Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  Most of the fighting in Afghanistan was on a comparatively small scale: minor operations commanded by lieutenants, captains, and majors. The nearest the 40th Army got to real old-fashioned war was when it conducted large-scale operations to clear out a rebel stronghold, relieve rebel pressure on a town, or close the border with Pakistan. This was where the colonels and the generals had their chance to exercise their skill in the art of war. These sledgehammer blows involved thousands of troops, hundreds of armoured vehicles and helicopters, massive air and artillery strikes. They continued for weeks at a time and had few lasting results.

  The Weapons

  The men of the 40th Army were generously equipped with sophisticated weapons. Some achieved the status of icons—the Kalashnikov automatic rifle, the infantry fighting vehicle, the BMP (Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty), and the battle helicopter, the Mi-24. But the weapons, like the men, had been intended for use against the armies of NATO. They now had to be adapted to a quite different kind of war. Determined attempts were made to improve the weapons systems. Designers and engineers regularly visited Afghanistan to listen to complaints and suggestions from the soldiers.2 Some of the weapons the Russians brought with them turned out to be irrelevant—heavy anti-aircraft weapons, for example, useful for fighting an enemy air force, but not much use against partisans—and were sent back to the Soviet Union.

  The backbone of the Soviet army was the motor-rifle unit, motorised infantry which travelled across the battlefield in armoured personnel carriers, BTRs (Bronetransportyor), which had a crew of three and carried seven soldiers; and in the ubiquitous BMP, which also had a crew of three and could carry eight soldiers. The BMP was an advanced vehicle for its time, but its cannon could not be elevated sufficiently to engage rebels shooting from the mountains above: this defect was rectified in a later model, the BMP-2. It was designed to resist small-arms fire, but it was very vulnerable to mines and anti-tank rockets. If a large mine went off under a BMP, it would drive the floor up against the deck, crushing those inside. The soldiers often preferred to ride on the outside: you were exposed to the bullets, but if the vehicle hit a mine you had some chance of being thrown off and surviving. The driver, of course, had no choice.

  The Mi-24 attack helicopter, which the soldiers called the ‘Crocodile’, stars in most films about the Afghan war. It carried a crew of three and eight passengers or four stretchers. A sinister-looking beast, it could mount a variety of formidable weapons to use against people, buildings, and armoured vehicles. The Mi-8 transport helicopter, the ‘Bee’, was the workhorse of the 40th Army. It came into service in 1967: more were said to have been produced than any other helicopter in the world. With a crew of three, it could carry twenty-four passengers, or twelve stretchers, or a load of three thousand kilograms. Little more than a decade after the Soviet war was over, the Americans hired Mi-8s to supply their special forces because they were particularly well adapted to operate in the high mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The aircraft were flown by Russians—sometimes by the same men who had flown them during the Soviet war. But this time they were flown not by military crews but—because Russia was now a capitalist country—by the employees of a commercial company called, appropriately enough, Vertical-T. When one of these helicopters was shot down in 2008, the Russian Ambassador in Kabul contacted the Taliban for the return of the bodies. ‘You mean they were Russians?’ said the Taliban. ‘We thought they were Americans. Of course you can have them.’3

  The soldiers’ personal weapons were good, and they too were steadily improved throughout the war. Their other equipment was less suitable. They were issued at first with uncomfortable uniforms in the wrong camouflage pattern, a clumsy flak jacket which weighed twenty kilograms until a newer model got it down to twelve, a skimpy cotton sleeping bag that let the water in, a heavy rucksack, and boots ill-adapted to marching across mountains. They had no proper identity discs, but kept their personal details in an empty cartridge case hung round their necks, just as their fathers and grandfathers had done in the Great Patriotic War.4

  So they improvised. At headquarters in Kabul the dress code was rigidly enforced. But out in the field the soldiers wore whatever worked. They sewed their own ‘brassieres’, lifchiki, to carry spare magazines, grenades, signal rockets, and other paraphernalia. Instead of heavy army boots, officers and sometimes even soldiers wore light trainers of Soviet manufacture, or foreign ones bought or looted from the Afghan dukany (shops) or captured from the enemy.5 A great prize was a lightweight sleeping bag, acquired in the same way.

