Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  The mutilated body was put back together in the regimental morgue and dressed in Sidorov’s parade uniform. The next day the regiment paraded to honour his coffin. The guard of honour was mounted by the regimental officers, all with hangovers. The regimental band played as the coffin, loaded with Sidorov’s medals, was carried to the helicopter to begin the long journey back to a grave in Moscow’s Kuzminskoe Cemetery.40

  The Sledgehammer

  Most of the 40th Army’s large-scale operations took place in the imposing mountains on the border with Pakistan, across which lay the mujahedin’s main supply routes, or in the fertile Pandsher Valley, from which bands could threaten the Russians’ own supply lines across the Salang Pass.

  The city of Khost is only ten miles from the eastern border with Pakistan, about ninety miles south of Kabul and sixty miles from Gardez, to which it is linked by a strategic road, open to ambush and rising to ten thousand feet where it crosses the Satykandav Pass. During the Soviet war the guerrilla force in these parts was led by Jalaluddin Haqqani (c. 1950–). Twenty years later the same force was led by his son, Sirajuddin. By then the Russian base in Khost was being used by the Americans: it was here that seven CIA employees were killed by a suicide bomber in December 2009.

  Jalaluddin’s base at Zhawar consisted of a complex of tunnels whose entrances faced towards Pakistan, only a couple of miles away. Inside were arms depots and repair shops, a garage, a medical station, a radio centre, a kitchen, a mosque, and a hotel. Five hundred mujahedin defended the base, armed with a howitzer, rocket launchers, heavy antiaircraft machine guns, and two T-55 tanks they had captured from the Afghan army in 1983. From this base Jalaluddin was able to keep Khost under constant threat.41

  In late 1985 the Afghan army, supported by Soviet units, launched a major operation to smash the Zhawar base.42 The initial attacks were unsuccessful. An airborne assault by the Afghan 38th Commando Brigade got lost in the darkness and landed on the wrong side of the frontier. They were surrounded and taken prisoner. By now the government troops had lost some two-thirds of their strength through death, wounds, and desertion, and were no longer effective.

  Varennikov flew to Khost to sort things out. This time the Soviets provided three battalions from the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade and two from the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment to support the Afghans. The Afghans succeeded in capturing Zhawar—only to find that it had been abandoned. Soviet engineers were given a little time—too little—to destroy the tunnels. The troops were then withdrawn. A victory parade was held back in Kabul. The mujahedin reoccupied the Zhawar complex in a matter of days. For good measure, they executed seventy-eight captured Afghan army officers, including the commander of the 38th Commando Brigade.

  The following autumn it had to be done all over again. The operation was code-named Magistral (Highway), and the commanders were General Gromov and the Afghan Minister of Defence, Colonel General Tanai, he who had helped evacuate the advisers from Herat in March 1979. About ten thousand Soviet and eight thousand Afghan troops were involved. Because of its size and political significance, Magistral would be one of the most substantial operations of the whole war.43 Once again the blockade was raised and on 30 December the first supply columns started to reach Khost. Once again the Soviet forces withdrew and the mujahedin returned. Varennikov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Those who believed that it was others who had done the actual fighting were not best pleased.44

  One of the most famous incidents of the whole war occurred in the aftermath of Operation Magistral. This was the defence of Hill 3234 by the 9th Company of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment—the same company which Vostrotin had led in the storming of the Taj Bek Palace in December 1979. The hill—over ten thousand feet above sea level—commanded a significant sector of the road to Gardez, which the Soviet commanders were determined to keep open. The 9th Company, thirty-nine men in all, were landed on the hilltop on 7 January 1988, and were attacked almost immediately by a mujahedin force estimated at between two hundred and four hundred men. The attacks continued until the following morning, by which time the defenders were almost out of ammunition and had lost six dead and twenty-eight wounded. Two of the dead, a sergeant and a corporal, were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. In 2005 a big-budget film, 9th Company, was made about the incident. It had considerable commercial success in Russia and abroad, but most Afghan veterans thought it bombastic and historically inaccurate, not at all like the war that they had experienced.

