Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  Large claims have been made about the military and political significance of the Stingers.29 According to official Russian figures, the 40th Army lost 113 fixed-wing aircraft and 333 helicopters during the course of the war; by comparison, the Americans lost 5,086 helicopters during the Vietnam War.30 After the initial panic, the Soviet counter-measures reduced the loss rate to much what it had been before the Stingers arrived. No convincing evidence has appeared from Russian sources that the Stingers affected the political decision-making process in Moscow, or that they had much beyond an immediate tactical effect on the Soviet conduct of military operations. Gorbachev took the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan a full year before the first Stinger was fired.31

  The Salang Highway

  The one battle the Soviets could never afford to lose was the battle to keep open the Salang Highway. It was along this road that three-quarters of the 40th Army’s supplies were brought from the Soviet Union. Huge supply columns, as many as eight hundred vehicles, moved from the great logistics base in Khairaton, just on the Afghan side of the Amu Darya River, for more than 280 miles over the Hindu Kush to Kabul.32

  The road starts in the fertile plains of the north, and then winds its way up increasingly bleak mountains to Pul-i Khumri, which is about the halfway point. It then continues south until it passes through the Salang Tunnel, built by the Soviets in the 1960s about seventy-five miles north of Kabul to provide an all-weather route through the Hindu Kush. The tunnel is three miles long and when it was built it was, at eleven thousand feet above sea level, the highest tunnel in the world. Even today it is an intimidating place, narrow, unlined, ill-lit and ill-ventilated, just wide enough for two lorries to pass, with the raw rock seemingly pressing down upon your head. In the course of the war, the 40th Army moved 8 million tons of supplies through this tunnel.

  It normally took about fifteen minutes to negotiate the tunnel, though the big convoys took much longer. In November 1982 an Afghan government convoy broke down inside the tunnel, blocking the way for the Soviet column following behind it. It was very cold and the drivers left their engines running. Sixty-four Soviet soldiers and 112 Afghan soldiers died of carbon monoxide poisoning. This was not the first such case: twelve soldiers died in the tunnel in December 1979 and two more in spring of the following year. Indeed, people were still dying in the tunnel even after it had been rebuilt and reopened in 2002. After the disaster of 1982 a much stricter traffic control was instituted and there were no more incidents on that scale.33 But it could still be a very dangerous place, even in peacetime: in the winter of 2010 over 160 people were killed when the Salang was struck by a series of avalanches.

  On the southern side of the tunnel the road descends in broad serpentines, dominated by bleak cliffs and mountains on one side and falling steeply away on the other: ambush country. After passing through scattered villages, the road comes to the first major town, Charikar, known for its grapes and its pottery, where Captain Codrington and his Gurkhas were massacred during the First Anglo-Afghan War. Lesser roads branch out from Charikar, westwards to Bamyan and eastwards to Bagram, Afghanistan’s main airbase, and the Pandsher Valley, the base for Ahmad Shah Masud’s formidable guerrilla fighters. The fertile Shomali Plain begins here, a green zone of walled villages, tangled vineyards, small fields, and intricate irrigation ditches running close to the road for about sixty miles all the way to Kabul and to the outskirts of the great airbase at Bagram. It is an ideal place for snipers, the laying of ambushes, and the planting of roadside bombs and mines. Soviet troops went into the villages of the Shomali Plain at their peril. In one incident, a praporshchik (warrant officer) took the short cut from Kabul to Bagram through the green zone. The mujahedin waited until he and his column were well inside, then shot them to pieces. The vehicles were destroyed and only one wounded man managed to get back to the main road. When the Russians went to retrieve the bodies and wreak their revenge, they lost a helicopter.

