Afgantsy
Page 26
‘There were rags of something hanging on a tree and below it a mess. Evidently a bullet had hit a mine that one of the soldiers had been carrying.
‘Suddenly we heard a weak groan some distance off from the hollow, by the rocks. We carefully went towards the noise and came across a soldier who was still alive. His shin had been shot off and was hanging by rags of tendon. He was weakened by loss of blood, but he had managed to put a tourniquet round his leg and stem the flow. We gave him first aid and took him to the vehicles. He survived. There were no weapons left—they had all been collected by the rebels.
‘On the morning of 2 May we returned to the regimental armoured group. The bodies were lying on a stony beach in rows. There were about fifty of them. We were told that some had already been taken away. Our company commander, Lieutenant Kurdiuk, was lying on his back with his elbows bent and his fists clenched, and across his chest you could see a line of bullet holes. It was said that he had been shot by the Afghan soldiers who were marching with the battalion when they started to desert to the rebels, but he had time to order the lads to fire on them.’54
This operation too was described by the Soviets as a victory. After it was over, Marshal Sokolov flew to Rukha, the chief town in the valley, to see things for himself. There was nothing to see. Soviet tanks were standing around in the wheat fields. But there was little damage and no sign of the locals. Sokolov called a meeting in the house which was being used by the staff. There were three Afghans there—the orgyadro, or organisational cell which was to restore the authority of the Kabul government to the valley. The three men sat despondent and unnoticed among the gathering of generals and colonels.
The generals reported to Sokolov that three thousand rebels had opposed the incursion. Seventeen hundred had been killed, and the survivors had retreated into the mountains, carrying the bodies of their dead comrades with them. That was why there was so little to be seen.
Leonid Shebarshin, the Deputy Chief of the Analytical Department of the KGB’s Foreign Intelligence Headquarters in Moscow, was also present. He was not impressed by the figures being bandied around. How many casualties had there been on the Soviet side? How could thirteen hundred rebel survivors have carried seventeen hundred corpses? How could the corpses have been counted, since they were nowhere to be seen? He discovered the answer. Enemy casualties were estimated according to a formula based on the amount of ammunition expended. This charmingly precise formula had enabled the Soviets to claim that the rebels had lost thirty thousand men every year since 1982.55
Sokolov reported to Ustinov that 2,800 rebels had been killed and thirty captured. He told Karmal that the way had now been cleared for the Afghan authorities to set up a civilian administration and launch programmes of social and economic reform for the benefit of the peasantry in the valley.56 Only later did it become clear that Masud, forewarned by his agents in Kabul, had again withdrawn most of his forces to safety before the attack. That was why the Soviet troops had met with so little serious opposition. Their losses came chiefly from mines and ambushes as they were combing through villages. The long-range bombers had had little effect on a dispersed enemy and a rural countryside: as the wretched infantrymen said, ‘They didn’t earn their chocolate.’57 Masud’s prestige among his own people increased still further. He was able to extend his control in the northern provinces of the country and grew from being an ordinary field commander to being a major political figure, well known inside and outside Afghanistan.
Tactics without Strategy
Sergeant Morozov’s commander, Captain Khabarov, never got over his bitterness at the way these operations were conducted. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did we leave the Pandsher so quickly? What was the point of the operation?… Throughout the whole of that war practically every operation ended in the same way. Military operations began, soldiers and officers died, Afghan soldiers died, the mujahedin and the peaceful population died, and when the operation was over our forces would leave, and everything would return to what it had been before. I still feel guilty and bitter about the Afghan government forces… whom we betrayed and sold down the river when we left Afghanistan, leaving them and their families to the mercy of the victors.’58
The sledgehammer blows were incapable of cracking the nut of an elusive, uncoordinated guerrilla enemy. These operations usually succeeded in their immediate objectives. The garrison would be relieved, the base would be destroyed, the valley occupied. But the Russians never had sufficient troops to hold the ground they took. After a successful operation they would withdraw to their bases and hand responsibility to their Afghan allies. But the government’s military and civilian representatives found it impossible to operate amid a hostile population. Too often, under moral and military pressure from the mujahedin, they abandoned their posts, deserted, or went over to the enemy.
