Afgantsy
Rodric Braithwaite
As former ambassador to Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite brings unique insights to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The story has been distorted not only by Cold War propaganda but also by the myths of the nineteenth century Great Game. It moves from the high politics of the Kremlin to the lonely Russian conscripts in isolated mountain outposts. The parallels with Afghanistan today speak for themselves.
‘A superb achievement of narrative history, sensitive writing and exciting fresh research’: so wrote Simon Sebag Montefiore about Rodric Braithwaite’s bestseller Moscow 1941. But those words, and many others of praise that were given it, could equally apply to his new book.
Rodric Braithwaite
AFGANTSY
The Russians in Afghanistan 1979–89
As she lay dying Jill said to me, with all her customary firmness, that I was not even to think of following her until I had finished this book. It is dedicated to her courageous and generous spirit.
MAPS
Map 1: Afghanistan, 1979–89
Map 2: Kabul in 1980
Map 3: Storming the Palace
Map 4: The Pandsher Valley
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Afganets (plural: Afgantsy): An inhabitant of Afghanistan; a hot sand-laden south-west wind; a veteran of the Soviet war.
It was the Soviet government which sent the soldiers into Afghanistan in 1979, but it was following in the tradition of the Russian governments which preceded it. Policy was directed from the Russian capital, Moscow. The majority of those who fought in Afghanistan were Russians. I have tried to use the words ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ in a way that makes these subtle distinctions reasonably plain, and to ensure that the non-Russians in Afghanistan are given their historical due. But I have doubtless been inconsistent from time to time.
I have not adopted any of the standard scholarly systems of transliteration. My system attempts to be simple, phonetic, and as easy as may be for the non-Russian speaker (Russian speakers will be able to work out the original spelling for themselves). The sounds should be spoken as written. Some sounds which do not exist in English are represented thus:
‘kh’, as in Khrushchev, sounds like ‘ch’ in ‘loch’;
‘zh’, as in Zhukov, sounds like ‘ge’ in ‘rouge’.
An ‘e’ at the beginning of a Russian word is usually pronounced ‘ye’. Thus ‘Yeltsin’ not ‘Eltsin’; but ‘Mount Elbruz’ not ‘Mount Yelbruz’ (because in Russian the ‘E’ in this case is a different letter).
I have used the English versions of names where these are more familiar: ‘Moscow’ not ‘Moskva’; ‘Peter’ not ‘Pyotr’; ‘Alexander’ not ‘Aleksandr’. I have preferred to end Russian surnames in ‘-ski’. I prefer, inconsistently, ‘Mikhail’ to ‘Michael’.
I have used the names of cities, streets, and other places as they were known at the time of the action.
For Afghan names I have used whatever seemed to be both common usage in English and simple to pronounce.
The index contains short descriptions of people, and of foreign and technical words, in the hope that this will be of help to the reader.
PROLOGUE
The young men went off to the war with enthusiasm—because they had never been in a battle.
Thucydides1
Of course, the private soldier’s field of vision is much more limited than that of his general. On the other hand, it is of vital importance to the latter to gloss over his mistakes, and draw attention only to those things which will add to his reputation. The private soldier has no such feeling. It is only to the officers of high rank engaged that a battle can bring glory and renown. To the army of common soldiers, who do the actual fighting, and risk mutilation and death, there is no reward except the consciousness of duty bravely performed.
Private Warren Olney, who fought in the Union army at the Battle of Shiloh, 18622
By no means everything that happened to me during the two years I was in Afghanistan is set down here. Some things I did not want to describe. We Afgantsy talk among ourselves about things which those who were not in Afghanistan may not understand, or will understand in the wrong way.
Vitali Krivenko3
The explosion of violence which erupted in Herat in March 1979 was beyond anything that had happened since the bloody Communist coup a year earlier. Resistance to the Communists was already spreading throughout the country. But this was a full-scale revolt in a provincial capital, one of Afghanistan’s most important cities, an ancient centre of Islamic learning, music, art, and poetry. Power fell entirely into the hand of the insurgents, and it was a week before Afghan government forces finally regained control after the spilling of much blood.
The Communists had promised much: ‘Our aim was no less than to give an example to all the backward countries of the world of how to jump from feudalism straight to a prosperous, just society… Our choice was not between doing things democratically or not. Unless we did them, nobody else would… [Our] very first proclamation declared that food and shelter are the basic needs and rights of a human being… Our programme was clear: land to the peasants, food for the hungry, free education for all. We knew that the mullahs in the villages would scheme against us, so we issued our decrees swiftly so that the masses could see where their real interests lay… For the first time in Afghanistan’s history women were to be given the right to education… We told them that they owned their bodies, they could marry whom they liked, they shouldn’t have to live shut up in houses like pets.’
