insisted that weapons and money provided by the CIA and others should pass through their hands. Their aim was to secure a regime in Kabul that was not only friendly to Pakistan, but also to their own belief in Islamist government. So they helped those commanders, such as the Pushtun Hekmatyar, who shared their religious and political views, and gave scant support to those who did not, such as the Tajik Masud. The French and British recognised Masud’s importance and did what they could to help him. It was not all that much, because their resources could not begin to match those of the Americans.
The successes of the mujahedin grew from the start. The chief of Soviet army intelligence in Afghanistan reported in the middle of 1980 that ‘If in April this year there were 38 terrorist acts, and 63 people killed, then in May there were 112 terrorist attacks, killing 201 people. In a directive of the Islamic Party of Afghanistan… the rebels are instructed to continue to avoid direct armed confrontation with regular forces, and to camouflage themselves among the civilian population’.14 The mujahedin regularly launched rocket attacks on Kabul itself, infiltrating the outer line of defences despite the best efforts of the Soviet and Afghan forces. One of their greatest successes occurred in August 1986, when rockets fired by a time fuse hit a major ammunition dump outside Kabul, destroying forty thousand tons of ammunition at a cost to the Soviets estimated by the Pakistanis at $250 million. Two years later, in April 1988, another large dump exploded, this time outside Rawalpindi, in Pakistan. Ten thousand tons of ammunition, plastic explosive, rockets, and other ordnance blew up, killing a hundred people and injuring another thousand. The timing seemed significant, just as the Geneva Agreements were about to be signed and the Russians were preparing for the first phase of their withdrawal. The KGB had considerable respect for the ability of their colleagues in the KhAD to conduct special operations and believed they were responsible. Pakistani intelligence officers blamed the Russians. The more paranoid even suspected the Americans. The most likely explanation is that it was an accident.15
At first the insurgents were not as well armed as they later became. The professional soldiers among them knew how to operate armoured vehicles and aircraft, but did not acquire such sophisticated weapons until after the Soviets had left; then they used them against one another. But very soon, with the assistance of the Americans, the Pakistanis and others, they began to get mortars, mines, heavy machine guns, and radios, many of them of Soviet design imported from China, Egypt, and elsewhere. And even the old British Lee-Enfield rifles, which they used from the start, and which the Soviet soldiers called ‘Boers’ from some vague notion that they had been used during the Boer War, were more accurate than the Soviet automatic rifle and far outranged it. Soldiers began to die at the hands of distant snipers, and panic spread among them which their officers had difficulty in countering.16
The Russians and their Afghan allies used helicopters and fighter bombers to destroy villages suspected of harbouring rebels, to supply isolated garrisons, and to place their troops in ambush. But the mujahedin were not defenceless against aerial attack. In skilful hands, their Soviet-designed heavy machine guns could bring down even the armoured assault helicopters. Two or three years into the war they obtained—with CIA assistance—the very effective but too cumbersome Swiss Oerlikon light anti-aircraft gun. They made some spectacular attacks on Soviet and Afghan airbases, destroying a number of aircraft on the ground. From 1984 they began to use Chinese and Soviet anti-aircraft missiles and the dubiously effective British Blowpipe. The Blowpipes found their way to Afghanistan through a variety of covert sources so that their provenance could not be proved. The missile was used by both sides in the Falklands War, where one British officer remarked that it was like ‘trying to shoot pheasants with a drainpipe’. Senior Soviet officers such as General Varennikov and helicopter pilots such as Boris Zhelezin nevertheless regarded the weapon with a certain respect.17
But what the mujahedin really wanted was the American Stinger, a sophisticated portable rocket launcher which could seek out and hit an aircraft at a range of three miles, at altitudes between six hundred and twelve thousand five hundred feet.18 The US military opposed supplying Stingers to the mujahedin since they feared—correctly, as it turned out—that the weapons would leak to the Russians and others. It was not until February 1986 that the Americans finally decided to supply some two hundred and forty launchers and a thousand missiles.19
The first Stingers were fired on 26 September 1986, when a Soviet-trained engineer called Ghaffur shot down three Mi-24 helicopters that were coming in to land at Jalalabad.20 The initial impact on Soviet tactics and morale was considerable. Alla Smolina had just arrived in Jalalabad to work in the office of the military procurator when the three helicopters were shot down. ‘The old hands said that previously there had been nothing frightening about flying around Afghanistan,’ she wrote later. ‘Soviet and Afghan planes travelled for all sorts of reasons all over the country at all hours of the day and at all altitudes. Jalalabad was one of the few places where roses grew in the winter. So the Kabul garrison sent planes there at the end of every year to collect roses for their New Year parties.’