  The elite forces were much more colourful. They celebrated fearsome drinking rituals before they went out on operations and wore the most picturesque rig even on parade: ‘We were wearing the clothes we fought in. A few were wearing SpetsNaz overalls. Some were wearing the “afganka” jacket. Most were dressed in a canvas windcheater [shtormovka], tank crew overalls, long Afghan shirts and baggy trousers [shalvary]. Our equipment was just as varied. Some had captured Kalashnikovs of Arab or Chinese manufacture. Some had Soviet automatics, with a sniperscope or night sight attached and a silencer. Some had modernised versions of the Kalashnikov sub-machine gun [PKMP] or self-loading carbines [SKS], instead of our Dragunov sniper rifles. The sergeant major had a silenced Stechkin pistol as well as his PKMP. We looked like the crew of a pirate ship.’6

  The soldiers operated as beasts of burden, as soldiers have done throughout history. Even on raids they were supposed to carry their weapons, helmets, a flak jacket, a sleeping bag, a tent, dry rations for three days, bottles of water, up to six hundred rounds for their automatic rifles, two shrapnel and two attack grenades, signal rockets and smoke flares, and one or two 82mm mortar rounds. The whole lot weighed more than forty kilograms. The signallers carried radios, while the mortar and machine-gun crews carried the ponderous and awkward parts of their heavy weapons.7 When he first joined the signal platoon of the 1st Battalion of the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Bakharak, Andrei Ponomarev remembered, he was neither strong nor fit enough for the job. Carrying the radio in addition to his personal kit, weapons, and ammunition was a nightmare. But you could never admit that you weren’t up to it: you would be despised and probably beaten by the other soldiers. During his first operation he gritted his teeth, on the edge of tears, and struggled on. Some of the others eventually gave him a hand, carrying the radio in turns while he continued to operate it.8

  Not surprisingly, even the soldiers of the motor-rifle units, when they went on raids, especially at night, often left their helmets and flak jackets behind, and took the lighter weapons and no more than ten magazines of ammunition.9 Their senior officers never cottoned on to that: they were still saying long after the war that man for man the Soviet soldier could not match the Afghan fighter because of his lack of training and his clumsy equipment.10

  The Enemy

  The mujahedin against whom the soldiers of the 40th Army and their Afghan allies fought for nine years were formidable warriors, highly motivated, brave, determined, skilled in guerrilla warfare. Some were professionals—army officers who had turned against the government. Others were driven by religious passion, the desire for revenge, an ingrained unwillingness to do what the government told them to do. Some fought for money. Some who had been driven out of their homes by war had little alternative. Since for the most part they were drawn from the ordinary people of the villages, it was hard for the Russian soldiers to distinguish between friend and foe. A man working in his field might shoot at you as you drove past. The apparently friendly people in a village might direct you along a road which they knew led to an ambush. Faced with these lethal uncertainties, soldiers often shot first and asked questions afterwards, and their commanders would call in an air or artillery strike on a village if they encountered opposition without worrying too much about collateral damage.

  But the insurgents, like the Kabul government itself, suffered from ‘the fundamental characteristic of Afghan society—its incoherence’.11 For much of
the war there were seven main mujahedin parties, based in Pakistan, with representatives inside Afghanistan itself, who organised the supply of money and arms to the fighters. In May 1985 these parties formed themselves into a loosely organised Alliance of Seven. But they remained rivals rather than partners, and after the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989 the tensions between them broke into open civil war. Like the Afghan Communist Party these groupings had their origins in the university politics of the 1970s, where their leaders, such as Rabbani, the leader of the moderate Islamist Jamiat-i Islami, and Hekmatyar, the leader of the radical Islamist Hezb-i Islami, had already made a mark. All were Sunnis, and all were Pushtun, except for Rabbani’s Jamiat-i Islami, who were Tajiks and were led inside Afghanistan by Ahmad Shah Masud. (See Annex 3, ‘The Alliance of Seven and Its Leaders’, p.346.)

