Afgantsy

Pakistan. But he promised to look into the matter and told the senior Soviet representatives in Kabul that, to prevent a blockade of the capital, Soviet forces should remain, perhaps indefinitely, to guard Kabul airport and the road across the Salang. He instructed the embassy to work out a plan to leave twelve thousand soldiers behind, either under UN auspices or as ‘volunteers’.

Varennikov and his colleagues were furious at what they saw as yet another betrayal of the military by Shevardnadze and the other politicians to serve Najibullah’s political ambitions. Gritting their teeth, they put the withdrawal on hold while they planned for what they called, perhaps with deliberate irony, Operation Typhoon, the code name which the Germans had given to their offensive against Moscow in 1941. The operation was due to begin on 24 January. Najibullah appealed to the population along the road to move out for the time being. Heavy artillery and rocket launchers were put in place.

Meanwhile Shevardnadze forwarded to Moscow another proposal from Najibullah that the Soviets should send a brigade to lift the blockade of Kandahar and protect arms convoys to the city. When he heard of it, Chernyaev exploded. ‘Has he gone off his head? Doesn’t he see Najibullah is laying a trap to ensure we don’t leave, and to embroil us with the Americans and the whole of the rest of the world? Or hasn’t he got the guts to produce the counter-arguments?’ Najibullah’s regime was finished anyway: all the Soviets could now do was save his skin. Chernyaev listened in as Gorbachev phoned Shevardnadze. Shevardnadze started to blame the military. Chernyaev interrupted: ‘All the military have done is to work out the technicalities of the political plan which you’ve agreed with Najibullah. But that plan is clean contrary to our whole policy, and to plain common sense, without mentioning the losses to which you will be exposing our boys.’

‘You’ve not been there,’ replied Shevardnadze angrily. ‘You’ve no idea all the things we have done there in the past ten years!’

‘But why should we compound our crimes! What’s the logic in that? We’re not going to be able to save Najibullah anyway…’

‘But he says that if he can hold out for a year after we leave, he will be able to survive indefinitely…’

‘And you believe that? And for that you’re ready to sacrifice our boys and break the engagement we gave in Geneva?’⁴⁵

The Politburo met on 24 January. Shevardnadze insisted that the Soviet Union could not be indifferent to the fate of Najibullah’s regime. Ten to fifteen thousand Soviet troops should be left behind, not least because they would be guarding the roads along which the army would withdraw. Once again he was supported by Kryuchkov. But Gorbachev summed up against him. The Soviet Union had a moral obligation towards Najibullah: everything should be done to help him survive as long as he could. But there were only twenty days left and the withdrawal was to be completed on time.

Operation Typhoon

The Politburo decision came too late to halt Typhoon. Yazov had already ordered Varennikov to begin the operation a day early, on 23 January. It lasted for two days.⁴⁶ The morale of the troops was by now at rock bottom. Why, the soldiers wondered, should they risk their lives yet again, on the eve of departure for a homeland where, they knew, the war was seen as unjust, no better than the American performance in Vietnam. One young officer asked his superior on the eve of the operation, ‘Why does there have to be more bloodshed?… I will try to encourage the men in my battalion. But I tell you frankly, that if I am ordered to shoot, I will carry out the order, but I will hate myself.’⁴⁷

Fighter bombers and heavy bombers from bases inside the Soviet Union launched more than a thousand sorties against the rebel bases. More than four hundred strikes were carried out by rocket and conventional artillery. At times the bombardment resembled the massive storm of artillery which preceded the Red Army’s great offensives in the Second World War.⁴⁸ After it was over, the staff of the 40th Army reported that six hundred rebels had been killed. The survivors were demoralised, and continued air and artillery strikes were preventing them from regrouping and bringing up reinforcements. A tented camp had been put up for the civilian refugees, and army political officers were busy explaining to them that what had happened was the consequence of Masud’s ‘criminal position’. The Soviets lost three dead and five wounded. They did not try to count the civilian dead.

Masud’s reaction was swift and bitter. Nothing, he wrote to Vorontsov, had been changed by the ‘cruel and shameful actions’ of the Russians. Ten years of a horrible war should have taught the Soviets that the Afghan people could not be brought to their knees by force and threats. Instead the Russians were continuing to support ‘a handful of hirelings, who have betrayed themselves and for whom there is no place in the future of the country’. He hoped that the new Soviet leadership would understand that they could not impose a dying regime on a Muslim people, and that they would gather the courage to act in accordance with reality and with their own convictions.⁴⁹

The judgement of the Soviet military was just as bitter. General Sotskov, who was the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in Kabul in 1988 and 1989, wrote of Operation Typhoon, ‘Almost ten years of the war were reflected as if in a mirror in three days and three nights: political cynicism and military cruelty, the absolute defencelessness of some and the pathological need to kill and destroy of others. Three awful days absorbed in themselves ten years of bloodletting.’⁵⁰

Once Operation Typhoon was over, the Soviet withdrawal resumed on 27 January. Civilians and soldiers had been pulling out since the New Year—the families had left earlier. The weather conditions were exceptionally difficult, with snow, fog, and icy roads especially on the Salang Pass. Avalanches formed obstacles of snow and stone for many miles which had to be cleared by the engineers. But the work was done, and the long columns of armoured vehicles and lorries continued to move north according to the timetable set by the generals and the Geneva Agreements.⁵¹

The Soviet aircraft based in Bagram flew out between 30 January and 3 February. By 4 February the last troops had left Kabul. As they moved north the guard battalions placed to secure their passage folded seamlessly in behind them. In these two last weeks of the war the Russians lost thirty-nine more men. One of them was Igor Lakhovich, of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment, who was shot by a sniper and left Afghanistan wrapped in a groundsheet and bound to the deck of a BMP, according to legend the last Soviet soldier to be killed in the war.

General Sebrov, who had entered Afghanistan with the 103rd Division in 1979, was not impressed by the official speeches, the crowds, and the flowers. He summed it up bitterly: ‘The country we had been helping in every possible way for ten years now lay in ruins. Everyone had contributed to the destruction… but a significant part of the blame lay on us. It was impossible not to be struck by the change in people’s attitude to our army and our soldiers. We were greeted with sympathy and friendship when we came in. Now the ordinary Afghans threatened and insulted us as we departed.’⁵²

Crossing the Bridge

General Gromov, the commander of the 40th Army, woke up as usual, and in a good mood, at half past six on 14 February 1989 in Tashkurgan, about an hour’s drive from the frontier. Once upon a time Tashkurgan boasted an ancient and famously beautiful market, but that was destroyed in the fighting. For much of the war it was the base of a motor-rifle regiment, and since January it had been the last headquarters of the 40th Army. Now the Afghans were wandering around the place as if they owned it, working out the value of the buildings of which they were soon to take possession. At ten o’clock Gromov’s small column, the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 201st Division, set out for Khairaton, the transit base on the Afghan side of the river.

Here, as Gromov and his colleagues set down once again to check that no one from the 40th Army had been left behind, there was a panicky call from Yazov. The Foreign Ministry lawyers had pointed out that the Geneva Agreements stated that the Soviet forces should be out of Afghanistan by 15 February. In other words, they should have got back to the Soviet Union by 14th February. Gromov replied that he had already spoken to the United