Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  The ambassador did what he could to build a workable relationship with such Afghan government as there still was. Soviet trading organisations continued to operate in Kabul under the overall direction of Valeri Ivanov. Yuri Muratkhanian was the director of Afsotr, the joint Soviet-Afghan transport company. On 12 August 1992 he was drinking tea with his wife, Nina, in their flat with Yevgeni Konovalov, the bookkeeper at the Russian trade office, when the building was hit by a shell from a tank. Nina and Konovalov were both mortally wounded, and died a few days later. Their bodies were sealed in zinc coffins and stored in the refrigerator which had been set aside as a morgue. The electricity kept failing and the freon in the refrigerator began to run out. Some Afghan friends braved the bombardment to bring in more.22

  That same evening Najibullah called in the senior Russian military adviser, General Lagoshin, and told him that he and his colleagues—there were by now only seven military advisers left in Kabul—must leave Afghanistan urgently. The rebels would soon take power and he himself could survive in the post of president for only five more days. Najibullah added that, although the Soviets had betrayed him, he felt it was his duty to send the military advisers home safe and sound. And indeed, when the airport authorities put up various obstacles to their departure the next day, Najibullah came personally to the airport to help get them off to Tashkent.23

  The following day Najibullah appealed to the UN to fly him into exile as his government finally fell to pieces. His party was stopped at the airport, which was now controlled by General Dostum, and he sought asylum in what he hoped would be the safe haven of the UN headquarters in Kabul.24

  By now it made no sense to keep people in Kabul and the Russians decided to evacuate the embassy. The operation began at four o’clock on the morning of 28 August, when three aircraft left Termez for Kabul. The new ambassador, Yevgeni Ostrovenko, who had only been in Kabul for a few months, drove to the airport with his staff, picking up diplomats from Mongolia, China, Indonesia, and India on the way.

  Both what was left of the Afghan government and the mujahedin had guaranteed that the Russian aircraft would land and leave Kabul safely. The three Il-76s flew in, firing flares to decoy rockets. Valeri Ivanov and his wife, Galina, the coffins containing the bodies of Nina Muratkhanian and Yevgeni Konovalov, and a number of other people and goods were loaded on to the first plane. It took off safely, climbing steeply to thirteen thousand feet to avoid the rockets before setting course for home. But then the mujahedin started to bombard the airport. The second aircraft also took off successfully, though several tyres on the undercarriage had been shredded by splinters. But the third aircraft was set on fire, and the ambassador’s wife, who had already gone on board, barely escaped. The paratroopers and aircrew were able to save some documents but no baggage as they jumped out of the aircraft just before it blew up.

  The commander of the first aircraft refused to return to pick up those left behind, explaining to Ivanov that he had run out of flares. ‘You would have to pay a very great deal to get me to change my mind,’ he said, presumably as a joke. In Termez—in what was by now independent Uzbekistan—the airport staff refused to refuel the aircraft or supply food and water for the crew and the passengers unless they were given the two KaMAZ lorries the aircraft was carrying as a bribe. That was a measure, Ivanov thought, of how far things had deteriorated since the break-up of the Soviet Union.

  The remainder of the embassy staff, including Ambassador Ostrovenko and his wife, had to be ferried out to Mazar-i Sharif in several An-12s provided by General Dostum. From there they were flown home.

  One of the soldiers had rescued the bullet-riddled flag from the flagpole on the Russian Embassy. Years later it still hung in his office.25

  Those who looked for parallels remembered that, two decades earlier, the American Embassy staff had been rescued from Saigon in circumstances even more humiliating.

  There was now no coherent authority in the capital. The Uzbek militia commander General Dostum, who had hitherto been one of Najibullah’s most effective commanders, had joined Masud and Hekmatyar in a drive on the capital. But their unity was ephemeral. The endemic hostility between the various mujahedin factions now broke out in an even more vicious form. Kabul had suffered little during the nine years of the Soviet war. Now much of it was destroyed by indiscriminate bombardment, and its people were subjected to looting, rape, and murder. Masud’s troops were involved in some of the worst atrocities against the Hazara minority. By 1996 some forty thousand of the inhabitants are said to have been killed and two hundred thousand had fled.26

  The civil war was brought to an end by the Taliban. Many of them had grown up in the refugee camps in Pakistan and had been educated in the orthodox Muslim schools there. They enjoyed their first success in the spring of 1994, when they captured the town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistani frontier. From then on they moved inexorably forward, capturing Kandahar but checked for a while at Kabul, where Masud seemed to be prevailing. Backed by Pakistan, they then turned their attention to the west of the country, taking over the base at Shindand with its aircraft, and capturing Herat without a fight in September 1995. The fighting around Mazar-i Sharif was marked by massacres on both sides, but the Taliban finally established themselves there in August 1996. Jalalabad and Kabul fell in September.27

  For most of the inhabitants of Kabul the victory of the Taliban was, at least at first, a return to a kind of security and some sense of order, even if it was enforced by a brutal version of sharia law. But for Najibullah it was the end. The Taliban forcibly seized him and his brother in the UN headquarters, tortured them, castrated them, and hanged their bodies in the centre of the city.