  Field commanders, nominally answering to their party leaders in Pakistan, recruited and organised their fighters in Afghanistan and in the refugee camps. Individual warlords raised fighting bands for the glory of God or for their own glory, for local power or for loot. Their loyalties were uncertain and they would change sides in pursuit of personal advantage. Some individuals happily sold their services to the highest bidder. Internecine warfare between the fighting bands inside Afghanistan resulted in thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of deaths among the guerrillas and the civilian population.12

  Figures for the number of guerrilla fighters can only be estimates. The total number in 1980–82 might have reached 250,000. In the last full year of the war, between 35,000 and 175,000 might have been operating on any given day. The group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is said to have consisted of 40,570 men, one-third of the total.13 Such figures give an idea of the order of magnitude, but are not backed by hard evidence.

  The Pakistani military intelligence organisation, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) did what they could to monopolise outside support for the resistance. They set up training camps on the Afghan border, and insisted that weapons and money provided by the CIA and others should pass through their hands. Their aim was to secure a regime in Kabul that was not only friendly to Pakistan, but also to their own belief in Islamist government. So they helped those commanders, such as the Pushtun Hekmatyar, who shared their religious and political views, and gave scant support to those who did not, such as the Tajik Masud. The French and British recognised Masud’s importance and did what they could to help him. It was not all that much, because their resources could not begin to match those of the Americans.

  The successes of the mujahedin grew from the start. The chief of Soviet army intelligence in Afghanistan reported in the middle of 1980 that ‘If in April this year there were 38 terrorist acts, and 63 people killed, then in May there were 112 terrorist attacks, killing 201 people. In a directive of the Islamic Party of Afghanistan… the rebels are instructed to continue to avoid direct armed confrontation with regular forces, and to camouflage themselves among the civilian population’.14 The mujahedin regularly launched rocket attacks on Kabul itself, infiltrating the outer line of defences despite the best efforts of the Soviet and Afghan forces. One of their greatest successes occurred in August 1986, when rockets fired by a time fuse hit a major ammunition dump outside Kabul, destroying forty thousand tons of ammunition at a cost to the Soviets estimated by the Pakistanis at $250 million. Two years later, in April 1988, another large dump exploded, this time outside Rawalpindi, in Pakistan. Ten thousand tons of ammunition, plastic explosive, rockets, and other ordnance blew up, killing a hundred people and injuring another thousand. The timing seemed significant, just as the Geneva Agreements were about to be signed and the Russians were preparing for the first phase of their withdrawal. The KGB had considerable respect for the ability of their colleagues in the KhAD to conduct special operations and believed they were responsible. Pakistani intelligence officers blamed the Russians. The more paranoid even suspected the Americans. The most likely explanation is that it was an accident.15

  At first the insurgents were not as well armed as they later became. The professional soldiers among them knew how to operate armoured vehicles and aircraft, but did not acquire such sophisticated weapons until after the Soviets had left; then they used them against one another. But very soon, with the assistance of the Americans, the Pakistanis and others, they began to get mortars, mines, heavy machine guns, and radios, many of them of Soviet design imported from China, Egypt, and elsewhere. And even the old British Lee-Enfield rifles, which they used from the start, and which the Soviet soldiers called ‘Boers’ from some vague notion that they had been used during the Boer War, were more accurate than the Soviet automatic rifle and far outranged it. Soldiers began to die at the hands of distant snipers, and panic spread among them which their officers had difficulty in countering.16

