Book Review - Afgantsy: the Russians in Afghanistan 1979–89
Afgantsy: the Russians in Afghanistan 1979–89,
Written by: Rodric Braithwaite,
Profile Books, London, 2011,
ISBN 9781846680540, 448 pp
Reviewed by: Brigadier Richard Iron, British Army
On 15 February 1989, General Gromov, the commander of the 40th Army, in his BTR command vehicle and carrying his Army’s banner, was the last man in the 40th Army to cross the Termez bridge back into the Soviet Union; thus ending the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that had lasted a little over nine years. Afgantsy is the story of that occupation through the viewpoints of the politicians who made the decisions and the soldiers, officials and aid workers who did their best to implement them.
It is a story that has not been told in the English language before, and as Rory Stewart says on the front cover, it ‘finally dispels many of the Cold War myths’. It really had nothing to do with communist expansionism, or of gaining a warm water port in the Indian Ocean—both commonly-held beliefs in the West, or at least in the Western press. Although driven by Cold War fears (as concerned for their southern border as the United States was with Cuba) and mistaken ideology (believing in the power of a proletariat that didn’t exist), the Moscow Politburo agonised over the decision to intervene in Afghanistan. One of the strongest sections in Afgantsy, perhaps the strongest section, is Rodric Braithwaite’s description of the period from 1 April to 12 December 1979 when the fateful decision was made to send in the troops. It is perhaps best captured by three extracts:
Their decisions were bedevilled by ignorance, ideological prejudice, muddled thinking, inadequate intelligence, divided counsel, and the sheer pressure of events.
Step by step, with great reluctance, strongly suspecting that it would be a mistake, the Russians slithered towards a military intervention because they could not think of a better alternative.
The Russians had foreseen all the disadvantages of forceful intervention—bloody involvement in a ferocious civil war, a huge expenditure of blood and treasure, and international pariahdom.
In the end the Russians felt forced to intervene because of the ineptitude of the new Afghan communist government under Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin. Amin had assumed power through a coup within the Afghan communist government, and it is most likely the Soviet authorities had no clue was happening, despite the very heavy presence of advisers throughout Afghanistan. The new Afghan regime was faced with a counter-revolution, strongest in the rural areas, rebelling against its heavy-handedness, and urgently requested assistance from Moscow.
What is little understood in the West is that for about a hundred years before the Soviet invasion Afghanistan was ruled by monarchs, presidents and prime ministers who were, by and large, modernisers. As Braithwaite explains, in his first chapter on the history of Afghanistan (‘Paradise Lost’), from the rule of King Abdur Rahman Khan in 1880 to the communist regime in 1979, attempts were made to increase literacy, encourage economic development, and enhance women’s rights. Yet this had little if any impact in the countryside, which by the 1970s was still
a land of devout and simple Muslims, where disputes between individuals, or families, or clans and tribes, were still settled in the old violent way, where women were still subject to the absolute authority of their menfolk, where the writ of the government in Kabul barely ran, and where the idea of national rather than family or local loyalty was barely formed.
Thus developed one of the key fault lines in Afghan politics: a fissure perhaps even more important than ethnicity—a fault line between urban intellectual modernisers and rural religious conservatives—between Kabul and the countryside. Even the Afghan communists, the PDPA, split into two movements—the Khalq (rural) and Parcham (urban intellectuals). It was internecine fighting between these two groups that was at least partly responsible for the eventual Soviet military intervention. As Braithwaite points out, ‘the Afghan communists made the fatal mistake of underestimating the power of Islam and its hold on the people’.
What Braithwaite does not explore is why rural conservatism should inevitably have proved more powerful than urban modernisation in Afghanistan. After all, other Muslim Central Asian states had modernised over the course of the twentieth century, as part of the Soviet Union. He could perhaps have examined how, before 1979, power was exercised in the rural areas, how local and provincial government was organised, and their relationships with the Kabul government. This approach is so much a part of our understanding of the Afghan problem today that its absence from the book is rather surprising.
When the Politburo made the decision to intervene, it understood Amin was a major part of the problem, and they would have to set up a new, more effective Afghan leader. So the initial operation on 27 December 1979 was against the Taj Bel palace on the outskirts of Kabul, Amin’s headquarters. In another very strong section in the book, Braithwaite explains in detail the planning and execution of this operation: his most detailed coverage of an individual military operation. The Soviets appeared to accede to Amin’s request for help by sending in a small number of military units, one of which was tasked with assisting Afghan forces protect the Taj Bel palace. In a wonderful example of maskirovka, reminiscent of the 1973 Suez crossing, they inured the Afghan defenders to military preparations for the attack by making such preparations appear to be normal behaviour over a number of days, such as manoeuvring vehicles at night, use of flares, and starting up their engines. They invited their Afghan colleagues to a vodka, cognac and caviar party, and persuaded them to show them the internal layout of the palace. So when the operation was finally launched, the Afghans were completely surprised, to the extent that during the confusion of the night attack, Amin told his adjutant to ask the Soviets for help. Amin was killed, and the Soviets installed Babrak Kamal as the new leader they could trust.
The 40th Army formed for the Afghanistan operation was a conscript army. Braithwaite examines the army in some depth: how it was created and a sympathetic look at what life was like for the ordinary soldier in Afghanistan. Conscripts were sent for the whole of their two years’ service (less training time), so tour lengths were considerably longer than even contemporary US practice, let alone the six-month standard for British and Australian soldiers. Braithwaite cites evidence that the individual Soviet soldier was generally better at counterinsurgency in Afghanistan than his modern Western counterpart; he suggests it is because so many came from Central Asian republics and also because the majority were from poor farming stock (the richer and more influential were able to avoid military service in Afghanistan). As a result the soldiers in Afghanistan were more attuned to operations among a rural population. This may be true, but another contributor surely must be that they generally spent much longer there than the majority of Western soldiers, even if on their third tour.
