Interior. This was a mere 3.4 per cent of those eligible for military service. Throughout the war in Afghanistan most Soviet soldiers continued to serve in the Far East or, above all, in Europe, where the main threat lay.
The official figure for the dead was 15,051: 2.4 per cent of those who served. The figure includes those from the KGB’s frontier forces, those who went missing in action, and those who died of illness or wounds, including those who died after they left the army (about 5.5 per cent of the total) or in accidents (about 12 per cent). Fifty- two of the dead were women, four of them warrant officers in the military, the rest civilians.
Soldiers from all the peoples of the Soviet Union fought in Afghanistan, from the largest group, the Russians, to some of the very smallest. There were Soviet Germans, Poles, Greeks, Romanians, one Gypsy, one Finn, one Hungarian, and one Czech among the dead. The burden of the war was not evenly distributed, but 52.7 people were killed per million of the Soviet population as a whole. The peoples of Central Asia suffered proportionately the most—65 killed for every million of the population—the story that Central Asians were unwilling to fight their co- religionists in Afghanistan is a myth. For the Slavs as a whole, the figure was 53.5 per million; for the Russians 51.1 dead per million. The peoples of the Caucasus and the Baltic States believed that they were deliberately targeted for service in Afghanistan because the Kremlin thought they were politically unreliable. The figures show that this was another myth: only 25.8 per million Caucasians and 17 per million Balts died in Afghanistan.
Apart from the dead, more than fifty thousand were wounded, and more than ten thousand became invalids. Many others suffered various forms of post-traumatic stress disorder, took to crime or drugs, or were unable to hold down a permanent job. For these victims of the war the available statistics are thin, misleading, or both. No one disputes the huge overall figure of 469,685—88 per cent of all those who served—who fell sick or were wounded during the war.3
Western intelligence reports at the time produced wild casualty figures extrapolated from anecdotal evidence. One such estimate was that 20–25,000 Soviet soldiers had died by the end of 1981 and 50,000 by the end of 1983.4 But the Defence Ministry and the Russian regions produced Books of Remembrance with details of each dead soldier. Local websites tracked the fates of local boys who had served and died. Interest in the issue inside Russia eventually died away, and the official figures were more or less accepted as the best that were likely to become available.
Large claims were made, not least by the mujahedin themselves, about the contribution that the war in Afghanistan made to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In spring 2002 Burhanuddin Rabbani said in Mazar-i Sharif, ‘We forced the Communists out of our country, we can force all invaders out of holy Afghanistan… Had it not been for the jihad, the whole world would still be in the Communist grip. The Berlin Wall fell because of the wounds which we inflicted on the Soviet Union, and the inspiration we gave all oppressed people. We broke the Soviet Union up into fifteen parts. We liberated people from Communism. Jihad led to a free world. We saved the world because Communism met its grave here in Afghanistan!’5
The reality was more complicated. The war was an economic and military burden on the Soviet Union, but not a particularly large one measured against the country’s overall commitments.6 The failure in Afghanistan did reinforce the lack of confidence of the Soviet people in their government which was growing throughout the 1980s. But that dissatisfaction was also fed by many other factors: the humiliating spectacle of one gerontocrat succeeding another at the head of government which preceded Gorbachev’s election in 1985; the revelation of incompetence and government deceit which followed the explosion at Chernobyl nuclear plant in April 1986; the strains of the arms competition with the United States; an economic malaise which turned into an economic catastrophe towards the end of the decade; the uncertainties and upheavals engendered by Gorbachev’s own reforms. All these were the symptoms that the Soviet economic and political system was no longer viable. It was collapsing even without the contribution of the war in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union was thus damaged not so much by the material losses of the war as by the political costs both domestic and foreign. Domestic opposition to the war was never on the scale that it reached in the United States during the war in Vietnam: that would have been inconceivable, given the nature of the Soviet political system. But the early realisation that the invasion had been a mistake, the moral revulsion which began to be felt by some people even inside the government and the army, the anger of ordinary people as they started to realise what was happening—all this increased pressure on the politicians to find a way out of the quagmire.