But the Communists knew that such ideas would not be welcome to the pious and conservative people of Afghanistan, and they were not prepared to wait. They had expected resistance and acted ruthlessly to put it down: ‘[I]t was not the time to put on kid gloves. First and foremost we had to hold on to power. The alternative was to be liquidated and for Afghanistan to revert to darkness.’4 So they started a massive reign of terror: landowners, mullahs, dissident officers, professional people, even members of the Communist Party itself, were arrested, tortured, and shot in large numbers. When their friends in Moscow protested, they replied that what had worked for Stalin would work for them too.
There are various accounts of what triggered off the violence in Herat. Sher Ahmad Maladani was there at the time and later commanded a local band of mujahedin—Muslim fighters against the Communists and the Russians. He said that the peasants in an outlying village, incensed by a decision of the local Communists to force their daughters to school, rose up, killed the Communists, killed the girls for good measure, and marched on the city.5 Others said that the rising took place on orders from émigrés in Pakistan, who had planned for a countrywide rebellion. Some said that the rising was led by mutinous soldiers from the 17th Division, the local Afghan army garrison. Still others said it was stirred up by agents from Iran.
Whatever the basis for these stories, the peasants of the neighbouring villages gathered at their mosques on the morning of Thursday, 15 March, and moved towards the city carrying religious slogans and brandishing ancient rifles, knives, and other improvised weapons, destroying the symbols of Communism and the state as they marched. They were rapidly joined by the people of Herat itself. The mob flooded down the pine-tree avenues that led to the city, past the great citadel and the four ancient minarets in the north-western corner, through the Maliki Gate, and into the new suburbs to the north and east where the provincial governor’s office was situated. They stormed the prison, sacked and torched banks, post offices, newspaper offices, and government buildings, and looted the bazaars. They tore down the red flags and the portraits of the Communist leaders. They beat people not wearing traditional Muslim clothes. Party officials, including the governor himself, were hunted down and killed.6 So we
re some of the Soviet advisers who were working in the city and were unable to make their escape. By noon most of the city was in rebel hands. That evening there was dancing in the bazaars.7
In the months and years that followed, the story of what happened in Herat on those March days grew mightily in the telling, fanned by the reports of courageous but uncritical Western journalists who had no way of checking what they were told. The mutilated bodies of a hundred Soviet advisers, their wives and children, were said to have been paraded through the streets. It was confidently asserted that Soviet long-range bombers had pounded the city for two days. Up to twenty thousand people were said to have died in the rebellion and its aftermath.
As so often during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, facts were hard to establish, and hard to distinguish from myth-making. Most of the figures about the Herat rising have been much exaggerated. But whatever the truth of the matter, the immediate reaction of the Communist government in Kabul was to panic, and to ask Moscow to send military forces to put the rising down. The Soviet Politburo debated the question for four whole days and then came to a very sensible conclusion. They would not send troops, though they would supply the Afghan government with additional military and economic aid. As the Soviet Prime Minister, Alexei Kosygin (1904–80), told the Afghan President, Nur Mohamed Taraki (1913–79), ‘If we sent in our troops, the situation in your country would not improve. On the contrary, it would get worse. Our troops would have to struggle not only with an external aggressor, but with a part of your own people. And people do not forgive that kind of thing.’
In the event, the Afghan government was able to put down the Herat rising on its own. But a slow-burning fuse had been lit. Unrest and armed resistance continued to spread throughout the country. Infighting within the Communist Party grew increasingly bloody, until it culminated in September with Taraki’s murder by the Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin (1929–79).
For the Russians this was the last straw. Driven step by step, mostly against their will, they tried to get a grip. Their decisions were bedevilled by ignorance, ideological prejudice, muddled thinking, inadequate intelligence, divided counsel, and the sheer pressure of events. Needless to say, the experts who actually knew about Afghanistan—and there were many of them in the Soviet Union in those days—were neither consulted nor informed.
In December 1979 Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan. Soviet special forces seized key objectives in Kabul, stormed Amin’s palace, and killed him. The intentions of the Soviet government were modest: they aimed to secure the main towns and the roads, stabilise the government, train up the Afghan army and police, and withdraw within six months or a year. Instead they found themselves in a bloody war from which it took them nine years and fifty-two days to extricate themselves.
The Afgantsy, the soldiers who did the actual fighting, came from all parts of the Soviet Union: from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic States. Despite the great differences between them, most thought of themselves as Soviet citizens. That changed towards the end, as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, and men who had been comrades in arms found themselves living in different and sometimes hostile countries. Many took years to find their feet again in civilian life. Some never did.
None shook free of the memories of their common war.
PART I
The Road to Kabul
The country is extremely well adapted to a passive resistance. Its mountainous nature and the proud and freedom-loving character of its people, combined with the lack of adequate roads, makes it very difficult to conquer and even harder to hold.
General A. Snesarev, 19211
– ONE –
Paradise Lost
It took the Russians two hundred and fifty years to get to Kabul. The British started later, but got there sooner.