And so the Russians discovered, as other armies have discovered in Afghanistan before and since, that once you have taken the ground you need troops to hold it. They might dominate the towns and the villages by day. But the mujahedin would rule them by night. They never broke the rebels’ grip on the countryside or closed the frontier through which the rebels received their supplies.
In the end the Russians had good tactics but no workable strategy. They could win their fights, but they could not convincingly win the war. Their best efforts, military and political, went for nothing. They eventually had no choice but to disentangle themselves as best they could.
– TEN –
Devastation and Disillusion
Armies are institutions for organising and channelling violence in the pursuit of some concept of the national interest. They help to focus the emotions of patriotism, self-sacrifice, and solidarity which states need for their coherence and sometimes for their survival.
Violence is not easy to control, and armies have to cope with violence within their own ranks as well as atrocities against the enemy and the civilian population. Otherwise they risk a breakdown of discipline and a loss of function. Wellington was notoriously severe in his determination to keep his army—‘the scum of the earth enlisted for drink’—under control. Even he did not always succeed.
But commanders also have to preserve the morale of their men and the principle—itself important for effective cohesion—of the ‘honour of the uniform’. Time and again, and in all armies, this leads to evasion and cover-up to prevent the stories of military crimes emerging or to limit their consequences: because of the pressure of military and public opinion the US authorities found it impossible to bring to account all those responsible for the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968. Commanders in the 40th Army were no different. They were blamed by their generals for not exercising a more effective discipline. Fearing for their careers, they often responded by writing off suicides and murders as battle casualties. Some crimes could not be concealed. But there were plenty of other cases where officers managed to avoid formal inquiry into the actions of themselves or their men. And things such as the destruction of villages suspected of harbouring insurgents or firing on the troops were regarded as a legitimate, or at least an unavoidable, act of war.
The 40th Army made it clear enough to its soldiers what would happen if they misbehaved. In 1985 they produced a little booklet ‘The Life, Habits and Customs of the Peoples of Afghanistan: Rules and Norms of Behaviour for Military Personnel Serving outside their Own Country’.1 This described the country and its people, their religion, their fierce sense of independence, their housing, clothing and food, their customs of mutual hospitality and vendetta, the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. It continued with some simple rules of behaviour: remember that you are a representative of the army and be worthy of your historical mission; know and respect the customs of the local people, even if they do not correspond with your own; be very careful to respect Afghan women; do not interfere with a Muslim at prayer and do not go into a mosque without a very good reason; beware of enemy spies; do not drink water from irrigation c
anals; do not leave camp or accept hospitality without permission. There were strict injunctions against trading, especially in narcotics. The booklet concluded: ‘Soldier, remember!… you are criminally responsible for military crimes under the Criminal Code, whether committed negligently, carelessly, or deliberately.’ Deliberate killing could be punished by up to ten years; the death penalty could be imposed if there were aggravating circumstances, which included being drunk. Robbery with violence and smuggling into the Soviet Union could both be punished by up to ten years in prison.
