But most of the energies of the 40th Army were confined to preparing and then executing their final withdrawal from the country in February 1989. The withdrawal took place in two stages, between May and August 1988 and between November and February 1989. It was accomplished with the same logistical skill that the Russians had shown when they first entered the country. During this period 2,262 soldiers were killed, an average of eighty-seven a month.
The withdrawal was not seriously opposed by the rebels, who by then were much more concerned with jostling for power in the new Afghanistan. The resulting civil war was, at least for Kabul, more destructive than anything that had happened during the Soviet war.41
General Lyakhovski, the indefatigable Russian chronicler of the war, paints a devastating picture of the 40th Army’s performance. Until the middle of 1980, he says, the troops were hidebound by orthodoxy, sticking close to their armoured vehicles in the valley roads. Later their performance improved, but even so many problems remained unsolved. Units were understrength, and the need to remain alert against mujahedin attacks by day or night led to physical exhaustion and low morale. The soldiers lacked stamina. They were poorly trained. Their personal equipment was inadequate. Junior commanders were careless about security and intelligence, and tactically inept, so that even when they got them at a disadvantage, the rebels were too often able to break out. Lyakhovski’s devastating conclusion was that the Soviet Union’s comparative failure in Afghanistan, its first war since the Second World War, demonstrated its weakness, robbed it of confidence in its own strength, and dispelled the myth of its military invincibility.42
This is not entirely fair. Despite the criticisms levelled against the soldiers of the 40th Army, the best of them became formidable fighting men, respected and feared by their enemy. The troops from the elite parachute and special services units were increasingly well trained and equipped to fight their elusive enemy. Edward Girardet, who spent much time with the mujahedin, reported, ‘The special troops are swift, silent and deadly. Swooping down in a single December [1985] raid, they slaughtered 82 guerrillas and wounded 60 more.’43 A mujahedin commander, Amin Wardak, described the ambush: ‘They attacked at night in a narrow gorge. At first, we didn’t know we were being shot at because of the silencers. Then our people began falling.’44
The 40th Army was unique in its composition. ‘Never before in the history of the Soviet armed forces,’ said its last commander, General Gromov, ‘had an army had its own air force. It was particularly well supplied with special forces units—eight battalions in all, alongside the highly trained air assault and reconnaissance units.’45 It was unique, too, in the task it was set. Unlike some Western armies, no other Soviet army was ever asked to fight an extended counter-insurgency war in a foreign country. The 40th Army was disbanded as soon as the war was over. It had won all its major battles and never lost a post to the enemy: a record which consoled its commanders. But it was never able to deliver the political success which the leaders of the country had hoped for.
– SEVEN –
The Nationbuilders
Even before the troops had crossed the Amu Darya, an army of Soviet advisers had preceded them to try to build ‘socialism’ there, as other foreigners were later to try to build ‘democracy’.
The United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and others all gave aid to Afghanistan before the war. The Russians had the advantage of a direct model on which to base themselves: the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, to which in the course of a hundred years of imperial rule they had brought law and order, clean water, health care, universal education for boys and girls, economic development, and for the elite the prospect of glittering prizes in Moscow. This progress was achieved at a very high price: a protracted guerrilla war in the 1920s, perhaps a million dead in the collectivisation of Kazakhstan in the 1930s, widespread corruption, and political repression sometimes even more ruthless than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless one American scholar judged in 1982: ‘The Soviet leadership can legitimately claim to have a developmental model that has managed to achieve one of the highest rates of literacy, the best health care system, and the highest general standard of living found anywhere in the Muslim world.’1 Even though the extreme measures of the 1920s and 1930s could no longer be applied, there seemed few intrinsic reasons why what had worked in Central Asia should not work in Afghanistan too.
According to Soviet figures, which are neither systematic nor coherent, Soviet aid to Afghanistan between 1954 and 1980 amounted to 1.5 billion roubles. The Russians built power stations, irrigation systems, factories, natural gas wells, and the silo which remained long after the war as one of the sights of Kabul. Many of these were operated with the assistance of Soviet specialists. In addition to army and air-force officers, the Soviets trained labourers, technicians, and engineers—over seventy thousand by 1980, according to Soviet government figures. In 1979 and 1980 the Russians provided 500 million roubles of economic aid to the Afghans: credits, grants, vehicles, fuel, and support for agriculture. In February 1987 they provided 950 million roubles in grant aid, to sweeten the prospect of their eventual withdrawal. Aid to Afghanistan constituted a significant, though not overwhelming, portion of the Soviet aid given to the Third World at this time—estimated at $78 billion between 1982 and 1986. Taken together, aid to the Afghan military and the expenses associated with the Soviet military effort amounted to 1,578.5 million roubles in 1984, 2,623.8 in 1985, 3,197.4 in 1986, and 4,116 in 1987, or roughly $7.5 billion over the four years. By comparison, the entire Soviet military budget as late as 1989 was $128 billion. Similarly, according to Russian government records, Afghanistan’s debt to the USSR by October 1991 was 4.7 billion roubles, roughly half of India’s, and about a tenth of the total debt owed to the Soviet Union by all developing countries.2
Once the war started the Russians made every effort to keep existing projects going, often at considerable risk to the Soviet specialists involved. The major irrigation project outside Jalalabad employed about six thousand people, and consisted of six large state farms, specialising in the production of citrus fruit, vegetable oils, dairy products, and meat. It included a dam and a major canal, a hydroelectric station and a pumping station, a repair works, a wood processing plant, and a jam factory. It was the largest economic project in the country, and was said to be larger than any comparable project anywhere else in the developing world. But it was in a vulnerable place: one hour’s drive from Pakistan, close to two Russian brigades and an airbase. The farms came under attack from the mujahedin, who mined the local roads. B. N. Mikhanov, the chief expert, and his colleagues—there were seventy-eight of them altogether—were professionals, mostly middle-aged and married. They were regularly threatened, and their Afghan fellow workers were sometimes abducted and killed. But they stayed at their posts, and went to work carrying an automatic, a bag of spare ammunition, and hand grenades to defend themselves if necessary. The project survived until after the Russians left, when it was destroyed by the mujahedin in their failed offensive against Jalalabad in the spring of 1989.3
Another major project was the Polytechnic Institute in Kabul, which had been completed well before the war began. Alexander Lunin was the chief adviser to the rector, and managed the Soviet teaching staff—more than a hundred of them. In addition to its three faculties—construction, geology, and electro-mechanics—the institute had a preparatory department which took in students from poorer families and brought them up to speed in Russian and other subjects. The institute too kept going, despite the threats, the shelling, the booby traps, and the death of colleagues.4
How much lasting good all this money did for the Afghan people is not clear. Before the Afghan Communists