Both were driven by the same imperial logic. The Russian Foreign Minister, Prince Gorchakov (1789–1883), set it out in December 1864: ‘The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilised states which are brought into contact with half-savage nomad populations possessing no fixed social organisation. In such cases it always happens that the more civilised state is forced, in the interests of the security of its frontiers and its commercial relations, to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whose turbulent and unsettled character makes them undesirable neighbours.’ In their turn these newly pacified regions had to be protected from the depredations of the lawless tribes beyond them. The Russian government therefore had to choose between bringing civilisation to those suffering under barbarian rule and abandoning its frontiers to anarchy and bloodshed. ‘Such has been the fate of every country which has found itself in a similar position.’ Britain and the other colonial powers, as well as Russia, had been ‘irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward march’. The greatest difficulty, Gorchakov rightly concluded, lay in deciding where to stop.1
Gorchakov’s defence of Russian policy was of course self-serving, though his analysis was plausible. The Russians soon resumed their southward movement. This provoked a hypocritical outrage among other imperial powers engaged in much the same pursuit in other parts of the world. The British, in particular, were incensed: in the last part of the nineteenth century they created the romantic myth of the ‘Great Game’, brilliantly fuelled by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, in which gallant British officers rode into the Himalayan mountains and the desert lands to their north, and risked their lives to frustrate the knavish tricks of sinister Russian agents seeking to subvert the Indian jewel in the Imperial British Crown.
Afghanistan in the Modern Era
Afghanistan, the country on which the Russians and the British had both set their eye, is one of the oldest-inhabited places in the world, a crossroads between the Central Asian empires to the north, the Indian subcontinent to the south, Persia to the west, and China to the east. Alexander the Great ruled there briefly. Buddhist and Persian empires followed, until all were swept aside by Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227) and Tamberlane (1336–1405) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Babur (1483–1530), a descendant of both men, established the Mogul empire in the sixteenth century. Delhi was its capital, but he chose to be buried in Kabul. Despite successive wars, ‘the bulk of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage remains intact (albeit under threat): it is still one of the greatest cultural storehouses of all Asia’.2
The people of Afghanistan are divided by race into Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other lesser ethnic groupings. Each of these is subdivided into clans defined often by the accidents of geography, as so often in mountainous regions. And each clan is further divided into often mutually hostile families. All are ruled by an ethic of fierce pride, martial valour, honour, and hospitality, mediated by the institution of the blood feud. At all levels, from the local to the central, politics and loyalties are defined by conflicts and deals between these groups, and even between individual families. There is thus little sense of a national entity on which to build a functioning unitary state.
Most Afghans are Sunni Muslims. The Pushtuns make up two-fifths of the population and their language, Pushtu, is one of the two official languages of the country. Most of them live in the southern part of the country, and in neighbouring Pakistan on the other side of the ‘Durand Line’, the artificial frontier drawn by the British at the end of the nineteenth century. But substantial numbers live in the north, where they were settled at the end of the nineteenth century to reinforce Kabul’s control over the non-Pushtun inhabitants. The Pushtuns used to consider themselves, and were considered by outsiders, to be the true Afghans. Some still do, which is not well taken by the rest.
The next largest groupings—the Tajiks (27 per cent), who live in the north and west, and the Uzbeks (9 per cent), who live in the north—are related to the peoples across the border in what used to be Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many Tajiks and Uzbeks fled into Afghanistan when the Bolsheviks were imposing their regime in Central As
ia in the 1920s and 1930s. The Tajiks speak Dari, the Afghan form of Persian, the second official language.
The Hazaras (9 per cent) live in the central mountains and are said to be descended from the Mongols. They are Shias, and the rest of the country despises them as infidels. They are often found in menial positions and they have often been persecuted. But when occasion calls, they too are effective warriors.
Afghanistan’s modern history was shaped by three remarkable rulers: Ahmad Shah Abdali (c. 1722–73), Dost Mohamed (1793–1863), and Abdur Rahman (c 1840–1901). They and their successors have always had to tackle four main tasks. The first has been to preserve a semblance of national unity, despite ethnic divisions, local lawlessness and violence, the arrogance of provincial satraps, and the determination of most Afghans to preserve their independent way of life whatever the plans and intentions of the government in Kabul. Any Afghan government has to try to negotiate a compromise where it can, and to suppress dissent and rebellion—often by the most ruthless means—where it cannot. Only the most exceptional rulers have succeeded.
The second task has been to preserve the independence of the state from the depredations of outside powers. Afghan foreign policy has usually combined a precarious neutrality with a willingness to distance itself from one predatory rival in return for a guarantee of security and a large bribe from the other. This policy has often failed, and Afghanistan has often been successfully invaded. But invaders have always found it even harder than its own native rulers to manage the country. Sooner or later they have preferred to cut their losses and pull out, and that has always been Afghanistan’s ultimate defence.
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