Afgantsy

got to know the rest by inspecting the sentries at night.

‘Of course, I was lucky. I didn’t go to Afghanistan immediately I had finished officer school, but did specialist training for another whole year. It could be difficult for the young lieutenants who went out to Afghanistan straight from their basic training. The sergeants were often more experienced than they were and they found it hard to establish their authority. Many of them were too arrogant to sleep in the same tents as the men, as I did; others became too familiar with the soldiers, and their authority was undermined. The trick was to find the golden mean.’³⁹

Russians and Afghans

Russians later claimed that, despite all the brutalities of the war, on a human level they got on with the Afghan population rather well—better than the NATO soldiers who succeeded them.

It is a large claim, but it may be justified. Because many Soviet soldiers came from poor rural backgrounds, they could relate to the Afghan peasants and the lives they lived. Andrei Ponomarev, who served in Bakharak, came from a village in the Kaluga province south of Moscow. For a while he was stationed at a zastava guarding a bridge across the river which was manned by Afghans as well as Soviet soldiers. The Afghans lived in dugouts interspersed with the Russian ones. Ponomarev got on well with the Afghan conscript soldiers, who were on the whole better fed than the Russians. In civilian life they were peasants like him: only the land they had to cultivate was much poorer than that in Kaluga. They were anxious to learn Russian, and he did what he could to teach them.⁴⁰

Ponomarev’s comrade Alexander Gergel put it like this: ‘I can’t answer for all of my fellow soldiers, but I myself never felt any hatred towards the Afghan people. Every now and again, when the conditions in which I was living became particularly unbearable, it seemed to me that it was the locals who were to blame for everything. I was irritated to the point when I wanted to mow down each and every one of them. But then I saw the people working in their barren fields and I felt sympathy for them all over again. Fury and hatred broke through only when I was in battle. When we fought we were often outnumbered by the enemy. And we rarely got air support. So one could say that we fought as equals: we had the better weapons, but they were better at tactics, fighting as they were in surroundings with which they were familiar.’⁴¹

Quite junior Soviet commanders worked out their own deals with the local villages and mujahedin commanders, and especially of course with those who represented the regime—soldiers, policemen, the head of the village defence force. The relationship was a complex one. Fighting alternated with cooperation and compromise: an informal ceasefire, a willingness to turn a blind eye to smuggling provided weapons were not involved. The tiny detachments in the zastavas had little choice but to get on with the local villagers: they could not otherwise have survived. For that purpose they were supplied with goods for barter and bribe: canned food, sugar, cigarettes, soap, kerosene, matches, used clothing and shoes, and so on.

The 2nd Battalion of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment kept an eye on the lower reaches of the Pandsher Valley. Their headquarters was in a little fort in Anava. Their doctors would help with simple medicine where they could. They showed films to the villagers and exchanged visits with the local authorities. They tried to mediate in incomprehensible local conflicts. They provided the poorest families with flour, tinned food, vegetable oil, salt, sugar, and condensed milk. Their officers would be invited to dinner by the KhAD representative in Anava to meet the local worthies: the secretary of the party committee, the head of the local administration, the local doctor and teacher. There would be portraits of Lenin and Gorbachev on the wall, generous food, sweets from Pakistan served on delicate porcelain, meat, rice, potatoes, onions, against a background of popular Afghan music from a tape recorder. The mujahedin bombarded the fort in a desultory manner, usually on Sundays, and the Russians responded by shelling the local mountains. The mujahedin did try once to storm one of the battalion’s zastavas, but that was an exception: they were getting their own back because they had recently lost a caravan.⁴²

Much depended on the personality of the local commanders, both of the Soviet soldiers and of the mujahedin bands. Alexander Kartsev was on good terms with the locals. But the commander of the neighbouring zastava was not. His zastava was regularly attacked, while Kartsev and his people were on the whole left alone.

Kartsev used his limited medical skills to improve his relationship with the villagers. Because they had had no contact with modern medicines they reacted well to aspirins, standard antibiotics, and so on. Kartsev’s reputation grew. On one occasion he was kidnapped while he was tending his patients in the local village. He feared the worst, but it turned out that the brother of the local mujahedin commander, Anwar, had accidentally shot himself and Kartsev was needed to cure him. Luckily for him, he succeeded in doing so.

Some months later, two Afghan government BMPs arrived at his zastava carrying several local officials. They had come to negotiate a deal with Anwar. It was a trap: Anwar took them prisoner and threatened to kill them. Colonel Wahid, commanding the local KhAD, asked Kartsev to negotiate the release of the men and the vehicles. Kartsev was escorted to see Anwar, who told him that he would release the BMPs, but the prisoners would be executed, because they were allies of the enemies of Islam. As a gesture to Kartsev, they would not be tortured. Kartsev argued that it was wrong to kill envoys and that reprisals would certainly be taken against the village and the crops. Many of the faithful would die. Anwar thought it over, consulted his colleagues, and let both the prisoners and the BMPs go.⁴³

The relationships worked in other complicated ways. In August 1984 an Afghan tank regiment was involved in a joint operation in Paktia province. One of the regiment’s tanks was blown up by a remote-controlled mine, rolled over and crushed a KhAD officer. A week later an old man and his four sons turned up in the office of the regiment’s Soviet adviser. The brothers were tall and powerful, festooned with weapons like a Christmas tree. They told the adviser that the dead KhAD officer was their brother. He had studied in the Soviet Union, but they were with the mujahedin. The adviser gave them tea, talked about the weather, then showed them on the map where the mine had gone off and gave them the name of the local rebel commander. They thanked him and went off to revenge themselves on the man who had placed the mine which killed their brother.⁴⁴

The Lion of Pandsher

The most elaborate of these ambiguous relationships between the Russians and their enemies was that with Ahmad Shah Masud, who caught the imagination of Afghans and Russians alike with his gallant defence of the Pandsher Valley. Masud, whose name meant ‘the lucky one’, was an authentic and charismatic hero, the most competent and statesmanlike of all the rebel leaders. ‘Pandsher’ was supposed to mean ‘the Five Lions’ and Masud was widely called the ‘Lion of Pandsher’. General Ter-Grigoriants, who fought against him, called him ‘a very worthy opponent and a highly competent organiser of military operations. His opportunities for securing weapons and ammunition were extremely limited, and his equipment was distinctly inferior to that of the Soviet and government forces. But he was nevertheless able to organise the defence of the Pandsher in a way which made it very difficult for us to break through and to take control of the valley.’⁴⁵

Masud came from the kishlak of Jangalak in the Pandsher Valley. His father was a professional army officer from an influential local family. He studied engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Kabul, where he was drawn towards the Islamic ideas of the fundamentalist Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and the more moderate Burhanuddin Rabbani, and joined the Muslim Youth organisation, which drew much of its inspiration from the Muslim Brothers in the Middle East. The Muslim Youth was not merely a study group. Its members attacked women they considered improperly dressed and brawled with their Maoist and Communist opponents. In the spring of 1973 the Muslim Youth split into the Islamic Party of Afghanistan (Hezbi-I Islami) under Hekmatyar and the Islamic Society of Afghanistan (Jamiat-I Islami) under Rabbani. Masud allied himself with the more moderate Rabbani; but when Hekmatyar bungled an army coup against Daud, he fled with the leading Islamists to Pakistan.

He soon returned to the Pandsher to organise a rising against Daud. His men captured the main