Marking time with mujahideen

CONFLICT: Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989By Rodric Braithwaite Profile Books, 417pp. £25

ONE MEMORABLE IMAGE in Afgantsy, Rodric Braithwaite's history of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, comes from spectacular new-year celebrations at Kabul stadium in 1982. "There is a striking contrast," a Soviet adviser named Vladmir Snegirev noted at the time, "which is only possible here: many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chador – a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador and the parachute. You don't have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute."

And, as Afghan history shows, you don’t have to be a Soviet adviser to wrongly predict the winner when “progress” and “modernity” collide with a society whose majority is deeply conservative, bound by tradition and suspicious of outsiders.

Snegirev wrote that the thousands of his countrymen who went to Afghanistan after 1979 to fight the mujahideen and build a socialist Afghanistan “may have had the good fortune to witness one of the most brilliant and tragic revolutions of the end of the century”. It didn’t take long for only one of those adjectives to be attributed to what became a decade-long debacle in Central Asia.

Many Soviets arrived in Afghanistan with the same high hopes and lofty principles as Snegirev. They came bearing peace, prosperity, education, technology and, not least, equality between sexes and ethnic groups, all in the name of performing their “internationalist duty”.

What transpired was a disaster for both occupied and occupier. About a million Afghans died during the Soviet occupation, which was followed by a devastating civil war, Taliban rule and invasion by the United States. For the Soviet Union disintegration came just two years after the weary Red Army traipsed home over the Amu Darya river, the fabled Oxus of the ancient world.

It had been sent into Afghanistan in December 1979 by a gerontocracy led by Leonid Brezhnev, who had no enthusiasm for the venture but saw no other way of cementing a friendly regime on the Soviet Union’s southern border and keeping the United States out of Central Asia.

Brezhnev had no appetite for the considerable trouble that he knew occupying Afghanistan would bring. He hoped his forces would put down a revolt against the brutal communist leadership in Kabul, secure the country’s main towns and roads, stabilise the government and strengthen its security forces – and be back home within a year.

In the event Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko all died in office as Soviet leader while their forces sank deeper into the Afghan mire. It took a different sort of leader – Mikhail Gorbachev – to finally drag them out.

Braithwaite, who was Britain’s ambassador to Moscow during the 1989 withdrawal and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, shows how decision makers in Moscow never caught up with, and never fully understood, events on the ground in Afghanistan, and how neither Soviet ideology nor modern warfare technology could bend the Afghan people to the Kremlin’s will.

This book reminds us that it was ever thus in Afghanistan. Imperial Britain and tsarist Russia played the Great Game for control over 19th-century Afghanistan, the buffer zone between their empires, and both ultimately found it to be more trouble than it was worth.

The Afghans were fiercely resistant to foreign rule; their rugged terrain was perfect for guerrilla warfare; conservative Islam and tribal loyalties were unbreakable in the provinces; and occupied areas were quickly retaken by local forces when invaders dropped their guard. These observations were as true for Braithwaite’s predecessors in the British Colonial Service and for the Soviets as they are for US forces in Afghanistan today.

The Americans and their allies would also recognise the lack of trust that undermined relations between the Soviets and their Afghan allies, the weakness of Afghan national identity and institutions, and the difficulty of keeping supplies flowing through exposed mountain passes.

The Soviets also had to cope with an enemy that was being funded and armed by a United States that was happy to see its cold-war adversary stumbling into its own Vietnam.

Braithwaite’s book is true to its subtitle by focusing on “the Russians in Afghanistan”, and some readers will be disappointed not to find more about how Washington co-operated with Pakistan’s now often vilified intelligence services to back a mujahideen movement that gave birth to al-Qaeda.

It would also have benefited the book to reveal more about how the legacy of the Afghan war continues to influence Russia today, in everything from foreign policy to the conflict in the North Caucasus and murky collaborations between military veterans and organised-crime groups.

There is plenty of strong material here, though, and much concerns the daily experiences of soldiers, advisers and volunteers in Afghanistan, the horrors they witnessed, the dreadful toll taken by injury and disease, the things that gave them pleasure and kept them sane. When they returned home they were shunned as reminders of a humiliating campaign, and this book shows how military resentment fed opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms and later fuelled support for Vladimir Putin.

Ultimately, the mujahideen strategy was simple: keep fighting and wait for the Soviets to leave. As Braithwaite notes, and Afghanistan’s current occupiers know well, the foreigners may have the watches, but the Afghans have the time.

Daniel McLaughlin is based in Budapest and reports on central and eastern Europe for The Irish Times. He previously lived in Moscow and covered Russia and the former Soviet Union