  A pipeline ran alongside the Salang Highway, carrying fuel oil from the Soviet Union, and followed the road as far as the airbase at Bagram. A similar pipeline ran along the western highway to Shindand.34 Small detachments from the Pipeline Brigade—seven men under a conscript sergeant—guarded and maintained the pumping stations along the route. If there were an incident or a mechanical failure, day or night, they would go out to investigate. It was not a glamorous service. But it was dangerous, and in 1986 nearly a third of one Pipeline Battalion was decorated.35

  The Russians cut down trees and destroyed villages along their main supply routes to deny cover to potential ambushers. They placed their zastavas close enough together to give mutual support or on heights overlooking the road. They positioned larger garrisons at intervals of about twelve miles, with a mobile reserve of motor-rifle troops, armour, and artillery. Before a convoy set out along a particularly vulnerable route, special forces and paratroopers travelled by forced march or by helicopter to occupy the heights before the mujahedin could get there and to block off their line of retreat. One column, which was sent to supply the garrison at Chagcharan in the mountains midway between Herat and Kabul, consisted of 250 army lorries and several hundred civilian vehicles with goods for the civilian population. It was supported by four motor-rifle battalions, five reconnaissance companies, two troops of tanks, a battery of artillery, and thirty-two helicopters.36

  A typical skirmish occurred on the Salang Pass on 16 October 1986, shortly after midday, when a column of oil tankers, more than a mile long, was attacked by several hundred of Masud’s fighters from the Pandsher Valley, accompanied, it is said, by a Western TV crew out for some spectacular footage. A BTR escorting the column was put out of action in the first salvo of mortar shells. A number of tankers were set on fire and the drivers bailed out to take cover.

  Ruslan Aushev (1954–) was just descending towards Charikar with a small armoured task force (bron-egruppa) of seven armoured vehicles and two tanks when he heard the firing. He had already been made a Hero of the Soviet Union for action in Afghanistan. Now he reversed his column to go to the aid of the stricken convoy. They passed the wrecked BTR and a few tankers which had escaped from the ambush. On a narrow stretch, two burning oil tankers had slewed across the road and had blocked it entirely. Aushev tried to push them off the road with his tank. When the tank itself risked catching fire, he blew the two vehicles away with a couple of shells fired at point-blank range.

  What was left of the convoy was trapped higher up. The young lieutenant commanding the next zastava, Nikolai Kiselev, radioed that he was sending his small force to help. Between them Aushev’s bron-egruppa and Kiselev’s little force rescued the survivors. But Kiselev was killed and Aushev severely wounded.37

  Though not as important as the Salang route, the western highway which led from Kushka in Uzbekistan to Herat, Shindand, and Kandahar also had to be kept open. It was less vulnerable than the Salang, since much of it lay across open desert with little cover for ambushes. But it was never safe. Major Vyacheslav Izmailov commanded a transport battalion based in Shindand which ran columns between Herat and Kandahar. The journey usually took three days. Major Izmailov’s columns might consist of up to two hundred lorries, escorted by three or four BTRs and occasionally tanks. They hardly ever had air cover.

  Perhaps because he came from Muslim Dagestan and understood the local customs better, Major Izmailov never had any serious trouble. You needed to treat the Afghans with respect, he said: you drove through their villages at two or three miles an hour, you didn’t drive away from accidents, you talked to the village elders. If there were some incident, the Afghans would take payment in cash or kind in compensation, even for a death. But if the Russians refused to accept responsibility or give compensation, then the Afghans would exact their compensation in blood, mining the routes and ambushing the convoys. Through their agents, the mujahedin always knew who was in command of a convoy. They did not attack those who played the game.

  Compensation could include sacks
of rice or money for the funerals. When Izmailov’s men once casually shot up and destroyed a couple of disabled Afghan trucks by the roadside the local leaders told him that the truck owners risked losing their livelihoods. They would be left with nothing to do but to join the mujahedin. Izmailov arranged a complicated deal which involved siphoning fuel out of his tankers, passing it through a third party to the local leaders, and so on to the truck owners.

  Another transport battalion followed a different policy and suffered a different fate. Colonel Kretenin always led his columns at great speed through populated areas as well as open countryside, raising clouds of dust, not stopping for accidents. The Afghans decided to teach him a lesson. In February 1987 he set out with a column from Kandahar to Shindand. Izmailov followed more slowly. Ninety miles out from Kandahar, he heard on his radio that Kretenin was under fire. By the time he got to the scene most of the convoy had been destroyed and Kretenin was dead.