  Jalaluddin resumed the blockade around Khost. Charlie Wilson, the US Congressman who was one of the most effective supporters of the mujahedin, visited Jalaluddin and pronounced him ‘goodness personified’.45 He finally captured Khost in April 1991, two years after the Soviets had left Afghanistan. He later joined the Taliban and remained with them after 9/11. Charlie Wilson’s hero became number three on the Americans’ ‘wanted’ list.46

  The Pandsher

  It was the operations of the 40th Army in the Pandsher Valley that caught the imagination of Russians and foreigners alike. There were nine major operations in the valley, according to most calculations, though there are arguments about definition. The pattern of all these operations was similar. The 40th Army swept into the valley and took the ground, but was unable to inflict a decisive defeat on Masud because of his evasive tactics. The Russians would then pull out, leaving Afghan military units and civilian representatives of the Kabul regime to hold the territory. This they regularly failed to do: Masud reoccupied the valley, killed, seduced, or expelled the regime’s representatives, and the whole thing had to be done all over again. Even so the Russians always maintained a toehold in the valley. In addition to its fort in Anava, the second battalion of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment had twenty zastavas spread through the lower reaches, each manned by up to a dozen men under a lieutenant. They were usually supplied by helicopters, a dangerous business: though Masud’s men did not have Stingers, they used their heavy machine guns to good effect, and nearly a third of the local helicopter squadron was lost. There was a regular trickle of casualties: soldiers stepped on mines or were hit by snipers. If there were no helicopters available, a small armoured group would be put together to evacuate the wounded by road to Bagram, putting other soldiers at risk.

  The Pandsher Valley is a place of spectacular beauty. Its people are Tajiks, devout but not fanatical Sunni Muslims, often at odds with the Pushtuns to the south. Alexander the Great went this way in an epic winter march in pursuit of Bessus, the last claimant to the imperial Persian throne. Later the locals made a living by extracting tribute from the rich caravans from China which passed through the valley, until the twentieth century one of the main trade routes northwards from Kabul. The painters of the European Renaissance used lapis lazuli mined around the upper valley for making the blue paint for the robes of their Madonnas. The mines generated an income of more than $5 million a year even during the war; they were carefully camouflaged, heavily protected against air attack, and exploited with the help of Japanese and West German engineers. Because of their economic importance to the resistance, the mines were attacked—unsuccessfully—in June 1981 by long-range bombers from bases in the Soviet Union.47

  After the road over the Salang Pass was built, the valley lost its significance as a trade route. But despite its diminished importance, its position—dangerously close to Bagram, the main Soviet airbase, to the main Soviet supply line across the Hindu Kush through the Salang Tunnel, and to Kabul itself—meant that guerrilla forces operating out of the valley were a thorn in the Russians’ side from the first day of the Soviet occupation to the last (see Map 4).

  The entrance to the valley from the Shomali Plain, about fifty-five miles north of Kabul, is forbidding. From the town of Charikar you pass through a narrow gorge, the Dalang Sang. The Pandsher River foams along, up to sixty feet below you, and the road clings to the sheer rock face on your left. It was along th
is narrow road that the Russians had to funnel their soldiers, their guns, and their armour as they stormed the valley time and again in the first five years of the war.

  Once you are through the gorge, the valley opens out. In its lower reaches there are vineyards, orchards of mulberries and apricots, and irrigated fields of wheat and maize. The river itself is rich with fish. Kishlaks are spread out along the river and up the sides of the hills, many with no more than a single street with shops or a market. They are often guarded by a small fort, and the houses themselves are walled and capable of defence.

