But the most unshakable of these myths is about the victory of the Mujahideen over the Soviets.
"Explosion? What kind of explosion? " Afghan Foreign Minister Shah Mohammed Dost asked, elegantly raising an eyebrow as I interrupted his interview to ask about the sudden uproar I had just heard.
“Oh yes, dynamite explosions,” Dost declared with relief as another explosion sounded in the distance, and he realized that I was being misled. "It happens almost every day, sometimes twice a day, to provide stones for the building, you know." A tall, thin man with a carefully trimmed mustache, Dost, who began his diplomatic career under King Mohammed Zahir Shah and is now the most prominent figure in the Afghan regime established by Moscow, wanted to let me know that the war was practically over: “We destroyed the main camps of bandits and mercenaries … Now they cannot operate in groups. Only a few fighters continue their terrorist activities and sabotage, which is common throughout the world. We hope to eliminate them as well”.
This was in November 1981, almost two years after the Soviet invasion, and the official line of Moscow, like its allies in Kabul, was that everything was taken under control. In the first weeks of the invasion, in December 1979, Soviet officials were so confident of an imminent victory that they gave Western reporters incredible access, even allowing them to drive in tanks or drive rented cars and taxis alongside Soviet convoys. By the spring of 1980, the mood had changed as the Kremlin saw a long war of attrition going on. There was no longer even the American-style presence of trusted Soviet journalists. The war became a taboo in the Soviet media, and Western reporters who applied for a visa to Afghanistan were rudely refused.
The only way to cover the conflict was to patiently walk day and night along the perilous mountain trails with rebel fighters from Muslim, safe camps in Pakistan and describe it. The few stories that surfaced in the Western press about such routes were cautious and restrained, but most were romantic, self-promoting accounts of heroic discoveries, often written by untrained volunteers who saw a chance to make a name for themselves by presenting obscure photographs and testimonies or statements of evidence of Soviet atrocities.
By 1981, the Soviets began to realize that their visa denial policies were counterproductive. A handful of Western journalists were allowed to come, but only for short periods of time. In my case, the agreement came from my previous experience in describing the Soviet Union. That first trip to Afghanistan, in 1986 and 1988, was followed by others, culminating (if the word is applicable) with my arrival by plane from Moscow on February 15, 1989, the very day that the last Soviet soldier, returning from Afghanistan home, crossed the Oxus River (Amu Darya).
When I look back at all the reports and analyzes I wrote at the time, it turns out that it is impossible not to be amazed at the similarities between Soviet policy and the one that the Bush and Obama administrations are trying to achieve during their recent intervention.
The struggle in Afghanistan was then and remains now a civil war. In the 1980s, its background was the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. In 2010, the backdrop is the “war on terror” and the hunt for al-Qaeda. But the essence remains - the battle among the Afghans of the forces of modernization and adherents of tradition, or, as the Soviets believed, counter-revolutionaries. Then as now, foreigners tried to support the government in Kabul, which faced the difficult task of creating a state that could demand loyalty, exercise control over its territory, collect taxes and bring development to some of the world's poorest and most conservative peoples.
When the Soviets launched the invasion, some Western observers viewed it strategically, such as the Kremlin heading for ports in warm seas, taking the first step towards the sea through Pakistan. In fact, the original campaign was aimed at defense, was an attempt to save the revolution, entangled in its own intemperance.
The Moscow-linked People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power in April 1978 through a military coup. But the party had two different wings. The hardliners who initially dominated tried to impose radical change on the feudal Islamic country. The changes included land reform and an adult literacy campaign, with women sitting next to men. Some of the fundamentalist leaders - opponents of such change - retired into exile, unhappy with the modernization tendencies of the government that preceded the PDPA, and took up arms even before April 1978. Others left the party after the coup. Therefore, the claim that the Soviet invasion triggered a civil war is erroneous. Civil war was already on the way. It was the same with the Western invasion. Zbigniew Brzezinski persuaded Jimmy Carter to authorize the first support of the CIA for the Mujahideen - opponents of the PDPA - in the summer of 1979, a few months before the appearance of Soviet tanks.
The regime in Kabul has requested Soviet military support 13 times, even Soviet diplomats (as we now know from Soviet archives and the memoirs of former Soviet officials) sent private messages to the Kremlin about the development of the crisis. But it was not until December 12 that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and a small group within the Politburo approved a regime change in Kabul. Soviet troops were supposed to enter the country and remove the supporter of the hard line, the leader of the PDPA, Hafizullah Amin, replacing him with a team intending to soften the revolution in order to save it.