  The Soviet supply lines were never seriously threatened. But the convoys inevitably suffered heavy losses from time to time. One column destined for Faisabad in the north-east started out from the Soviet Union with twelve hundred vehicles, but only seven hundred reached their destination. Another column took eleven days to cover twenty-five miles.38 Many of the columns were organised by a joint Afghan-Soviet company, Afsotr, which was still in existence in 2008. The lorry drivers were civilians and many of them died: more than nine thousand received Soviet or Afghan awards during the war. More than eleven thousand lorries and fuel tankers were lost, and the mountain passes and valleys of Afghanistan were still littered with their carcasses twenty years after the war had ended.39

  Operations

  The Russians did not of course stay perpetually on the defensive; they took the war to the enemy as well. In September 1983 Colonel Rokhlin, the commander the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Faisabad, was sacked for mismanaging a major operation against a concentration of mujahedin which cost fifteen killed and seventy-eight wounded, and went down in regimental legend as the ‘Bakharak Massacre’. He was replaced by Colonel Valeri Sidorov, a well-connected officer whose father taught in the General Staff College and whose mother was a member of the Supreme Soviet. Sidorov was not popular. He was courageous and led from the front, but his soldiers found him hard-driving and ambitious, careless of their lives as he devised ever more ingenious and dangerous operations to enhance his career. The shadow under which the regiment was living after the ‘Bakharak Massacre’ spurred his ambition still further: he would, by his deeds, restore its reputation.

  His first big operation, in January 1984, was aimed at rooting out the guerrillas around the village of Karamugul, a few miles along a gorge from Faisabad. The whole regiment would be involved, including the cooks and drivers. The grandfathers who were expecting to go home in a matter of weeks were particularly unhappy at the news: it was a rule of thumb among the soldiers that courage begins to run out as the prospect of survival draws closer.

  After a rousing speech by the colonel, they moved out early in the morning. An hour later they were clambering up on to the plateau on the western side of the gorge. The temperature was just above zero, it was raining, and by two o’clock they were soaked. Because of the weather they had no air cover.

  By five o’clock in the morning Karamagul was effectively blockaded. The temperature had fallen to between minus fifteen and minus twenty degrees, and officers and men were huddling together for warmth. The soldiers from the reconnaissance company—the razvedchiki—went into Karamugul at six. The village was empty by then, though the stoves were still warm: both the villagers and the insurgents had got out in good time. There was no point in hanging about and at eight o’clock the troops began to withdraw. They were immediately set upon by mujahedin. Only the razvedchiki managed to get to their BMPs and pull out.

  The third platoon covered the retreat on the plateau. They were more heavily armed than the mujahedin, but the latter had the advantage of numbers and mobility. The cooks and the drivers, together with some wounded and men from the mortar battery, were ordered straight back to the regimental base under a praporshchik, Sandirescu. They started off across the plateau, but after they were caught in crossfire Sandirescu took them down into the gorge which led to the base, hoping that would be the quickest way home. The rest of the battalion managed to disengage at the cost of a few lightly wounded, but when they reached the edge of the plateau overlooking their base, they once again came under fire. They slid down the snow-covered slopes on their behinds and eventually worked their way home.

  When the roll call was taken, it was discovered that Sandirescu and his party had still not returned. The razvedchiki, who were still comparatively fresh, set off in their BMPs to find them. They returned at five o’clock in the evening, with the body of one of the cooks. They had picked up six more soldiers stumbling back to base. Sandirescu was one of them, but he was too shocked to say what had happened. Two others turned up during the night: a cook who had lost his boots and whose feet were cut to pieces; and one of the drivers, nicknamed the ‘Moldovan’, whose weapon had to be taken by force from his frozen hands. All he could say was that the rest were dead, except for one soldier, Pashanin, who had been taken prisoner.

