Eight years into the war in Afghanistan: the most senior defence official running the conflict receives a letter from one of his officers. It is a depressing list of political and tactical failures.
“We should honestly admit,” he writes, “that our efforts over the last eight years have not led to the expected results. Huge material resources and considerable casualties did not produce a positive end result — stabilisation of military-political situation in the country. The protracted character of the military struggle and the absence of any serious success, which could lead to a breakthrough in the entire strategic situation, led to the formation in the minds of the majority of the population of the mistrust in the abilities of the regime.”
“The experience of the past years,” he continues bleakly, “clearly shows that the Afghan problem cannot be solved by military means only. We should decisively reject our illusions and undertake principally new steps, taking into account the lessons of the past, and the real situation in the country …”
The date is 17 August … 1987. The writer is Colonel K. Tsagalov and he is addressing the newly appointed Soviet defence minister, Dmitry Yazov.
Fast-forward 22 years to the confidential briefing paper prepared for President Barack Obama by the senior US general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, in August 2009, eight years into the US-led intervention in Afghanistan.
“The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and Isaf’s own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government,” McChrystal argued in a document leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. He said the consequence had been a “crisis of confidence among Afghans. Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents”.
The American led-effort, wrote McChrystal, echoing Tsaglov, was labouring under its own illusions regarding its competence. “Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. [Nato and the US] does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population.” The war was in danger of being lost.
In Washington the talk in recent weeks has been of a “Vietnam moment”. Commentators have pored over new studies of that war, looking deep into the heart of one US military debacle in order to think their way out of another. But what if Afghanistan — as Artemy Kalinovsky argued in Foreign Policy magazine last month — is not the new Vietnam but rather “the new Afghanistan”?
Should not US and British policy makers be studying the lessons of the Soviet Union’s disastrous war from 1979-89, if they want to avoid history’s mistakes?
Kalinovsky writes: “The US army/marine corps counterinsurgency field manual does not mention the Soviet experience once. One analyst told me that when she suggested including the conflict as a way to inform current policy, Pentagon officials seemed to have little awareness about what Moscow had been trying to do there or for how long.
Yet, to cite one parallel, McChrystal has just announced he wants to relocate isolated firebases — including one at Kamdesh that came close to being overwhelmed by Taliban fighters on October 3 — to relocate troops in population centres. The Russians, confronted by a widening conflict, were forced to adopt the same strategy.
The Soviet war, at its conclusion, cost more than a million Afghan lives, 26 000 Soviet soldiers died and more than five million Afghans fled the devastated country. Soviet troop numbers reached 108 000 at their peak. True, the mujahideen, unlike the Taliban today, benefited from US and other foreign military aid. And the present conflict has lacked the same intensity, with 800 US soldiers killed and more than 220 Britons, in addition to thousands of Afghans.
But while the scale is different, a study of Soviet archives shows the intellectual failures associated with both wars are the same, a point reinforced by the official history of the Soviet war, prepared by Russia’s general staff after the retreat.
“The Soviet government and the Soviet high command,” its authors bitterly observed, “did not study Afghanistan’s national-historic factors before committing Soviet forces. If they had, they would have found a history of many centuries of resisting various conquerors. The Afghan considers any foreigner carrying weapons as an alien occupier.”
The reality too, as Kalinovsky argued last month, is that neither the Russians nor the Americans intended to become embroiled in long wars. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who ordered the Soviet invasion to bring down the brutal Afghan communist president, Hafizullah Amin, in 1979, hoped troops could be home within months, leaving military and other advisers — backed by huge economic and logistical support — to build a communist government that could stand on its own feet. It was an error repeated by the US-led efforts to rebuild the country as a democratic state.
Professor Chris Bellamy of Cranfield University — an expert on Soviet military history, whose students include serving British army officers — is one of many struck by the similarities. “I remember meeting a Russian general after the Soviet war,” he recalled. “He said to me — we should have read Kipling! Now it has come round again, we should have read the Soviet history of Afghanistan.”
Belatedly, said Bellamy, his institution had been approached to run a course for British officers en route to Afghanistan on the country’s culture and society.