Smolina’s flight into Jalalabad was the last to land in the old carefree way. Thereafter planes flew at night if possible, approached the airfield at a safe height of several thousand feet, and landed in a tight, quick spiral. You felt, she said, as if you were in a spacecraft, leaving your insides behind you. Parachutes became obligatory, though it was hard to see how they could be used if your plane was hit by a rocket. And anyway most of them were too big if you were a woman. People cut their air travel to a minimum. But if you travelled by land you risked being ambushed. Some people gave up travelling altogether. Others still flew to the base, either on business or to enjoy its various attractions: a shop, a club, a hairdresser, even a discotheque run by a paratroop lieutenant.21
The Soviets were now forced to refine the tactics they had developed against anti-aircraft missiles and heavy machine guns. Their aircraft fired infrared flares to confuse the Stingers’ guidance systems. Fixed-wing aircraft flew above sixteen thousand five hundred feet—beyond the range of the Stinger. Soviet bombing became even more inaccurate, and even more destructive of civilian lives and property.22 Helicopters flew very low among the mountains, because the Stinger was unreliable except against a background of sky. Most transport flights took place at night. These measures successfully reduced losses. But they were not infallible. One aircraft was hit over Khost at a height of thirty thousand feet, though it managed to land with a large hole in the tailplane.23
The Soviet Minister of Defence promised that the first person to get hold of a Stinger would be made a Hero of the Soviet Union. There are two versions of what then happened. One is that, acting on intelligence, a special forces detachment under Major Sergeev, flying in four battle helicopters, successfully intercepted a motorcycle caravan on 5 January 1987. The mujahedin fired two Stingers at them, which missed, and another was captured intact.24 A more colourful version is that the successful commander was called Major Belov and that he was given the lesser Order of the Military Red Banner when it was discovered at the last minute that ‘he had a drink problem and was brusque in his attitude to his superiors’.25
The Russians also set out to buy Stingers from the rebels: the going price was $3,000.26 The Iranians did the same, and displayed several Stingers during a military parade in September 1987 which were allegedly sold to them by two mujahedin commanders for $1 million.27 After the war was over, the CIA were still sufficiently worried to try to buy back unused Stingers at twice their original cost. But few were recovered, and between two hundred and four hundred remained at large.28
Large claims have been made about the military and political significance of the Stingers.29 According to official Russian figures, the 40th Army lost 113 fixed-wing aircraft and 333 helicopters during the course of the war; by comparison, the Americans lost 5,086 helicopters during the Vietnam War.30 After the initial panic, the Soviet counter-measures reduced the loss rate to much what it had been before the Stingers arrived. No convincing evidence has appeared from Russian sources that the Stingers affected the political decision-making process in Moscow, or that they had much beyond an immediate tactical effect on the Soviet conduct of military operations. Gorbachev took the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan a full year before the first Stinger was fired.31
The one battle the Soviets could never afford to lose was the battle to keep open the Salang Highway. It was along this road that three-quarters of the 40th Army’s supplies were brought from the Soviet Union. Huge supply columns, as many as eight hundred vehicles, moved from the great logistics base in Khairaton, just on the