  Colonel Sidorov realised he was in trouble. He would be castigated for not waiting for better weather and a helicopter escort; the village was known to be well defended; his force was too small for the job; the cooks and drivers had been hopelessly unsuitable for battle. How was he to explain to his superiors that no one knew what had happened to the missing men? The exhausted soldiers were asked to volunteer to go out to find them. During the night—something unprecedented in army life—a grandfather and five new recruits stayed up to clean their weapons, get them dry clothing from the store, and dry their boots. The next day, swearing mightily, the volunteers set off into a cold clear dawn, a light snow falling, escorted this time by helicopters.

  While half the soldiers climbed back on to the plateau to cover them, Ponomarev and his men were sent to the gorge along which Sandirescu had tried to withdraw. They found some landmines and some piles of spent cartridges. The river was frozen and they systematically broke the ice in case there was something beneath it. Almost at the end of their strength, they eventually found the frozen, mutilated, and emasculated remains of seven soldiers.

  It was clear what had happened. Under fire, the wretched cooks had rushed as fast as they could towards their base, instead of taking up a defensive position and calling for help. The Moldovan and Pashanin, the two oldest soldiers in the group, had covered their retreat as best they could. The mujahedin had attacked the little detachment from both ends of the gorge. A third group had mowed them down from above. After running out of ammunition, the Moldovan had saved himself by jumping into the frozen river. Pashanin had refused to follow and was captured. The regiment later heard through their Afghan agents that he had been castrated and a ring put through his nose. He had been dragged naked through the villages and finished off a month later.

  Six months later a scruffy small boy came to the base and offered to show them where Pashanin’s body was buried—for a price. The corpse was unrecognisable. The soldiers buried the body and for good measure slapped the small boy about a bit. In the absence of positive identification, Pashanin was recorded as missing in action.

  Undismayed, Sidorov decided to mount another major operation. The direct route from Kishim to Faisabad—the Old Kishim Road—ran for about twenty miles. But it went over the Argu Pass, which was firmly controlled by the mujahedin. The only other available route was the New Kishim Road, which wound by a roundabout way for over sixty miles. The journey normally took three to four days, since the convoys, escorted by armoured vehicles, sappers, and the reconnaissance company, moved at a walking pace: quite literally, because the sappers had to go ahead on foot, looking for mines and roadside bombs. Even so, there were usually two or three explosions each time a convoy went out. If a column was fired upon, i
t would destroy the nearest village to deter further attacks. By the end of 1983 the New Kishim Road was lined with ruins.

  Sidorov decided to reopen the Old Kishim Road and thus free for offensive operations the two battalions now immobilised by guard and escort duties. The whole regiment would take part in the operation, leaving only small garrisons to guard the regimental and battalion bases.

  The operation took place at the end of May 1984. The evening before it began Sidorov gave another fiery speech to his men, calling on them to be worthy of their fathers and to fight to the last in the pursuit of victory. This time the temperature was forty degrees in the shade and several men fainted before he had finished.

  The task force moved off the following morning in a cloud of black smoke, its engines roaring. At first things went well enough. But after the operation had been under way for several days it was decisively brought to an end by an avoidable accident.

  Sidorov’s command vehicle got stuck in a river crossing. His driver was unable to get it going again. Sidorov hauled him out of the driver’s hatch, sent him on his way with a few well-placed blows, and slid into his place. As he did so, a grenade he was carrying snagged. The fuse ignited and in the few seconds remaining before the grenade went off Sidorov was unable to get rid of it. In the last second, he tried to shield the other men in the vehicle from the blast. He himself was killed.

  The operation was immediately called off. That evening all the officers of the regiment got drunk. They fired off their guns and signal flares, and for good measure four tanks let off a salvo at the nearest kishlak so that the locals too should also have something to remember Sidorov by. The soldiers got no vodka, but they were given extra helpings of meat and fried potatoes. The new recruits were detailed off to mount the guard for the night.