Afgantsy

Afghan side of the Amu Darya River, for more than 280 miles over the Hindu Kush to Kabul.³²

The road starts in the fertile plains of the north, and then winds its way up increasingly bleak mountains to Pul-i Khumri, which is about the halfway point. It then continues south until it passes through the Salang Tunnel, built by the Soviets in the 1960s about seventy-five miles north of Kabul to provide an all-weather route through the Hindu Kush. The tunnel is three miles long and when it was built it was, at eleven thousand feet above sea level, the highest tunnel in the world. Even today it is an intimidating place, narrow, unlined, ill-lit and ill-ventilated, just wide enough for two lorries to pass, with the raw rock seemingly pressing down upon your head. In the course of the war, the 40th Army moved 8 million tons of supplies through this tunnel.

It normally took about fifteen minutes to negotiate the tunnel, though the big convoys took much longer. In November 1982 an Afghan government convoy broke down inside the tunnel, blocking the way for the Soviet column following behind it. It was very cold and the drivers left their engines running. Sixty-four Soviet soldiers and 112 Afghan soldiers died of carbon monoxide poisoning. This was not the first such case: twelve soldiers died in the tunnel in December 1979 and two more in spring of the following year. Indeed, people were still dying in the tunnel even after it had been rebuilt and reopened in 2002. After the disaster of 1982 a much stricter traffic control was instituted and there were no more incidents on that scale.³³ But it could still be a very dangerous place, even in peacetime: in the winter of 2010 over 160 people were killed when the Salang was struck by a series of avalanches.

On the southern side of the tunnel the road descends in broad serpentines, dominated by bleak cliffs and mountains on one side and falling steeply away on the other: ambush country. After passing through scattered villages, the road comes to the first major town, Charikar, known for its grapes and its pottery, where Captain Codrington and his Gurkhas were massacred during the First Anglo-Afghan War. Lesser roads branch out from Charikar, westwards to Bamyan and eastwards to Bagram, Afghanistan’s main airbase, and the Pandsher Valley, the base for Ahmad Shah Masud’s formidable guerrilla fighters. The fertile Shomali Plain begins here, a green zone of walled villages, tangled vineyards, small fields, and intricate irrigation ditches running close to the road for about sixty miles all the way to Kabul and to the outskirts of the great airbase at Bagram. It is an ideal place for snipers, the laying of ambushes, and the planting of roadside bombs and mines. Soviet troops went into the villages of the Shomali Plain at their peril. In one incident, a praporshchik (warrant officer) took the short cut from Kabul to Bagram through the green zone. The mujahedin waited until he and his column were well inside, then shot them to pieces. The vehicles were destroyed and only one wounded man managed to get back to the main road. When the Russians went to retrieve the bodies and wreak their revenge, they lost a helicopter.

A pipeline ran alongside the Salang Highway, carrying fuel oil from the Soviet Union, and followed the road as far as the airbase at Bagram. A similar pipeline ran along the western highway to Shindand.³⁴ Small detachments from the Pipeline Brigade—seven men under a conscript sergeant—guarded and maintained the pumping stations along the route. If there were an incident or a mechanical failure, day or night, they would go out to investigate. It was not a glamorous service. But it was dangerous, and in 1986 nearly a third of one Pipeline Battalion was decorated.³⁵

The Russians cut down trees and destroyed villages along their main supply routes to deny cover to potential ambushers. They placed their zastavas close enough together to give mutual support or on heights overlooking the road. They positioned larger garrisons at intervals of about twelve miles, with a mobile reserve of motor-rifle troops, armour, and artillery. Before a convoy set out along a particularly vulnerable route, special forces and paratroopers travelled by forced march or by helicopter to occupy the heights before the mujahedin could get there and to block off their line of retreat. One column, which was sent to supply the garrison at Chagcharan in the mountains midway between Herat and Kabul, consisted of 250 army lorries and several hundred civilian vehicles with goods for the civilian population. It was supported by four motor-rifle battalions, five reconnaissance companies, two troops of tanks, a battery of artillery, and thirty-two helicopters.³⁶

A typical skirmish occurred on the Salang Pass on 16 October 1986, shortly after midday, when a column of oil tankers, more than a mile long, was attacked by several hundred of Masud’s fighters from the Pandsher Valley, accompanied, it is said, by a Western TV crew out for some spectacular footage. A BTR escorting the column was put out of action in the first salvo of mortar shells. A number of tankers were set on fire and the drivers bailed out to take cover.

