely lost situation? We are wasting our moral capital, others will stop trusting us entirely. We have not been in such a mess since the Crimean War in the last century: everyone is against us, and our allies are weak and unreliable. If they are incapable of running their own country, then we will not succeed in teaching them anything with our economy in tatters, our inability to manage our political affairs or to organise anything properly and so on. What’s more, we seem to be getting mixed up in a civil war, even though it is being fed from abroad. Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? Why should we try to play the role of a universal saviour, when we need to work out properly what we want in our own external and internal affairs. The terrible thing is that this is not what concerns our leaders. Their concern is to hold on to power, to engage in domestic manoeuvres, to demonstrate their high ideological principles, which incidentally we no longer understand ourselves… The action in Afghanistan is the quintessence of our internal affairs. The economic disorganisation, the fear of the Central Asian republics, the approaching Congress, the habit of deciding problems by force, the ideological dogmatism—what sort of a socialist revolution is that, what sort of revolutionaries are these? There is the same obscurity everywhere. What sort of help can we give them? We were better off with the King [Zahir Shah]: at least he listened to us.’17
The Americans had of course been keeping close track of what the Russians were up to in Afghanistan. Their most reliable resource was satellite intelligence, which enabled them to follow the changes in Soviet military dispositions. But they were painfully aware that they had very little idea of what lay behind the Soviet moves. On 17 September 1978 Thomas Thomson, the President’s assistant for national security, sent his boss, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a memorandum entitled ‘What are the Soviets doing in Afghanistan’. His answer was blunt: ‘Simply, we don’t know’.18 The Americans correctly concluded after the Herat rising that the Russians would be unlikely to send their army to support an unpopular Afghan government.19 By the autumn they still judged that the forces the Russians were now assembling were sufficient only to protect Soviet citizens, not to subdue the country. They nevertheless began to make contingency plans in case the Russians did invade after all.20 Later the analysts were blamed for not having predicted the invasion earlier. The CIA’s own post-mortem showed that what had gone wrong was quite simple: the Russians themselves had been uncertain until the last minute if, when, or in what numbers to invade, and so there was no basis on which an earlier assessment could sensibly have been made.
With far less intelligence capacity than the Americans, the British were also keeping track of events. The murder of Taraki, they thought, did raise the possibility that the Soviets might move into Afghanistan. One British official wondered towards the end of November 1979, perhaps presciently, ‘Wouldn’t we be better off with a socialist regime rather than a reactionary Islamic type that is giving us problems elsewhere?’21
After the invasion had taken place, most British and American analysts tended to agree that the Soviets had undertaken it with reluctance, in order to prevent the crumbling of their position in a country which was within their legitimate sphere of influence. Both before and after the invasion, British analysts specifically rejected the idea— popular in the press at the time—that the Russians were after a warm-water port in the Indian Ocean. And indeed no serious evidence has yet emerged, beyond a couple of remarks reported in one Soviet military memoir, that the Soviet invasion was intended as a first step towards securing a warm-water port or—another theme of Western propaganda—towards incorporating Afghanistan into the Soviet Union.22
Both themes were, however, to form a telling element in the all-out campaign of public denunciation which was now unleashed by the Americans and the British. The Soviets, they said, had violated international law with their brutal and unprovoked surprise attack on a very small neighbour. The claim that the Soviet forces had been invited in was a transparent fiction, just as it had been before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was another example of the Soviet Union’s insatiable imperial appetite, of their claim that the so-called ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ gave them the right to keep countries in their bloc by force.
