officers sought the cooperation of local tribal leaders, offering them safety from military operations, paying them subsidies, giving them food, medicine, military advice, and equipment, in exchange for their agreement to prevent ambushes, mines, and the movement of mujahedin caravans within the area they controlled. They successfully recruited agents among the villagers to report on the movements and intentions of the mujahedin. But the local leaders were under equal pressure from the mujahedin and the agreements would break down. The agents were very often illiterate, unable to read maps, and reported gossip as fact. Their handlers had to deal with them face to face, with all the risks that entailed, instead of communicating with them by secret means.22 Double and triple agents abounded. It was not unknown for rival agencies on the Russian side—the KGB and the GRU—to employ the same agent unwittingly, paying him twice for the same piece of dubious information. The mujahedin kept their own agents around Soviet bases and along their routes of march, and reported all Soviet troop movements to their principals immediately. Because the Afghan army and police were so heavily penetrated by agents of the mujahedin, the Russians only informed their allies of the objectives of joint operations at the very last minute; or they would issue them with deliberately misleading operational plans, which would be modified only when the operation was already under way. Naturally enough, the Afghans blamed their Russian advisers when things went wrong.
Fighting alongside the 40th Army were the Afghan government forces. On paper at least these were formidable. At the time of the invasion in 1979, the Afghans had ten divisions, and were armed with modern—if not the most modern—Soviet weapons: aircraft, tanks, and artillery.23 By the end of the war the army had grown to twelve divisions, and a number of specialised brigades and smaller units. The air force had seven air regiments, with thirty fighters, more than seventy fighter bombers, fifty bombers, seventy-six helicopters, and forty transport aircraft. Many of the officers spoke Russian and had been well trained in the Soviet Union.24
But there were serious weaknesses. Units were often reluctant to fight, although they did better if they were backed by Soviet units. Most were well below their nominal strength: an Afghan division might consist of no more than a thousand men, a tenth of what it should have been. The loyalty of the officers was suspect. In what amounted to a continual purge, both Amin and Babrak Karmal systematically moved or got rid of officers whose loyalty they questioned. Many deserted to the mujahedin. Badly paid and barely trained, with little reason to be loyal to Kabul, the soldiers deserted too: most went back to their villages, some to join the rebels. At first whole units defected: two brigades from the 9th Division in Kunar province; three battalions from the 11th Division at Jalalabad in the south; a brigade in Badakhshan in the north-east.
By 1980 the numbers in the army had fallen to 25,000. To stem the haemorrhage, the government lowered the age of conscription; press-ganged reluctant conscripts by force; increased the length of service to three years; and mobilised reservists under thirty-nine. After 1980 few units defected en masse; the number of individual desertions somewhat declined; and overall numbers increased, nominally at least: to 40,000 by 1982 and to 150,000 by the eve of the Soviet withdrawal at the beginning of 1989.25 The rule of thumb was that if the desertion rate was no more than about 30 per cent a year you were all right. If it went much above that you were in trouble, sixty per cent was bad news.26
To maintain the numbers at something like a reasonable level, the 40th Army engaged in so-called ‘operative measures in support of the recruitment of volunteers into the People’s Army of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan’. The Russian soldiers loved these operations. You drove instead of marching, there was hardly ever any shooting, you didn’t have to go up into the mountains, and the operations took place in comparatively peaceful areas: after all, you could hardly recruit government soldiers in villages that were committed to the mujahedin. Moreover, there were always plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables to be had, livestock to be ‘liberated’, marijuana to be picked up, a whole month free of routine duty. On these occasions the riflemen were accompanied by a detachment of Tsarandoi and the local ‘officer’s battalion’ of the KhAD, most of whom had been trained in the Soviet Union.
The press gangs went out twice a year, a month after the spring sowing and a month after the autumn harvest. Afghan conscripts had to serve twice: three years in the first instance. Then they got two years’ leave. If by then they had not produced a family (and that meant assembling the bride price, which not everyone could do in the time), they would be recalled for another four years.
The ‘volunteers’ were rounded up in the following fashion. An armoured column would blockade a
At the barracks, men’s heads would be shaved (contrary to the religious beliefs of many of them), they would get rudimentary training in the use of their weapons, and they were given severe warnings about what would happen to them if they disobeyed orders. Within six months two-thirds of them had deserted with their weapons, often to the mujahedin. Sometimes they would return: some Afghan soldiers changed sides as many as seven times. By the spring of 1984 the men in the villages had learned to take to the hills for a month in the spring and the autumn. Recruitment rates fell alarmingly, the press gangs met with increased opposition, and the process lost much of its attraction.27
An unsurprising consequence was that the Afghan units were unreliable in action: if there were real trouble, the Afghan soldiers would often simply get up and leave the scene. The only Afghan troops that could be relied on were the KhAD: they could expect no quarter if they were captured and so they had nothing to lose.
Most of the Soviet soldiers despised their Afghan allies, and wondered why they fought so badly when the same Afghans fought so well with the mujahedin. But General Kutsenko, who served as an adviser to the Afghan army from September 1984 to September 1987, thought that it had been underestimated: ‘By the time I arrived in Afghanistan the Afghan army had been more or less fully reconstructed. Their officers were not bad and they were well armed.’ In his view the Afghan military should have been allowed to manage their own affairs. ‘The Soviet military served only two years and were then replaced. Few of them learned the customs of the local tribes. But the Afghan commanders had been fighting for five to eight years and they well understood the psychology of their people. Our strategists nevertheless decided that the Soviet and the Afghan forces should fight side by side. The result was endless rows and buck-passing when things went wrong. Soviet officers began to say that if the Afghan forces did not want to fight the mujahedin, why should they be doing so?’ Kutsenko, who was also a ‘bard’, one of many soldiers in the 40th Army who composed songs about the war, wondered, ‘Perhaps that was why defeatist songs began to circulate in the period 1984 to 1987, especially among the soldiers.’28
The KhAD was brutally efficient. It worked closely with Soviet KGB advisers and the Soviet military both in Kabul and on the ground. Between 1980 and 1989 about thirty thousand Afghan security officers were trained by the Soviets in Kabul and in Moscow and other Soviet cities, either on short courses of two to six months, or in special institutes for up to two years.29 Under different names the KhAD continued to operate until the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. It was re-established by President Karzai (1957–) under another name in 2001.
The KhAD succeeded in penetrating the mujahedin inside Afghanistan and their organisations back in Pakistan. But the mujahedin also had substantial success in penetrating the KhAD and the army. In May 1985 the head of the intelligence department of the Afghan General Staff, General Khalil, was arrested with ten of his officers and eight others. He was accused of running a spy network on behalf of Masud, who claimed that no operation had ever been mounted against him without his agents warning him of it in advance.30
The war is usually divided into four distinct phases. The first lasted from December 1979 to February 1980, and covered the initial deployment of the Soviet forces throughout the country.
