social, moral, and political damage which had initially been caused by the Communist regime and the Soviet intervention. The Vietnamese were able to enjoy the fruits of their victory. The Afghans were not.
Perhaps it was because of the horrors that followed that the Afghans did not in the long run seem to nurture a grudge against the Russians. Leonid Shebarshin returned to Herat only nine months after the 40th Army had pulled out, expecting to be met with fear, hatred, and hostility. Not a bit of it, his Afghan interlocutors told him: you lived with one lot of feelings while the fighting was going on, but once the war was over you had to forget the bad things that had happened.11 By the time the journalist Vladimir Snegirev returned to Afghanistan in 2003, people were already beginning to compare the Russians favourably to the new invaders who had arrived in 2001. ‘They seemed to have forgotten our carpet-bombing, the minefields, the manhunts, the looting, in a word everything which, alas, accompanied the presence of the “limited military contingent”.’12
Not long after that Russian veterans began to return as tourists to the places where they had fought two decades earlier. To accommodate them, the enterprising Sergei Zharov set up his own guidebook on the web,
In the spring of 2009 Dmitri Fedorov, a former senior sergeant with the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, returned to Afghanistan through Osh and Ishkashim, and along the mountain roads of Badakhshan to Bakharak and Faisabad—the same route that the regiment had taken when it entered Afghanistan nearly thirty years earlier. Much had changed in the meanwhile. The tracks along which the regiment had struggled with so much difficulty had been replaced with decent roads. The town of Faisabad had nearly tripled in size and now boasted a proper hotel, which belonged to the former mujahedin commander Basir. A suburb now bordered the two or three miles which had separated the town and the regiment’s base. The base itself was unrecognisable. The barren terrain where the soldiers had vainly attempted to sow trees was now a flourishing oasis with gardens and houses, surrounded by Lebanese cedars. Fedorov and his colleagues talked to those who had fought against them. To the men who had been on the same side, men from KhAD and the Tsarandoi, they handed out certificates marking the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal. One thing had not changed, said Fedorov. The region was no more under the control of the central government than it had been during the Soviet time. In and around Faisabad, Basir and the other local potentates were in charge, as they had always been.
Afghans told these tales not only to Russians, whom they might have wanted to flatter, but to other visitors, whom they did not. When I visited Afghanistan in September 2008—a national of one of the foreign countries now fighting there—I was told by almost every Afghan I met that things were better under the Russians. The Russians were not so stand-offish as the Americans, who had no interest in Afghanistan itself, and who looked like Martians with their elaborate equipment, their menacing body armour, and their impenetrable Ray-Bans when they briefly emerged from the high walls behind which they barricaded themselves. The Russians, I was told, had built the elements of industry, whereas now most of the aid money simply ended up in the wrong pockets in the wrong countries. In the Russian time everyone had had work; now things were getting steadily worse. The last Communist president, Najibullah, had been one of the best of Afghanistan’s recent rulers: more popular than Daud, the equal of Zahir Shah. Video recordings of Najibullah’s speeches were being sold round Kabul, with their warnings—which turned out to be true—that there would be civil war if he were overthrown. People were discreetly dismissive of President Karzai, whom they said was a puppet of the foreigners. Sher Ahmad Maladani, a mujahedin commander in Herat who fought the Communists and the Russians for a decade and the Taliban after them, told me that if Najibullah instead of Karmal had taken over in 1979, the country would not be in its present mess. He too preferred the Russians. The Russians were strong and brave, he said. They fought man to man on the ground, and they used their weapons only when their enemy was armed. They never killed women and children. But the Americans were afraid to fight on the ground and their bombing was indiscriminate.
As history much of this was travesty. But it did seem to indicate that the latest attempt to help the Afghans to help themselves was having little more success than its predecessor.
Leaders take their countries into foreign wars for reasons of ambition, greed, moral or messianic fervour, or on a calculation of national advantage which may or may not be flawed.
The generals manage the wars as well as they can. The best try to husband the lives of their soldiers and to keep them under proper control. When it is all over, they ransack the archives and write their memoirs, to carve out their niche in history, to justify the decisions they took, and sometimes to take a sideswipe at a former colleague.
The soldiers who do the actual fighting come home having seen and done terrible things which return to haunt them. The stories of heroism and comradeship help them to manage their memories and give meaning to what they have been through. Some claim that the war years were the best of their lives. Many more say nothing, and go to their graves without telling even their nearest and dearest what it was really like.
So it is after all wars. So it was after the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
– ANNEX ONE –
Timeline
1717 Peter the Great sends an expedition to Central Asia. It fails.
1747 Ahmad Shah Abdali elected ruler of what becomes modern Afghan state.
1801 British take Peshawar from Afghans, later give it to Sikhs.
1835 Jan Witkiewicz, first Russian envoy to reach Kabul.
1838–42 First Anglo-Afghan War.
1878–80 Second Anglo-Afghan War.
1880–1901 Abdul Rahman Khan takes power, greatly strengthens state and army.
1901–19 Habibullah succeeds Abdur Rahman. Assassinated.
1919–29 Amanullah succeeds Habibullah. Exiled.
1919 Third Anglo-Afghan War.
1921 Afghan–Soviet Friendship Treaty signed.
1929–33 Nadir Shah, Amanullah’s uncle, takes power. Assassinated.
1933–73 Zahir Shah succeeds (dies in exile in 2007).
1959 President Eisenhower visits Afghanistan.
1965 Afghan Communist Party founded.
1973 Daud proclaims himself President.
April 1978 Afghan Communists seize power, kill Daud.
March 1979 Anti-Communist rising in Herat.
September 1979 President Taraki arrested and killed by Prime Minister Amin.
December 1979 Soviets enter Afghanistan. Amin killed, replaced by Babrak Karmal.
January 1980 UN condemns Soviet invasion.
February 1980 Massive demonstrations in Kabul. Soviets begin major operations.
November 1982 Leonid Brezhnev dies, succeeded by Yuri Andropov.
February 1983 UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar discusses withdrawal with Andropov.
February 1984 Andropov dies, succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko.
