Afgantsy

Although the fighting was messy, piecemeal and confused, the main objective of each side was simple enough: to stifle the supply routes of the other. The Russians brought in all their fuel, their equipment, their ammunition, and much of their food by lorry from the Soviet Union. The mujahedin got most of their weapons, ammunition, and other military supplies over the mountains from Pakistan.

Because it was a battle for roads and tracks and mountain pathways, both the Russians and the rebels used mines in very large numbers and with little discrimination. But in an asymmetrical war mines, booby traps, and roadside bombs are the preferred weapon of the weaker side, and can have a devastating effect on the morale of the stronger, as the Americans discovered in Vietnam. The rebels’ mines came from a wide variety of sources— America, Britain, Italy, China—and they also improvised their own. The largest mines could destroy a tank or an infantry fighting vehicle. The smallest could blow off a foot. The Russians used flail tanks to clear the roads. Sappers used trained dogs, probed for mines by hand—it was no good using a metal detector because the mujahedin often used plastic mines—and defused them, as columns and raiding parties followed at a snail’s pace. As they said, a sapper only ever makes one mistake.

For their part the Russians set mines in a protective belt round their own positions, and along routes and mountain tracks used by the rebels. In principle they kept proper maps of the places where they had sown their mines. In practice maps were inaccurate, got lost, or were never made in the first place, and so the Russians were sometimes blown up on their own mines. The rebels did not bother to make maps.

It was not for nothing that the Russians called it a ‘war of mines’: Afghanistan remains littered with mines sown by all parties both to the Soviet war and to the civil war which followed. There are still casualties as old mines are set off by children playing and by peasants working their fields.

The mujahedin avoided pitched battles and struck from ambush where they had the advantage. Occasionally they went further, attacked garrisons and airbases, and tried towards the end of the war to capture towns. But the Soviet convoys went on running, the main roads remained open, and no town of any consequence fell to the mujahedin while the Russians were still in Afghanistan.

For their part the Russians raided villages suspected of harbouring rebels, struck into the mountains to destroy their bases and disperse their men, mounted counter-ambushes, and mined the routes along which the mujahedin moved. Their operations were supported by transport and battle helicopters, by artillery, by fighter bombers under the command of the 40th Army, and by long-range bombers from the Soviet Union. Quite junior officers—lieutenants and captains in charge of guard posts—could call down artillery support if they needed it. The inevitable result was a heavy loss of life and property among the civilian population.

But to confront the mujahedin and their unorthodox methods of fighting effectively, special skills and special tactics and special troops were needed, troops that could operate in the mountains to ambush and counter-ambush the guerrilla bands, and to cut the routes taken by their caravans. Although the ordinary motor-rifle units took regular part in such operations, the main brunt of the fighting inevitably fell on the elite special and parachute units, and on the reconnaissance battalions and companies in the motor-rifle divisions and regiments. These troops fought very effectively, both in the high mountains and in the green zone. They made up some 20 per cent of the total strength of the 40th Army: according to some calculations, of the 133 battalions in the 40th Army, only fifty-one took part regularly in operations. The rest spent much of their time in their garrisons or escorting convoys.¹⁵

In addition to these regular army units there were a number of special forces teams set up by the GRU, the KGB, and the Ministry of the Interior. Of these the GRU special forces teams were the most substantial. A ‘special forces group’ was set up in 1985 which eventually consisted of two brigades, each of eight battalions, an independent company, an independent reconnaissance battalion, four regimental reconnaissance companies, nine reconnaissance platoons, and thirteen other units, a total of three thousand men in all. The 15th Brigade was stationed in Jalalabad and the 22nd Brigade in Asadabad in Kunar province on the Pakistani border. The 22nd Brigade was pulled out in the summer of 1988 as the 40th Army began its withdrawal. The 15th Brigade remained behind to cover the final stage of the withdrawal in February 1989.¹⁶

The main purpose of the GRU special forces units was to block the supply routes of the mujahedin through the mountains. They acquired a formidable reputation as they became increasingly well trained and equipped to fight their elusive enemy. Enduring extreme heat and cold in the harsh Afghan climate, suffering from altitude sickness in the high mountains, backed by helicopters and attack aircraft, they ambushed the guerrillas or were ambushed in their turn, and they did what they could to stop the caravans with military supplies streaming in from CIA and Pakistani bases across the frontier. They achieved some impressive results: in one action in May 1987 they destroyed a large caravan, killed 187 mujahedin, and captured a considerable amount of equipment and ammunition. But in spite of all their efforts, and those of the other elite troops, they succeeded in intercepting barely 15–20 per cent of the mujahedin caravans.¹⁷ No more than the mujahedin did they succeed in their prime purpose: to block their enemies’ supply routes.

The Problem of Intelligence

The KGB and MVD (Interior Ministry) teams were much smaller, and their prime job was to gather intelligence—to build networks of agents among the mujahedin, to study the tribal and clan relationships in their area of operations, and to discover the whereabouts of mujahedin bases, supply routes, and arms dumps. They were also given the task of hunting down and capturing—dead or alive—foreign advisers attached to the mujahedin; persuading mujahedin commanders to bring their bands over to the government side; and sowing dissension between bands so that they fought one another instead of the Russians—the tactic adopted by Rudyard Kipling’s hero on the Khyber Pass in the last chapter of Stalky & Co.¹⁸ Of course the Afghans were playing a similar game, and fed the Russians with false information to provoke operations against their own personal or tribal enemies.

The KGB’s teams formed part of an organisation called Kaskad, which Andropov set up in the summer of 1980.¹⁹ It consisted of about a thousand KGB special forces officers, stationed in eight different places throughout Afghanistan. They were not permitted to take part in routine military operations; they were too valuable to lose. The officers called themselves ‘Kaskadery’, from the French cascadeur, a stuntman. Kaskad remained in Afghanistan for three years. It was then replaced by a similar group, Omega, which itself left Afghanistan after a year. But many individual officers remained, attached to various special forces until the end of the war.

The code name for the Interior Ministry’s teams was Kobalt. The Kobalt officers were mostly from the ministry’s criminal investigation department, skilled at manhunting villains across the Soviet Union. Their job was to assist the Afghan secret police, the KhAD (Khadamate Etela’at-e Dawlati, the State Information Agency) in tracking down mujahedin leaders. They too were supposed to keep clear of regular military operations. There were twenty-three Kobalt teams in Afghanistan, each consisting of up to seven men, with a BTR (armoured personnel carrier) and a radio.²⁰

A surprising number of the officers in these small units barely knew the local languages and had to rely on interpreters, often Central Asian soldiers from the nearest Soviet unit. As one of them said, this was inconvenient if you were trying to interrogate a prisoner. Some of them were later withdrawn for two years’ intensive language training and then sent back to Afghanistan. The teams were also very thin on the ground. Zabol province shared forty miles of open border with Pakistan, across which passed seven caravan supply routes. Even after 200,000 people had left as refugees, there were still 150,000 living there, divided among seventeen tribes and ethnic groups, mostly Pushtuns. There were 145 mujahedin bands in the province, about two–three thousand men in all. They attacked pro-government kishlaks, collected tribute from the locals, mined the Kabul– Kandahar road, and carried out terrorist attacks. The KGB had twenty-eight officers for the whole province. The Kobalt team consisted of five officers and three frontier guards. There were only twenty- seven KhAD officers to support them, out of a nominal establishment of just under five hundred. There were eighty Tsarandoi—gendarmes—but they were local men, and their loyalties were suspect.²¹

The problem of intelligence and security bedevilled the 40th Army throughout the war. Their intelligence