government, law and order, health, agricultural reform, development, education for women as well as men.
They discovered instead that most Afghans preferred their own ways, and were not going to change them at the behest of a bunch of godless foreigners and home-grown infidels. The Russians did not, and could not, address this fundamental strategic issue. The vicious civil war which greeted them had started well before they arrived and continued for seven years after they left, until it ended with the victory of the Taliban in 1996. It was a war in which loyalties were fluid and divided. Individuals and whole groups switched sides in both directions, or negotiated with one another for a ceasefire or a trade deal when the opportunity arose. Fighting and bloodshed erupted within each of the Afghan parties to the war as leaders and groupings struggled for advantage. The Russians found themselves fighting the worst kind of war, a war against an insurgency which they had not expected and for which they were not equipped or trained. All sides behaved with great brutality. There were executions, torture, and the indiscriminate destruction of civilians, their villages, and their livelihood on all sides. Like others who had entered Afghanistan before and since, the Russians were appalled at the violence and effectiveness of the opposition which faced them almost immediately and which made a mockery of their hopes.
One day, both the Russians and the Afghans knew, the Soviets would go home. The Afghans would have to go on living in the country and with one another, long after the last Russian had left. Even those Afghans who supported the Kabul government and acquiesced in the Soviet presence, or perhaps even welcomed it, had always to calculate where they would find themselves once the Soviets had departed.
And there was another fundamental weakness in the strategic thinking of the Soviet government. They had underestimated—maybe they had not even considered—the eventual unwillingness of their own people to sustain a long and apparently pointless war in a far-off country. They were never of course faced by the massive popular movement in America which opposed the war in Vietnam. But a growing disillusion inside and outside government sapped the will of the leadership to continue a war that was brutal, costly, and pointless.
These two misjudgements were sufficient to nullify the military successes of the 40th Army.
The 40th Army had seven commanders during its existence: Yuri Tukharinov, Boris Tkach, Viktor Yermakov, Leonid Generalov, Igor Rodionov, Viktor Dubynin, and Boris Gromov. Between 1975 and 1991 another eleven generals served as advisers to the Afghan armed forces. A number of these men, appalled by the humiliations inflicted on their army and their country, played a significant part in the politics surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new Russia.
These men were sophisticated professionals. They had attended the Academy of the General Staff. They had managed major military formations, run military districts inside the Soviet Union, and commanded armies outside it. In 1979 they still enjoyed the reflected glory of the victory over the Germans in 1945. They were paid more than other public servants except the KGB. They shared with the political leadership the basic objective of maintaining strategic parity with the United States, and the politicians were content that they should have the first claim on the country’s economic resources, provided they kept out of politics. Like professional officers elsewhere, they had been drilled during their training with a strong sense of military honour, duty, and patriotism. They were devoted to the glories of Russian military history. They kept themselves apart from civilian life, but they were quite sure that civilians should not be allowed to meddle in any aspect of military affairs. Even the Defence Minister, Dmitri Ustinov, did not in their eyes quite fit the bill. Despite his long connection with the military, he was a Party bureaucrat, not a professional officer.
Some of these generals had seen action as junior officers in the Second World War. Many of them had served and a significant number had died in the Far East, the Middle East and Africa, where the Soviet Union had given active military support to Communist allies, to ‘progressive’ governments in the Third World, or to peoples seeking independence from their former colonial masters.4
The generals had successfully deployed seventeen divisions into Hungary in 1956; and eighteen divisions, backed by eight Warsaw Pact divisions, into Czechoslovakia in 1968. Eighty-seven officers and 633 soldiers died in the operations against the Hungarian rebels. There was no fighting in Czechoslovakia, and only one officer and eleven other ranks were killed there. As an exercise in logistics, these were formidable achievements. But they were not the real thing. Unlike many of their American counterparts, the Soviet generals had no recent experience of managing large numbers of troops in battle. And they did not have the equipment, the training, the doctrine, or the experience to fight a counter-insurgency war in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Although four Soviet generals perished in the fighting,5 the brunt was borne by colonels, majors, and captains, by young lieutenants, and of course by the ordinary soldier. Only a small proportion, less than 10 per cent, of the officers of the motor-rifle forces, the backbone of the army, went to Afghanistan. The rest were spread across the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, ready for a major war with NATO while keeping a careful eye on the Chinese.
Most Soviet officers genuinely believed in their professional duty to carry out the orders of their government. Even had they known about them, they would not have regarded the doubts which assailed the Soviet leadership as any of their business. At least to start with, they believed that they were indeed in Afghanistan to protect it from outside interference and domestic rebellion. Even as disillusion grew towards the end, some idealism remained. Anatoli Yermolin went to Afghanistan as a young lieutenant in 1987 and was in no doubt about the value of Soviet intervention. The doubts came later, when he returned home and became a liberal politician in the post-Communist Russian parliament.6
By the time they arrived in Afghanistan, young men who had been through the Soviet officer schools were mostly reasonably well trained, or at least equipped to absorb the indispensable lessons they could only learn on the battlefield.
Specialists were given extra training. After finishing at the Academy, Alexander Kartsev was sent off for a year’s further training in intelligence. By then the GRU had decided that they needed better local intelligence in Afghanistan. Technical means of gaining intelligence were proving inadequate. Aerial intelligence arrived too late. Radio listening stations did not work well in the mountains. They recorded a huge number of significant conversations on to ancient tape recorders, but there were not enough qualified interpreters to process the material. One solution, the GRU decided, was to imitate the French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres and give selected intelligence officers basic medical skills. They would be welcomed in the villages, where they ought to be able to pick up much useful information.
And so for two months Kartsev was trained by professors of medicine from Moscow, and learned the ‘Short Russian–Dari Phrase-book’ by heart. He was then sent off to a camp in Turkmenistan, where he learned mountaineering, shooting, mountain driving, and a bit more about the local languages. Then, after being issued with a Soviet passport and enjoying the unsympathetic attentions of the Soviet customs officials at Tashkent airport, he was posted to the 180th Motor-rifle Regiment in Kabul and served in Afghanistan from 1986 to 1988.
He was assigned to a small post west of Bagram. Here he was involved in the raids, ambushes, and house- to-house searches which were the bread-and-butter tasks of such units. In addition he used his medical skills to gain the confidence of the headmen in the nearby village, or
Like other counter-insurgency wars, the campaign in Afghanistan was not a war of set-piece battles and great offensives, of victories, defeats, and headlong retreat, and there was no front line. In such a war, there was
