Afgantsy

Most of the 40th Army’s large-scale operations took place in the imposing mountains on the border with Pakistan, across which lay the mujahedin’s main supply routes, or in the fertile Pandsher Valley, from which bands could threaten the Russians’ own supply lines across the Salang Pass.

The city of Khost is only ten miles from the eastern border with Pakistan, about ninety miles south of Kabul and sixty miles from Gardez, to which it is linked by a strategic road, open to ambush and rising to ten thousand feet where it crosses the Satykandav Pass. During the Soviet war the guerrilla force in these parts was led by Jalaluddin Haqqani (c. 1950–). Twenty years later the same force was led by his son, Sirajuddin. By then the Russian base in Khost was being used by the Americans: it was here that seven CIA employees were killed by a suicide bomber in December 2009.

Jalaluddin’s base at Zhawar consisted of a complex of tunnels whose entrances faced towards Pakistan, only a couple of miles away. Inside were arms depots and repair shops, a garage, a medical station, a radio centre, a kitchen, a mosque, and a hotel. Five hundred mujahedin defended the base, armed with a howitzer, rocket launchers, heavy antiaircraft machine guns, and two T-55 tanks they had captured from the Afghan army in 1983. From this base Jalaluddin was able to keep Khost under constant threat.⁴¹

In late 1985 the Afghan army, supported by Soviet units, launched a major operation to smash the Zhawar base.⁴² The initial attacks were unsuccessful. An airborne assault by the Afghan 38th Commando Brigade got lost in the darkness and landed on the wrong side of the frontier. They were surrounded and taken prisoner. By now the government troops had lost some two-thirds of their strength through death, wounds, and desertion, and were no longer effective.

Varennikov flew to Khost to sort things out. This time the Soviets provided three battalions from the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade and two from the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment to support the Afghans. The Afghans succeeded in capturing Zhawar—only to find that it had been abandoned. Soviet engineers were given a little time—too little—to destroy the tunnels. The troops were then withdrawn. A victory parade was held back in Kabul. The mujahedin reoccupied the Zhawar complex in a matter of days. For good measure, they executed seventy-eight captured Afghan army officers, including the commander of the 38th Commando Brigade.

The following autumn it had to be done all over again. The operation was code-named Magistral (Highway), and the commanders were General Gromov and the Afghan Minister of Defence, Colonel General Tanai, he who had helped evacuate the advisers from Herat in March 1979. About ten thousand Soviet and eight thousand Afghan troops were involved. Because of its size and political significance, Magistral would be one of the most substantial operations of the whole war.⁴³ Once again the blockade was raised and on 30 December the first supply columns started to reach Khost. Once again the Soviet forces withdrew and the mujahedin returned. Varennikov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Those who believed that it was others who had done the actual fighting were not best pleased.⁴⁴

One of the most famous incidents of the whole war occurred in the aftermath of Operation Magistral. This was the defence of Hill 3234 by the 9th Company of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment—the same company which Vostrotin had led in the storming of the Taj Bek Palace in December 1979. The hill—over ten thousand feet above sea level—commanded a significant sector of the road to Gardez, which the Soviet commanders were determined to keep open. The 9th Company, thirty-nine men in all, were landed on the hilltop on 7 January 1988, and were attacked almost immediately by a mujahedin force estimated at between two hundred and four hundred men. The attacks continued until the following morning, by which time the defenders were almost out of ammunition and had lost six dead and twenty-eight wounded. Two of the dead, a sergeant and a corporal, were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. In 2005 a big-budget film, 9th Company, was made about the incident. It had considerable commercial success in Russia and abroad, but most Afghan veterans thought it bombastic and historically inaccurate, not at all like the war that they had experienced.

Jalaluddin resumed the blockade around Khost. Charlie Wilson, the US Congressman who was one of the most effective supporters of the mujahedin, visited Jalaluddin and pronounced him ‘goodness personified’.⁴⁵ He finally captured Khost in April 1991, two years after the Soviets had left Afghanistan. He later joined the Taliban and remained with them after 9/11. Charlie Wilson’s hero became number three on the Americans’ ‘wanted’ list.⁴⁶

The Pandsher

It was the operations of the 40th Army in the Pandsher Valley that caught the imagination of Russians and foreigners alike. There were nine major operations in the valley, according to most calculations, though there are arguments about definition. The pattern of all these operations was similar. The 40th Army swept into the valley and took the ground, but was unable to inflict a decisive defeat on Masud because of his evasive tactics. The Russians would then pull out, leaving Afghan military units and civilian representatives of the Kabul regime to hold the territory. This they regularly failed to do: Masud reoccupied the valley, killed, seduced, or expelled the regime’s representatives, and the whole thing had to be done all over again. Even so the Russians always maintained a toehold in the valley. In addition to its fort in Anava, the second battalion of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment had twenty zastavas spread through the lower reaches, each manned by up to a dozen men under a lieutenant. They were usually supplied by helicopters, a dangerous business: though Masud’s men did not have Stingers, they used their heavy machine guns to good effect, and nearly a third of the local helicopter squadron was lost. There was a regular trickle of casualties: soldiers stepped on mines or were hit by snipers. If there were no helicopters available, a small armoured group would be put together to evacuate the wounded by road to Bagram, putting other soldiers at risk.

The Pandsher Valley is a place of spectacular beauty. Its people are Tajiks, devout but not fanatical Sunni Muslims, often at odds with the Pushtuns to the south. Alexander the Great went this way in an epic winter march in pursuit of Bessus, the last claimant to the imperial Persian throne. Later the locals made a living by extracting tribute from the rich caravans from China which passed through the valley, until the twentieth century one of the main trade routes northwards from Kabul. The painters of the European Renaissance used lapis lazuli mined around the upper valley for making the blue paint for the robes of their Madonnas. The mines generated an income of more than $5 million a year even during the war; they were carefully camouflaged, heavily protected against air attack, and exploited with the help of Japanese and West German engineers. Because of their economic importance to the resistance, the mines were attacked—unsuccessfully—in June 1981 by long-range bombers from bases in the Soviet Union.⁴⁷

After the road over the Salang Pass was built, the valley lost its significance as a trade route. But despite its diminished importance, its position—dangerously close to Bagram, the main Soviet airbase, to the main Soviet supply line across the Hindu Kush through the Salang Tunnel, and to Kabul itself—meant that guerrilla forces operating out of the valley were a thorn in the Russians’ side from the first day of the Soviet occupation to the last (see Map 4).

The entrance to the valley from the Shomali Plain, about fifty-five miles north of Kabul, is forbidding. From the town of Charikar you pass through a narrow gorge, the Dalang Sang. The Pandsher River foams along, up to sixty feet below you, and the road clings to the sheer rock face on your left. It was along this narrow road that the Russians had to funnel their soldiers, their guns, and their armour as they stormed the valley time and again in the first five years of the war.

Once you are through the gorge, the valley opens out. In its lower reaches there are vineyards, orchards of mulberries and apricots, and irrigated fields of wheat and maize. The river itself is rich with fish. Kishlaks are spread out along the river and up the sides of the hills, many with no more than a single street with shops or a market. They are often guarded by a small fort, and the houses themselves are walled and capable of defence.

From Charikar to the upper end of the valley is more than a hundred miles.⁴⁸ During the Russian time the road petered out after fifty-three miles. After that you had to proceed on foot or on horseback, over increasingly rugged country, until you were up among the glaciers of the Hindu Kush, between ten and twenty