Ruslan Aushev (1954–) was just descending towards Charikar with a small armoured task force (bron-egruppa) of seven armoured vehicles and two tanks when he heard the firing. He had already been made a Hero of the Soviet Union for action in Afghanistan. Now he reversed his column to go to the aid of the stricken convoy. They passed the wrecked BTR and a few tankers which had escaped from the ambush. On a narrow stretch, two burning oil tankers had slewed across the road and had blocked it entirely. Aushev tried to push them off the road with his tank. When the tank itself risked catching fire, he blew the two vehicles away with a couple of shells fired at point-blank range.

What was left of the convoy was trapped higher up. The young lieutenant commanding the next zastava, Nikolai Kiselev, radioed that he was sending his small force to help. Between them Aushev’s bron-egruppa and Kiselev’s little force rescued the survivors. But Kiselev was killed and Aushev severely wounded.³⁷

Though not as important as the Salang route, the western highway which led from Kushka in Uzbekistan to Herat, Shindand, and Kandahar also had to be kept open. It was less vulnerable than the Salang, since much of it lay across open desert with little cover for ambushes. But it was never safe. Major Vyacheslav Izmailov commanded a transport battalion based in Shindand which ran columns between Herat and Kandahar. The journey usually took three days. Major Izmailov’s columns might consist of up to two hundred lorries, escorted by three or four BTRs and occasionally tanks. They hardly ever had air cover.

Perhaps because he came from Muslim Dagestan and understood the local customs better, Major Izmailov never had any serious trouble. You needed to treat the Afghans with respect, he said: you drove through their villages at two or three miles an hour, you didn’t drive away from accidents, you talked to the village elders. If there were some incident, the Afghans would take payment in cash or kind in compensation, even for a death. But if the Russians refused to accept responsibility or give compensation, then the Afghans would exact their compensation in blood, mining the routes and ambushing the convoys. Through their agents, the mujahedin always knew who was in command of a convoy. They did not attack those who played the game.

Compensation could include sacks of rice or money for the funerals. When Izmailov’s men once casually shot up and destroyed a couple of disabled Afghan trucks by the roadside the local leaders told him that the truck owners risked losing their livelihoods. They would be left with nothing to do but to join the mujahedin. Izmailov arranged a complicated deal which involved siphoning fuel out of his tankers, passing it through a third party to the local leaders, and so on to the truck owners.

Another transport battalion followed a different policy and suffered a different fate. Colonel Kretenin always led his columns at great speed through populated areas as well as open countryside, raising clouds of dust, not stopping for accidents. The Afghans decided to teach him a lesson. In February 1987 he set out with a column from Kandahar to Shindand. Izmailov followed more slowly. Ninety miles out from Kandahar, he heard on his radio that Kretenin was under fire. By the time he got to the scene most of the convoy had been destroyed and Kretenin was dead.

The Soviet supply lines were never seriously threatened. But the convoys inevitably suffered heavy losses from time to time. One column destined for Faisabad in the north-east started out from the Soviet Union with twelve hundred vehicles, but only seven hundred reached their destination. Another column took eleven days to cover twenty-five miles.³⁸ Many of the columns were organised by a joint Afghan-Soviet company, Afsotr, which was still in existence in 2008. The lorry drivers were civilians and many of them died: more than nine thousand received Soviet or Afghan awards during the war. More than eleven thousand lorries and fuel tankers were lost, and the mountain passes and valleys of Afghanistan were still littered with their carcasses twenty years after the war had ended.³⁹

Operations