The Soviet Army at the time was rife with dedovshchina, the ‘grandfather system’. A conscript in his final six months’ service was known as a ‘grandfather’ (ded). Bullying of new recruits by grandfathers was rife—this was an insidious worm inside the Soviet Army that did much damage to its morale and operational effectiveness, as well as mentally scar many soldiers who remained psychologically damaged long after the war. It was also one of the main issues raised by soldiers’ mothers—the first such representational group in the Soviet Union, which later became a fully fledged peace movement. Sometimes we take our own military systems for granted, especially that of the professional NCO system; dedovshchina is an example of what can happen without it.
It is fashionable today to talk of the comprehensive approach (as it was yesterday of network centric operations and revolutions in military affairs), reflecting an age-old truth that military power alone is unlikely to achieve success. The Soviet operation in Afghanistan was no different, and a very large number of Soviet civilian advisers and aid workers supported the operation in Afghanistan. Considerable sums of money were spent on civil development. A major part of the aid effort was ideologically driven by party workers, Komsomol (the communist youth movement) and trade union advisers. These often proved as useless and self-defeating as some of the ideologically driven decisions made by Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003–04. But an equally large proportion of Soviet aid went into making the basic administration work, including training about 80,000 Afghans in the Soviet Union, both military and civilian. Frequently in Afghanistan today the most effective administrators, soldiers, doctors and engineers were trained by the Russians in this period.
Both Osama bin Laden and General Sir David Richards, Britain’s Chief of Defence Staff, have one thing in common: they have both claimed that the Afghan war was responsible for the downfall the Soviet Union, and that the mujahedeen were directly or indirectly the cause of the end of the Soviet empire and the Cold War. Braithwaite argues convincingly that this is not the case; compared with the Soviet Union’s other commitments, the war did not really have a significant economic or military impact. Certainly the war reinforced the lack of confidence of the Soviet people in their government, but that lack of confidence was driven more by wider economic factors, the humiliating spectacle of the rotating gerontocracy in the 1980s (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko), the revelation of incompetence and deceit over Chernobyl, and the uncertainties of Gorbachev’s reforms. The Soviet Union ‘was collapsing without the contribution of the war in Afghanistan’.
Anyone who served in Iraq when David Petraeus replaced Bill Casey, or in Afghanistan when Stanley McChrystal replaced David McKiernan, knows instantly the impact a commander’s ideas and personality have on an entire theatre. Braithwaite here perhaps betrays his diplomatic rather than military pedigree in that he shows no recognition of the importance of command. The 40th Army had seven commanders in its time in Afghanistan, whom Braithwaite lists but then ignores throughout the book, except for General Gromov, the final army commander who brought his army back across the bridge. There is no analysis here of the commander’s background, his thinking, or his views on the campaign. They are all treated as identically faceless, akin to the caricature of Western Front chateau generals, with no understanding of or influence over the conduct of the war. This may indeed have been true (although I suspect it isn’t) but if so it represents a gross failure on the part of Russian senior officers, which itself needs to be explained.
Similarly there is no examination of the 40th Army’s doctrine or how it developed through the war. Russian officers today claim their counterinsurgency doctrine developed considerably through the war, and that they still have much to teach Western armies. The only evidence here has to be induced from the anecdotes used to illustrate the soldiers’ experiences of war.
Sir Rodric Braithwaite is a former chairman of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee. It is therefore disappointing that his coverage of Soviet intelligence is so thin—just two pages. The Interior Ministry’s intelligence role seems primarily to have been to support the KhAD (the Afghan intelligence agency); the KGB’s role seems to have been more typical of a civilian intelligence agency. Braithwaite writes of the usual intelligence problems: language training, lack of trust in indigenous forces, too few people, and inter-service rivalry. But he doesn’t cover how military intelligence agencies worked and were organised, how they achieved continuity, or how well they provided their commanders with an understanding of the nature of the threat they faced. Nor does he mention any sources of intelligence other than HUMINT: how did they use aerial photography, satellite imagery and electronic warfare? How good were they at building intelligence capacity within the Afghan security forces?
Although there are clear and intended echoes with the current NATO operation in Afghanistan, including the lack of understanding of what we were letting ourselves in for (except replace the dogma of Marxism with the dogma of democracy), this is done without a heavy hand, and for the most part Braithwaite resists the temptation to lecture the current crop of political and military leaders.
This is unashamedly a Russian tale, told from a Russian perspective, albeit as interpreted by a British diplomat. Of the 180 entries in the bibliography, only one is by a modern Afghan. Even the sections on Afghans and Afghanistan are seen through Russian eyes. So Afgantsy doesn’t pretend to be an impartial history of the Afghan–Soviet War; it is the story of the Russians in Afghanistan.
Afgantsy is not a military analysis of the war, and some professional soldiers may find it disappointing as a result. In some respects it is oddly hollow—very strong on the top level politics in Moscow, excellent at the lowest level in describing the life and tribulations of the Russian soldier, but missing the middle levels of strategy and operational art. Nevertheless, it is an essential and compelling read for anyone interested in the Russians or in the war in Afghanistan. The military analysis of the war, including Russian and Afghan perspectives, will have to wait for another book.