  The Russians and their Afghan allies used helicopters and fighter bombers to destroy villages suspected of harbouring rebels, to supply isolated garrisons, and to place their troops in ambush. But the mujahedin were not defenceless against aerial attack. In skilful hands, their Soviet-designed heavy machine guns could bring down even the armoured assault helicopters. Two or three years into the war they obtained—with CIA assistance—the very effective but too cumbersome Swiss Oerlikon light anti-aircraft gun. They made some spectacular attacks on Soviet and Afghan airbases, destroying a number of aircraft on the ground. From 1984 they began to use Chinese and Soviet anti-aircraft missiles and the dubiously effective British Blowpipe. The Blowpipes found their way to Afghanistan through a variety of covert sources so that their provenance could not be proved. The missile was used by both sides in the Falklands War, where one British officer remarked that it was like ‘trying to shoot pheasants with a drainpipe’. Senior Soviet officers such as General Varennikov and helicopter pilots such as Boris Zhelezin nevertheless regarded the weapon with a certain respect.17

  But what the mujahedin really wanted was the American Stinger, a sophisticated portable rocket launcher which could seek out and hit an aircraft at a range of three miles, at altitudes between six hundred and twelve thousand five hundred feet.18 The US military opposed supplying Stingers to the mujahedin since they feared—correctly, as it turned out—that the weapons would leak to the Russians and others. It was not until February 1986 that the Americans finally decided to supply some two hundred and forty launchers and a thousand missiles.19

  The first Stingers were fired on 26 September 1986, when a Soviet-trained engineer called Ghaffur shot down three Mi-24 helicopters that were coming in to land at Jalalabad.20 The initial impact on Soviet tactics and morale was considerable. Alla Smolina had just arrived in Jalalabad to work in the office of the military procurator when the three helicopters were shot down. ‘The old hands said that previously there had been nothing frightening about flying around Afghanistan,’ she wrote later. ‘Soviet and Afghan planes travelled for all sorts of reasons all over the country at all hours of the day and at all altitudes. Jalalabad was one of the few places where roses grew in the winter. So the Kabul garrison sent planes there at the end of every year to collect roses for their New Year parties.’

  Smolina’s flight into Jalalabad was the last to land in the old carefree way. Thereafter planes flew at night if possible, approached the airfield at a safe height of several thousand feet, and landed in a tight, quick spiral. You felt, she said, as if you were in a spacecraft, leaving your insides behind you. Parachutes became obligatory, though it was hard to see how they could be used if your plane was hit by a rocket. And anyway most of them were too big if you were a woman. People cut their air travel to a minimum. But if you travelled by land you risked being ambushed. Some people gave up travelling altogether. Others still flew to the base, either on business or to enjoy its various attractions: a shop, a club, a hairdresser, even a discotheque run by a paratroop lieutenant.21

  The Soviets were now forced to refine the tactics they had developed against anti-aircraft missiles and heavy machine guns. Their aircraft fired infrared fl
ares to confuse the Stingers’ guidance systems. Fixed-wing aircraft flew above sixteen thousand five hundred feet—beyond the range of the Stinger. Soviet bombing became even more inaccurate, and even more destructive of civilian lives and property.22 Helicopters flew very low among the mountains, because the Stinger was unreliable except against a background of sky. Most transport flights took place at night. These measures successfully reduced losses. But they were not infallible. One aircraft was hit over Khost at a height of thirty thousand feet, though it managed to land with a large hole in the tailplane.23

  The Soviet Minister of Defence promised that the first person to get hold of a Stinger would be made a Hero of the Soviet Union. There are two versions of what then happened. One is that, acting on intelligence, a special forces detachment under Major Sergeev, flying in four battle helicopters, successfully intercepted a motorcycle caravan on 5 January 1987. The mujahedin fired two Stingers at them, which missed, and another was captured intact.24 A more colourful version is that the successful commander was called Major Belov and that he was given the lesser Order of the Military Red Banner when it was discovered at the last minute that ‘he had a drink problem and was brusque in his attitude to his superiors’.25

  The Russians also set out to buy Stingers from the rebels: the going price was $3,000.26 The Iranians did the same, and displayed several Stingers during a military parade in September 1987 which were allegedly sold to them by two mujahedin commanders for $1 million.27 After the war was over, the CIA were still sufficiently worried to try to buy back unused Stingers at twice their original cost. But few were recovered, and between two hundred and four hundred remained at large.28