For the Afghans, of course, it was not a small war at all. For the mujahedin it was a battle for national dignity and national liberation in which they were prepared to fight—literally—to the death. The casualty figures we have are more or less inaccurate guesses, often put into circulation for propaganda reasons. But probably somewhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million Afghans were killed in the Soviet war.7 Millions more were driven from their home to seek refuge in Pakistan and Iran. The complex relationships which governed the Afghan way of life were overturned almost beyond repair. But the people of Afghanistan, like the people of Vietnam, had one irreducible advantage over the invader: they were going to stay, while the foreigner would eventually leave. As the saying goes, the foreigners had the watches, but the locals had the time.
Russians and Americans drew the illuminating comparison with the American war in Vietnam both during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and afterwards. The Cold War conditioned the decisions of both governments. Both went to war, on a dubious interpretation of international law, in the belief that they were defending their country’s vital interests. Their immediate aims were similar: to protect a client and to deny a strategic territory to the other. Both had more grandiose aims: to build in a distant country a political, social, and economic system similar to their own. Neither understood what they were getting into. Both thought that they would be able to shore up their local ally— the PDPA government in Kabul and the South Vietnamese government in Saigon—so that they could hand over responsibility for the security of the country and then leave. Both believed that their modern military machine should prevail without too much difficulty over the ragtag guerrilla force which faced them.
And indeed the failures were not military. Neither the Soviet army in Afghanistan nor the American army in Vietnam was defeated: they held the ground and eventually withdrew in good order. The failures in both cases were failures of intelligence, of judgement, and of assessment. Both the Americans and the Russians set themselves unattainable strategic goals. Neither were able to achieve their main political objective: a friendly, stable regime which would share their ideological and political goals. Their proteges were overthrown and the peoples of Vietnam and Afghanistan rejected the political models they were offered. Some among the military in both Russia and America believed that the failure to prevail was the result of the spinelessness of the public and the press, and the weakness, even the treachery, of the politicians. But the entry of the mujahedin into Kabul, like the entry of the North Vietnamese into Saigon, marked a decisive outcome to both wars of a kind which Clausewitz, for one, would have recognised instantly.8
Western propaganda successfully portrayed Soviet behaviour in Afghanistan as uniquely brutal. But in Vietnam as well as in Afghanistan the armies went in for the casual and indiscriminate destruction of villages, crops, animals, and people. They used massive firepower in an attempt to overwhelm a ruthless and elusive enemy who never presented them with a target worthy of their sophisticated modern weapons. The Russians were accused of using chemical weapons in Afghanistan, but the accusations petered out. The Americans used the chemical Agent Orange to destroy forests and crops but also killed or disabled large numbers of Vietnamese. The Russians used aerial bombing on a large scale, but never on the scale of the massive American B-52 strikes against North Vietnam. More bombs were dropped by the Americans on Laos than were dropped on Germany by the RAF and the US Air Force combined.9
Both wars lasted for nine years. But the Vietnam War was on a much larger scale than the war in Afghanistan. More than 2.5 million Americans passed through Vietnam: nearly five times as many as the number of Soviets who served in Afghanistan. Nearly four times as many died. Many more Vietnamese than Afghans died— perhaps between one and a half to six times as many, depending on which among a number of unsatisfactory figures one chooses.10 Like the war in Afghanistan, the war in Vietnam was accompanied and followed by a brutal civil war in which large numbers also perished.
This kind of moral calculus is not very fruitful. There is little to choose between the way either war was fought. But there was one essential difference between the two wars—the distinction that Zbigniew Brzezinski drew in his advice to President Carter the day after the Soviet invasion began. The victors in Vietnam, the government in Hanoi, were coherent, dedicated, ruthless, and efficient. At great cost they were able to impose order on their country, which in the next thirty years became increasingly prosperous and open to the outside world. The mujahedin never achieved anything like that coherence and discipline, and their entry into Kabul was only the prelude to more decades of war and foreign intervention, which made it almost impossible to repair the physical,