On my first trip in November 1981, this policy produced some success, although not as much as the Soviets had originally hoped for. They controlled Kabul, the key cities of Jalalabad (close to Pakistan), Mazar-i-Sharif, Balkh in the north and the roads between them. Herat in the west and Kandahar (the de facto capital of the Pashtuns in the south) were less protected and were subject to separate raids by the Mujahideen.
But the Afghan capital was safe. From the window of my room in a small family hotel opposite the Soviet military hospital, I could see ambulances transporting the wounded to a number of tents, which were additionally deployed to reduce the burden on overcrowded hospital wards. Soldiers were wounded from ambushes along supply routes to Kabul or unsuccessful attacks on Mujahideen-held villages. The Afghan capital was largely untouched by the war, and Soviet troops were barely visible on the streets.
Occasionally, in small groups, they went into the city center to buy souvenirs on the eve of the end of their shifts. “All they wanted was one sheepskin vest,” the carpet merchant muttered to me after a young Soviet sergeant, wearing a bandage on his sleeve that showed his leadership in the group, rushed into the store, looked around and disappeared behind the next door.
The Soviets, like the Obama administration with its plan to build an Afghan army, tried to leave as many responsibilities as possible in the hands of the Afghan army and police. In Kabul and major cities, these efforts were successful. The Afghan army consisted largely of conscripts and lacked reliable figures. The desertion rate was very high. In a document published in 1981, the US State Department announced the reduction of the army from one hundred thousand in 1979 to twenty-five thousand by the end of 1980.
Whatever the truth, if not in battle, then in cities, to ensure law and order, the Soviets could rely on the Afghans. Car bombings and suicide attacks, now a recurring threat in Kabul, were unknown during the Soviet period, and Afghans went about their daily business without fear of sudden mass murder. On the city's two student campuses, young women were largely uncovered, as were many of the female staff in banks, shops, and government offices. Others, covering their hair, wore loose scarves on their heads. Only in the bazaar, where the poorer shopped, were everyone in the usual, completely closed, blue, pink or light brown shades.
The reformist wing of the PDPA, which came to power through the Soviet invasion, was viewed more as a tradition than evidence of Islamic fundamentalism. They did not condemn or bring to the problem of women's clothing the political - almost totemic - importance that was required when the Taliban took power in 1996 and forced every woman to wear a burqa. The same political pressure went in a different direction when the Bush administration overthrew the Taliban and hailed the right to remove the mandatory veil as the complete emancipation of Afghan women. In today's Kabul, compared to the Soviet period, a higher percentage of women wear it. Today, traveling through Kabul, many Western journalists, diplomats and NATO soldiers are surprised to see that Afghan women still wear the burqa. If the Taliban are not there, they wonder, why hasn't she disappeared as well?
I never found out the reasons for the explosions I heard during my interview with Foreign Minister Dost, but his remark that Kabul is not subject to military destruction proved to be valuable. Western diplomats could regularly arrange weekend trips to Lake Karga, eight miles from central Kabul. Below the dam was a primitive golf course, and from the top of it, sometimes Soviet tanks or Soviet military aircraft could be seen approaching the target on the far edge of the lake.
In those early days of the occupation, Soviet officials still hoped they could win the war of attrition. They felt that because they represent the forces of modernity, time is on their side. “You cannot expect quick results in a country that is in many respects in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries,” Vasily Sovronchuk, the top Soviet adviser in Afghanistan, told me. He compared the situation to the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war. “This is where the history of our own revolution is in its infancy. It took us at least five years to unite our power and achieve victory in all of Russia and ten in Central Asia."
In the company of other Europeans, Russian diplomats and journalists in Kabul lamented when talking about local residents, like any European emigrant in any developing country. They were unreliable, not punctual, ineffective, and overly suspicious of foreigners. “The first two words that we learned here,” said one Russian diplomat, “were tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. The third word is parvenez, which means "does not matter." You know, you need a new suit, and when you come to pick it up, you notice that there is no button. Do you complain to the tailor and what does he answer? parvenez. Some have nicknamed this place Parvenezistan. " A quarter of an hour later, his commentary would have resonated with smiles, complaints and accusations of ingratitude from the cafeterias and bars of every hotel to foreign contractors and development consultants in today's Kabul.