  From Charikar to the upper end of the valley is more than a hundred miles.48 During the Russian time the road petered out after fifty-three miles. After that you had to proceed on foot or on horseback, over increasingly rugged country, until you were up among the glaciers of the Hindu Kush, between ten and twenty thousand feet high and very close to the border with Pakistan and China.49 Two passes lead out of these high mountains and mark the end of the valley: the Khawak Pass (12,624 feet) to the northern plains and the Anjoman Pass (14,534 feet) to Badakhshan, the most north-easterly province of Afghanistan. Passable with difficulty in summer, in the winter they are closed for most purposes. It was over these passes that determined men brought goods, arms, and ammunition to feed the rebellion.

  The first Soviet operation in the Pandsher Valley took place in April 1980, only four months after the invasion. Three Soviet battalions participated, including the 4th Battalion of the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade under the command of Captain Leonid Khabarov. About a thousand Afghan soldiers and security police went with them. The plan was that the Soviet troops would block the kishlaks as they advanced and the Afghans would search them. To oppose this force Masud had little more than a thousand men. They were armed mainly with old-fashioned rifles and they had not yet constructed much in the way of defensive works. They mined the only road in the valley, destroyed the bridges, and planned to ambush the invaders.

  At first the operation went smoothly. The Russians cleared the mines, rebuilt the bridges, and advanced with reasonable speed. Where the ruined road made it impossible to move forward, they drove along the bed of the river. They quickly reached Masud’s headquarters at the kishlak of Pasishah-Mardan. It had been abandoned in a hurry: the prison was empty and files of documents, lists and identity documents lay scattered all around.

  Sergei Morozov, a sergeant in the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, said, ‘This was the first operation where we met major resistance. There were ambushes, the roads were blown up. Of course I did not know exactly what was going on because I was only a sergeant. We drove as far as we could and then dismounted. After leaving the kishlak which had housed Masud’s headquarters, we marched right to the end of the Pandsher Valley. It was the furthest anyone got during the whole war, and very close to the Pakistan frontier.

  ‘On the way back along the mountain path, my battalion was ambushed. Thirteen men were killed in the leading platoon. My own platoon had been in the lead on the way out and so we were in the rearguard on the way back. We stopped for the night and had to beat off a number of mujahedin attacks. Their weapons in those days were simple, many of them home-made. They didn’t get mortars until later. The numbers opposing us were very small—perhaps only a few dozen. We had helicopter cover throughout, though not of course at night. During the long march most of the radios failed because the batteries ran out. But I was familiar with radios from before the war and I had turned off my radio when it was out of range or blocked by the mountains. So I had enough power to call in helicopter support when it became necessary… It took us some time to get away from the inflexible tactics we had learned for war in Europe. Although our brigade had been formed for operations in the desert and the mountains, there was a difference between theory and practice. After the first Pandsher operation, I asked my company commander, Captain Khabarov, whether it made sense to advance in clumsy columns, which could get stuck, and often could not turn round. Would it not be better to leapfrog troops forward with helicopters? And of course we did in time learn to do those things.’50

  The Russians called it a victory. But the rebels considered that the victory was theirs. An Afghan historian has claimed that there were only two hundred armed rebels in the valley at the time, and their only anti-tank weapons were three rocket launchers. They deliberately offered no resistance to the initial Russian advance, but fell on the Russians as they withdrew down the mountains. The rebel newspaper The Call of the Jihad claimed that a hundred Soviet and Afghan soldiers were killed, ten guns were captured, and eight tanks and other vehicles damaged. The rebels lost four dead. Twenty-five civilians were also killed.51

  Naturally enough, Masud used the ceasefire of 1983–4 to enlarge and re-equip his forces. Soviet intelligence calculated that by then he had three thousand five hundred men. Five hundred were defending the entrance to the valley. Another two thousand were operating against the Afghan and Soviet garrisons. The remainder were in the north-east part of the valley, and their task was to ward off airborne landings.52

  Under pressure from the Afghan leadership, Moscow decided in the spring of 1984 to deal with Masud once and for all. This time they would use a total of 11,000 Soviet and 2,600 Afghan troops, together with 200 aircraft and 190 helicopters.