Military Crime
These were not idle threats. The Soviet military prosecutors in Afghanistan had to deal with the whole range of military crimes: murder, looting, rape, drug addiction, desertion, self-mutilation, theft, and random violence against the population. Those they found guilty were given harsh sentences of imprisonment, sent to disciplinary battalions back in the Soviet Union, and occasionally shot. At one time the notorious prison in Pul-i Charkhi outside Kabul held two hundred Russian soldiers accused of a variety of offences against the Afghan population, including murder. By the end of the war over two thousand five hundred Soviet soldiers were serving prison sentences, more than two hundred for crimes of premeditated murder.2
Until the files of the Military Prosecutor’s office are opened it is not possible to arrive at any reliable overall figures. Those that are available are very patchy. A senior general speaking to the commanders of the 40th Army in 1988 claimed that in 1987 the number of crimes went down to 543 compared with 745 the previous year. He named several units whose record was particularly poor: reconnaissance units, which were notoriously free and easy about discipline, the air force, the 108th and 201st Motor-rifle Divisions, the 66th and 70th Independent Motor-rifle Brigades, the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment. Altogether, according to another source, 6,412 criminal charges were preferred against soldiers in Afghanistan, including 714 cases of murder, 2,840 cases of weapons sales to Afghans, and 534 drug-trafficking offences.3
Despite the sanctions, soldiers committed many brutal acts individually or in groups. The excuse often was, ‘They did it to us, so we have a right to do it to them.’ Soviet commanders made a point of telling their men the stories of Russian prisoners being executed or tortured by the mujahedin, the mutilated bodies left for their comrades to find. The stories were not untrue: they belonged, after all, to an old tradition in Afghanistan, to which Kipling bore witness. One minor mujahedin leader boasted that he had made a practice of half-skinning Russian prisoners after a successful ambush, and leaving them alive, surrounded by booby traps, to catch the Soviet rescue teams.4 Varennikov described what happened when a raid by a company of the 22nd Special Forces Brigade ended in disaster in April 1985 in the eastern mountains of the Kunar province, scene of some of the Americans’ most vicious fighting twenty years later. The company had not expected opposition. They were ambushed and thirty-one were killed. In recovering their bodies, the Soviet forces lost three more men. It was clear that seven of the soldiers had killed themselves rather than surrender. The others had been mutilated or burned alive. Varennikov went to see the survivor, a sergeant who had lost his mind.5
The soldiers committed their crimes sometimes in cold blood, more often in the heat or aftermath of battle. ‘The thirst for blood… is a terrible desire,’ wrote one of them. ‘It is so strong that you cannot resist it. I saw for myself how the battalion opened a hail of fire on a group that was descending towards our column. And they were OUR soldiers, a detachment from the reconnaissance company who had been guarding us on the flank. They were only two hundred metres away and we were 90 per cent sure they were our people. And nevertheless—the thirst for blood, the desire to kill at all costs. Dozens of times I saw with my own eyes how the new recruits would shout and cry with joy after killing their first Afghan, pointing in the direction of the dead man, clapping one another on the back, and firing off a whole magazine into the corpse “just to make sure”… Not everyone can master this feeling, this instinct, and stifle the monster in his soul.’
Vanya Kosogovski, a soldier from Odessa in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, was a cheerful fellow, liked by everyone. His company was sent out by helicopter to follow up an intelligence report about a village some fifteen miles away from the regimental base. On the way the gunners amused themselves by machine-gunning a herd of oxen and sheep: their excuse was that they were denying the mujahedin their supplies. After shooting up the village itself, the soldiers landed to comb through it. In one house Kosogovski noticed a small door and heard people breathing behind it. Above the door was a small aperture. He took a grenade, pulled out the pin, shoved it through the hole, and followed the explosion with a burst from his gun. When he kicked down the door, he saw the results of his handiwork. An old woman lay dead, a younger woman was still breathing, seven children aged between one and five lay beside them, some still moving. Kosogovski emptied his magazine into the heaving mass and followed it up with another grenade.
‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he said later. ‘I was beside myself. Perhaps I didn’t want them to suffer. Anyway, I would have had the military police on my back.’ And indeed, he might well have ended up in a disciplinary battalion, had his officers not covered up the affair.6
On 14 February 1981 a reconnaissance patrol of eleven soldiers from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade led by a senior lieutenant broke into a house in a village near Jalalabad. There they found two old men, three young women, and five or six children. They raped and shot the women and then shot the rest, except for one small boy, who hid himself and survived to be a witness. General Maiorov, the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in Kabul from June 1980 to November 1981, immediately ordered an investigation. The perpetrators confessed and were arrested. Fearing that the mujahedin leadership would use the incident as an excuse to launch a countrywide jihad, Maiorov strengthened the security regime in the major cities. And he apologised for the incident to the Afghan Prime Minister, Ali Sultan Keshtmand.