  Masud’s Assassination

  At first Masud’s political and military career continued to flourish after the Russians had left. But the changing fortunes and shifting alliances of the civil war, and above all the rise of the Taliban, saw him increasingly on the defensive, under air attack, pushed back from Kabul. He fought with all his old skill, supported by Iran, Uzbekistan, and Russia. But he was eventually driven back into his old base in the Pandsher Valley. There he became leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, which grouped together the leaders of the small proportion—one-tenth—of the country which was still free of the Taliban.

  Despite these setbacks, the Russians continued to build up their links with Masud and the Northern Alliance. He corresponded with President Yeltsin and Yevgeni Primakov (1929–), who at that time was heading the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.28 In February 1994 Russian representatives came for secret talks with him in Afghanistan. In 1998 Masud sent his Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, to Moscow for talks about military-technical cooperation and the provision of military assistance. His representatives met with the Russian Chief of Staff, General Kvashnin, Yeltsin’s assistant Sevostyanov, and Deputy Foreign Minister Pastukhov. In 2000 serious fighting flared up again. The Taliban used tanks and aircraft against Masud, who despite being increasingly short of equipment and supplies was able to beat them off. In the spring of that year the Taliban declared a jihad against Russia. In October Masud met the Russian Minister of Defence, Marshal Sergeev, in Dushanbe and the Russians agreed to supply him with weapons and ammunition. The Taliban promptly issued a warning: ‘Russia should cease interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, otherwise it may create for itself many dangerous problems and grave consequences.’ In December 2000, on the proposal of Russia and the United States, the United Nations Security Council agreed on further sanctions against the Taliban. In April 2001 Masud visited the European Parliament in Brussels and asked for help in the fight against the Taliban, whose associates Al Qaeda, he warned, would next turn their attention to the US and Europe.29

  At the beginning of September 2001 Arkadi Dubnov, a journalist from Novoe Vremya, was staying in a guest house in the Pandsher Valley, waiting for an interview with Masud, whom he had got to know well since he first s
tarted working in Afghanistan in 1993. He shared a room with two Arab journalists who also wanted to interview Masud. The Arabs got their interview on 9 September and killed Masud with a bomb concealed in their TV camera. They were said to be Moroccans from a news agency in London. Scotland Yard therefore investigated the affair and Dubnov was interviewed by them. But the investigation was apparently abandoned for lack of sufficient evidence.30

  President Putin (1952–) immediately telephoned President Bush (1946–). ‘I said that Masud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, had just been killed. I told my American colleague: “I’m very worried. Something big is going to happen. They’re planning something.”’31 The Twin Towers in New York were bombed two days later. Putin was the first foreign leader to express his condolences to Bush, and immediately took practical steps to support the forthcoming American campaign to destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His people handed over a good deal of intelligence, including minefield maps—many of them inevitably inaccurate after the passage of time. He opened Russian air space to American military flights and persuaded the leaders of the Central Asian states to do the same. He met the leaders of the Northern Alliance, stepped up Russian military support for them, and convinced them to cooperate with the Americans. This collaboration did not flag. The northern supply route through Russia became increasingly important, as the Americans got into trouble with their supply route from Pakistan. The flow of intelligence continued. In October 2010 Russians provided support and advice for a US-led raid on four major narcotics factories, the first joint operation of its kind. Many Russians felt that the Americans were insufficiently grateful for what Putin had done to help them.32

  Once the Americans’ initial campaign was over and a new regime was installed in Kabul, the Russians continued to strengthen their links with the new Afghan regime, travelling to Afghanistan on open and confidential business as officials, journalists, and even tourists, as they had done almost uninterrupted since the end of the Soviet war.

  Masud was buried in the Pandsher Valley, on a hill by his native village, Jangalak, and a monument was erected to him immediately. A substantial Russian delegation led by General Varennikov took part in the ceremonies at his grave on the second anniversary of his death. Over the years, as the cult of Masud grew more elaborate, the grave was converted into a massive mausoleum. The Russians continued to pay their annual respects. The Pushtuns looked on with resentment at this glorification of a man who was not one of them and who, they grumbled for years afterwards, had signed ceasefires with the Russians instead of continuing the struggle against them.33

  The 201st Division Fights On

  For one of the divisions of the 40th Army the war never stopped. The 201st Division withdraw from Afghanistan to Tajikistan, and remained there after the country became independent on the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its headquarters were in the capital, Dushanbe, and its two regiments were deployed towards the Afghan frontier in Kulabe and Kurgan-Tobe. When civil war broke out in 1992 between the central government and Islamic rebels, the local Tajik conscripts deserted. The Russian officers and warrant officers withdrew to their barracks with their families and refused to surrender to the mob. Yeltsin took the division back under Russian jurisdiction. Its numbers were made up with Russian conscripts and contract soldiers on generous terms, and it formed the core of the peacekeeping force set up by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a grouping of former Soviet republics. The force was disbanded when the civil war ended in 1997, but the division remained in Tajikistan, its status undefined.