The Soviet preoccupation with Afghanistan — even in the months before the invasion as the number of Soviet military advisers reached thousands — seems strikingly familiar. At a meeting in the Kremlin on April 1 1979, after an uprising in Herat against the Afghan communist government, Moscow’s most senior officials, including Brezhnev, considered a report by foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, defence minister Dmitry Ustinov and KGB director Yuri Andropov. Their analysis — as prescient then as today — described a country in which “Afghan reactionary forces [were] skilfully taking advantage of the almost complete illiteracy of the population, complex international and inter-tribal conflicts, religious fanaticism and nationalism”.
It depicted a mujahideen insurgency in transition — as the neo-Taliban insurgency would also develop — “from covert subversive actions to open armed forms of activity” the aim of which was to “widen the front of the struggle, to force the government to disperse its forces across different regions”.
Just as Western officials now home in on the failings of the Hamid Karzai regime three decades later, the Soviet leadership lamented the lack of legitimacy and authority of their man in Kabul — Nur Mohammad Taraki — recommending, as US and British officials would do later, that the primary task of the Afghan leaders was to “create a new state apparatus, reorganise and strengthen the army and gather practical experience in building a state and party”.
It was this desire — insistence on a modern, centralised state similar to the one the international community would seek — that the Soviet Union realised was one of the biggest factors to its catastrophe in Afghanistan.
As a result, in both conflicts foreign forces have found themselves propping up a minority grouping with unsustainable claims to nationwide legitimacy. Russia backed the narrowly represented supporters of the PDPA, the fractious and divided Afghan communist party; now Nato has promoted a small elite surrounding Karzai’s weak government.
“The similarities are striking,” said Gregory Feifer, American author of The Great Gamble, a highly praised new history of the Soviet intervention. “I am reminded of it every time I hear an official talk about national reconciliation. The Soviets spoke about nothing else for nine years. But the goals were different, if the tactics often were similar.”
Reading translations of the Soviet record at the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project in the US, it is not only the obvious points of comparison that stand out but the detail. Just as US and Nato forces would struggle after the new Taliban insurgency to prevent fighters returning to areas already cleared, the Russians suffered a similar problem while officers complained about the quality of their Afghan army comrades.
Soviet officials complain of not being able to win on the battlefield decisively and of losing the “propaganda war”. Recently US envoy Richard Holbrooke and McChrystal have talked of the need “to wrest the information initiative from the Taliban and other groups”.
Arne Westad, the London School of Economics history professor who was one of the first to study the Soviet archive, is “constantly stunned” by the parallels. “I remember interviewing a member of the presidium of the Soviet foreign ministry, who dissented from the official line. He warned [the Soviets] that they needed to examine the British experience in Afghanistan and was derided. He was told: it is not the same. It was a different army. But it is [the same].”
Westad is concerned that while the Russians began to demonstrate a more flexible military approach after 1983, Nato and US forces appear to be slower to adapt. In particular, there has been a refusal to lose the old obsession with establishing a unified, “modern” state. Afghanistan is a tribal society where power traditionally has been mediated through qawm — overlapping local patronage networks — and where attempts to carve out a modern state, first tried by the autocratic Mohammad Daoud Khan in the 1970s, until the present day have been a motor for conflict. “It is the biggest problem,” he said. “It is like trying to fit a saddle on a cow.”
By the time Colonel Tsaglov put pen to paper, Mikhail Gorbachev, shocked by the failure of the intervention and increasing public anger at Russian losses, had already decided to pull out. This week, by contrast, Obama is expected to announce his decision to escalate the war and send yet more soldiers. In the end it was the endless death toll — as much as the crippling cost — that persuaded Gorbachev to call for withdrawal.
Anatoly Chernaev, a close colleague of Gorbachev, recorded the moment in his diary on October 17 1985 after attending the Politburo meeting. “[Gorbachev] read several heart-rending letters … There is a good deal of everything [in the letters]: international duty?! For what? Do the Afghans themselves want us to fulfil this duty? And is this duty worth the lives of our boys, who do not understand what they are fighting for? Besides the letters filled with tears, mothers’ grief over the dead and the crippled, heart-rending descriptions of funerals, there are letters of accusation: the Politburo made a mistake and it should be rectified, the sooner the better.”
Thirty years after Russian troops entered Afghanistan to remove a government, Nato, like the Soviets, is confronted by ethnic divisions, corruption and weak government; by a population of which large parts are hostile to foreign intervention and hostile to attempts to modernise and centralise the state.
With troop commitments creeping towards the Soviet total, the unanswered question is whether this war can end in a different manner to the predecessor it mirrors in such startling fashion. – guardian.co.uk