  Special forces troops went in first. They discovered that the rebel positions were empty. The Russians decided not to call off the operation, since the bombers, carrying cluster as well as high explosive bombs, the largest weighing nine tons, had already taken off from their bases inside the Soviet Union.53 The air strike lasted about two hours.

  The main force moved in at four o’clock on 19 April, preceded by sappers. On 30 April the second battalion of the 682nd Motor-rifle Regiment was particularly badly hit, thanks to the carelessness of the regimental commander, who had ordered it to advance into a ravine leading off the valley without first securing the commanding heights. At first the battalion met no resistance. They lowered their guard and were promptly ambushed from three sides. In the resulting fight, the battalion lost fifty-three dead, including twelve officers, and fifty-eight wounded. Private Nikolai Knyazev described the aftermath.

  ‘My platoon was guarding the regimental command post when we heard a sudden commotion, and the regimental commander told us that one of our battalions had been attacked, and that there were wounded and dead.

  ‘We loaded stretchers on to our armoured vehicles and started up the ravine. After waiting for darkness, we continued on foot. There were about ten of us together with the platoon commander. It was not easy to make our way along the mountain paths and it took us a long time, since there were boulders and terraces everywhere, which made it difficult to work out the distance we had covered. We seemed to be marching for eternity.

  ‘After a while we saw a strange light shining in the darkness and the platoon commander ordered us to lie down; but we soon worked out that it was light shining through the periscopes of a BMP. We had barely moved any distance further when we were fired on by a Kalashnikov. Our platoon commander, Lieutenant Arutiunov, fired a rocket, we shouted out, and the firing stopped. We came up close. It was one of our own BMPs, which had been blown up by a mine. The driver and the deputy political officer of the battalion, Major Kononenko, had remained with the vehicle, both suffering from concussion. We moved forward. After a little while we met the razvedchiki who had been sent ahead of us. They were carrying some dead bodies, including the body of the battalion commander, Captain Korolev. Everybody sobered up in a moment.

  ‘It was already getting light… as we arrived at a kishlak. As we went down the main street, we heard the sound of motors. Two of the battalion’s BMPs were moving towards us. They were loaded down with the bodies of dead soldiers. Arms and legs stuck out of the pile in different directions. Smashed-up radios and rocket launchers were piled up as well. A group of soldiers who had survived the battle were walking behind the armoured vehicles. It was terrible
to look at their faces. They were finished, they expressed no emotion, they were like zombies.

  ‘We brought the survivors back to the main body of the regiment. A helicopter landed nearby and some generals emerged. One of them ordered the surviving soldiers to form up. They had not yet pulled themselves together and still smelled of corpses—they had been lying among the dead for days (I can’t even imagine what had gone on in their heads). One of the visitors came up to them and shouted, ‘Bastards! Wankers! You’re standing here, you bastards, and your comrades are lying out there! Why are you here?!’—that’s how he addressed them. Then he read them the riot act and left with the feeling that he had done his duty. The lads stood silent and unfeeling—perhaps they did not even hear him.

  ‘That evening we were ordered to return to the scene of the action and bring back the remaining bodies. Imagine an open area about a hundred metres square. The river runs through the middle. On the right-hand side there is a level place, a few terraces and a hill about two or three hundred metres high. To the left of the river there is a path, an overhanging wall of rock on one side and on the other a sheer drop into the river.

  ‘It was immediately clear that we were in the right place. There was a heavy smell of corpses—the boys had been lying there for nearly two days, and at that time of year it is already getting hot. We were very much afraid that the rebels were waiting for someone to come to collect the bodies and that we too would end up lying there. We made our way to the foot of the hill, to the terraces. First we came across the body of a sergeant who was due to be demobilised: he had lost his legs either from an explosion or a burst of heavy machine-gun fire. Five or six of the lads were lying piled up in a natural cave on the terrace. They had been cut down either by a machine-gun burst or when the rebels had started to throw hand grenades. So there they lay together where death had caught up with them. We took the bodies across the river mechanically, as if we were asleep. The sight of the bodies was terrible.