  The war did not stop for the KGB’s frontier forces either. They too had their headquarters in Dushanbe, with detachments on the Afghan frontier. Some had been involved in operations inside Afghanistan, and some were among the 576 members of the KGB who had died there. Now they continued to guard the frontier between Afghanistan and Tajikistan against drug smugglers and the incursions of bands of fundamentalists anxious to support the Islamic rebels inside the country. They too were eventually brought under Russian jurisdiction. In May 1993 Russia and Tajikistan signed an agreement on friendship and cooperation which handed formal responsibility for the defence of the frontier to Russia.

  Attacks against the frontier posts had already started. On 13 July a massive attack was launched in the early hours against the 12th zastava by about four hundred men, a mixture of mujahedin and soldiers from the 55th Infantry Division of the regular Afghan army. The garrison of the zastava consisted of forty-eight frontier force soldiers. Aroused by their watchdog, the garrison made for their battle positions as fire was brought down upon them from the surrounding hills and from the Afghan side of the frontier. The crew of the zastavas’ one BTR were the first to die, even before they could mount their machine. After the twenty-five-year-old commander was killed, his deputy decided that the survivors would have to make a break for safety. A small force from the 201st Division and the Tajik army, backed by a couple of helicopters, was put together to rescue the beleaguered garrison. It ran into mines and ambushes on the only approach road, and the Tajik troops turned back. When the Russian relief force finally got through, they found that twenty-five of the garrison had been killed and their bodies mutilated.

  Six members of the garrison were made ‘Heroes of Russia’—four of them posthumously—to join the eighty-six men who had become ‘Heroes of the Soviet Union’ during the Afghan war.34

  – FOURTEEN –

  A Land Fit for Heroes

  The soldiers who crossed the Friendship Bridge on 15 February returned to a country which had less than two years to live, a country which in its own way was as shattered as the one they had left behind them. A radical electoral process was under way which would see senior officers losing the parliamentary seats which they believed were theirs by right. The whisperings of discontent in the non-Russian republics of the union were becoming louder. The economy was in rapid decline. The press had always treated the military with respect: it now had free rein to criticise them unmercifully. There was much to resent, but the soldiers particularly resented a poem by the popular poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko, describing the thoughts of an Afghan ant as it crawled on the face of a dead Russian soldier.

  The blows that then struck the Soviet army came close to destroying it as an effective military force.

  The 40th Army had withdrawn from Afghanistan, in the eyes of its commanders, with its military reputation and its honour intact. It had achieved the limited tasks laid upon it by the politicians: to hold the towns, to keep open the communications, to keep the rebels at bay sufficiently for the government in Kabul to build up its military position and survive, at least for a time. The soldiers had done their duty, and they had not been defeated on the battlefield. The war had been a bitter experience. But from the military point of view at least, it had not been a humiliation. Now, within months, the 40th Army, one of the most powerful in Soviet history, was disbanded, its generals, its divisional commanders, and their deputies transferred or sent off to military academies, its regimental commanders dispersed to units throughout the Soviet Union.

  When the Soviet Union fell apart less than two years later, many of these officers found themselves serving in the armed forces of what were now independent countries. They had sworn an oath to the Soviet Union; some of them refused to swear another and gave up their military careers.

  The Bitterness of the Officers

  In their bitterness and confusion, many of the officers turned to the older traditions of their country. They began to feel a guilty sense of shame towards Russia, towards the land of their fathers, its villages depopulated, its churches in ruins, the village blacksmith silent, a country which had changed almost out of recognition, abandoned and forgotten, as one of them remarked, ‘by me and people like me’.1 They had sympathised with their great-grandfathers, the officers of the old Tsarist army who had been forced to choose sides in the civil war. Now, as civil war seemed to loom once again, they found themselves having to face a similar choice. Sho
uld they go with the new regimes of Gorbachev and Yeltsin? Or should they do what they could to preserve what was best in the Soviet regime?

  They found themselves drawn willy-nilly into the increasingly confused and violent politics within the Soviet Union itself. The 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment had been one of the first to enter Afghanistan and one of the last to leave. Now it was sent to Kirovabad in Azerbaijan, where there were no barracks, no motor park, no accommodation, and no money. In early April 1989, a mere two months after leaving Afghanistan, the regiment was sent urgently to Tblisi to take part in the brutal suppression of an anti-government demonstration. Nineteen civilian demonstrators were killed by soldiers using a noxious riot-control gas and wielding sharpened entrenching tools. Most of the dead were women and girls. The ultimate responsibility for the action was obscure, but most of the soldiers laid the blame on Gorbachev himself. Moscow, however, blamed the local Georgian politicians and the local military commanders. General Rodionov, the commander of the Caucasus Military District, who had been a distinguished commander of the 40th Army, was sacked and sent off to become principal of the General Staff College.2 Nine months later, in January 1990, two hundred demonstrators were killed by the army in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Among those involved were a number of senior officers who had served in Afghanistan.