He immediately came under pressure to change the story from the Soviet Ambassador, from the KGB representative in Kabul, and from the Ministry of Defence and the KGB in Moscow. The KGB claimed to have information that the atrocity had been carried out as a deliberate provocation by mujahedin dressed in Soviet uniforms. Why, demanded Ogarkov, the Chief of Staff, was Maiorov trying to blacken the good name of the Soviet army? Ustinov, the Minister of Defence, hinted that if Maiorov did not change his tune he would not be re-elected to the Central Committee at the forthcoming meeting of the XXVIth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Maiorov held out. He was not re-elected to the Central Committee. But Karmal complained directly to Brezhnev, who gave orders for condign punishment. The perpetrators of the crime were sentenced to death or to long terms of imprisonment. The brigade commander, Colonel Valeri Smirnov, was severely reprimanded. The brigade itself was on the verge of being disbanded, saved only by its glorious record in the Second World War.7
Even senior officers could be punished for allowing their troops to commit excesses. After the fifth Pandsher operation in May–June 1982, the commander of the 191st Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Kravchenko, was court-martialled and sentenced to ten years for shooting prisoners. The commander of the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, Colonel Alexander Shebeda, was dismissed in April 1986 after he had been in the job only six months. Twenty prisoners had been captured on a raid and brought back to the base at Faisabad. Shebeda put them into the overnight custody of the reconnaissance company. The company had recently suffered losses and was still smarting. The men killed the prisoners and threw the bodies into the River Kochka. There was a scandal and Shebeda was relieved of his command.8
Collateral Damage
These were individual crimes, which the 40th Army could try to prevent or punish more or less effectively. Others were inherent in the nature of the war against a determined but elusive enemy who could merge almos
t at will with the civilian population. For the soldiers, this war without fronts was particularly terrifying and confusing. You could be blown up by a mine at any moment. The bearded peasant cultivating his field could next minute be firing at you from ambush or laying a bomb; or you might be shot in the back by a woman or even a child. And so the soldiers learned to shoot first regardless of the consequences. They reacted or overreacted savagely, either to defend themselves or to revenge their losses, calling in an air strike or a bombardment by artillery or tanks against villages they suspected of harbouring mujahedin or of firing on their troops, and leaving them in a pile of smoking rubble.
Alexander Rutskoi, an air-force colonel and Hero of the Soviet Union, told the Russian parliament after the war was over, ‘A kishlak fires at us and kills someone. I send up a couple of planes and there is nothing left of the kishlak. After I’ve burned a couple of kishlaks they stop shooting.’9 Vitali Krivenko tells how his company of the 12th Guards Motor-rifle Regiment was manning a roadblock outside Herat. There were two kishlaks nearby. One was deserted, but there were thought to be mujahedin lurking there. The population of the other was friendly. Helicopters were brought in, but they attacked the wrong village. By the time the mistake had been sorted out, the friendly village had been destroyed. ‘So what?’ Krivenko commented. ‘How many other villages got wiped out, for good reason or simply for fun?’10
Even when soldiers and their commanders had the best intentions, things could go wrong. It is a fundamental weakness of any counter-insurgency campaign that, too often, there comes a moment when a commander’s duty to preserve the lives of his soldiers overrides any wish he may have to spare the lives of civilians. Valeri Shiryaev was involved in just such a case. He was travelling with a convoy of tankers and supply lorries which was half a mile long and moved very slowly. It was preceded by sappers and a few BMPs. The rearguard consisted of more BMPs and four tanks. The convoy came under fire as it was passing through a village. Several tankers were hit and had to be pushed off the road. By the time the shooting had lasted for thirty minutes, four soldiers had been killed and others wounded. In the end the commander of the column ordered the tanks to open fire on the village, even though he knew there must be women and children in it. Each tank fired five salvoes and the village was destroyed. The commander was later reprimanded for not having ordered his tanks to fire sooner.11