One afternoon I was sitting with Yuri Volkov in the garden of the new villa of his news agency. The seasoned journalist Volkov traveled to Afghanistan since 1958. Winter had not yet set, and while the sun was high in the sky over the plateau where Kabul is located, it was fresh and warm. “There is a bandit right behind that wall,” Volkov said, handing me a glass of tea. Startled, I sat up straight in my chair. “You don’t recognize him,” Volkov continued. - Who knows, who exactly is the bandit? Maybe he's carrying a submachine gun under his clothes. Sometimes they dress up and look like women."
That same morning, one of his employees reported receiving a nightmare warning against working for the Russians. He confirmed that this constantly happened to people who worked for the Soviets. One of the woman's friends, along with her sister, was recently murdered for being "collaborators." Afghan officials have also confirmed his statements. The head of the PDPA branch at Kabul University said five of his colleagues had been killed in the past two years. Mullahs working for the government on a new program to finance the construction of a dozen new mosques (in an effort to show that the revolution is not directed against Islam) were the first targets.
On my next visit to the city, in February 1986, the Mujahideen could already cause more fear in Kabul thanks to the 122-mm NURS, with which they were now shelling the capital almost daily. But the shooting was not aimed, the damage was minimal, and the victims were accidental. (Rockets hit the US Embassy at least three times.) At the same time, Soviet forces performed slightly better than in the first two years of the war. They managed to expand the security perimeter further - around key cities. If in 1981 I was not allowed to leave the city centers, now, with less and non-military escort, I was taken to villages located dozens of miles from Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul. The goal was to show me the value and effectiveness of handing over some of the defenses to the Afghan "people's fighters" that Moscow had armed and paid - a tactic soon copied by the Bush and Obama administrations.
Such successes demanded a price. Although the front line was changing, in essence, the war was hopeless. In the Kremlin, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began to feel the price of paying with the lives of Soviet soldiers, as well as the price of Soviet resources. At the end of February 1986, he gave the first public hint of dissatisfaction using a keynote speech in which he called the war a "bleeding wound." (From the memoirs of his assistant Anatoly Chernyaev, we know that a few months earlier Gorbachev announced to the Politburo about preparations, if necessary, to withdraw troops from Afghanistan unilaterally).
It is easy to forget that in the 1970s and 1980s, “defense by force” (that is, keeping your own military losses low) was not the priority it later became. In nine years in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union lost about 13,500 from its 118,000-strong occupation army. The casualty rate was, in a sense, comparable to American casualties - 58,000 of the 400,000 army in eight years in Vietnam. If the lives of soldiers were cheap, then even less could be given for the lives of civilians. Indeed, they were often deliberately targeted. The Soviet strategy consisted of sending assault helicopters and bombers to punitive raids on villages in the Afghan border regions to drive out civilians and create a devastated cordon sanitaire that could impede support for the mujahideen coming from Pakistan. Conversely, in the current war, the US military has declared that it has particular concern for free Afghan citizens. The targeting of their high-tech weapons can be incredibly accurate, but the intelligence that informs them often fails. The high percentage of civilian deaths caused by rocket fire from Predator drones makes Afghans suspicious, and those who, due to their age, remember the Soviet occupation sometimes say they see little difference.
Although the high losses of Soviet troops could be politically tolerant in a society where statistics were not published and the opposition was banned, Gorbachev was sane enough to understand the failure of the war. His policy underwent changes in other directions as well - pressure on the Afghan party leader Babrak Karmal, whose purpose was to try to force him to interact with the Mujahideen by pursuing a policy of "national reconciliation". Summoned to Moscow in November 1985, Karmal was instructed to expand the foundations of his regime and "abandon the ideas of socialism."
When I saw Karmal in February 1986 (it turned out that this was his last interview as the leader of the PDPA), he was in a boastful mood. He invited me to come back a year later and ride through Afghanistan on horseback and see how his government controls the situation everywhere. Just leaks from Washington showed that Ronald Reagan persuaded Congress to approve spending of $ 300 million over the next two years for covert military aid to the Mujahideen, more than ten times the amount sent to the Contras to Nicaragua. But Karmal said he would no longer ask Soviet troops to counter the growing threat. “Afghans can do it themselves,” he said. A few weeks later, he was again summoned to Moscow, this time he was told that he would be removed from his post as party leader.
Although Karmal was pompous, his indication that the CIA's supply of weapons and aid to the Mujahideen would not bring them victory turned out to be correct. One of the many myths of the Afghan war (which brought to life the 2007 film Charlie Winston's War, starring Tom Hanks as a congressman from Texas) is that the supply of portable stingers led to the defeat of the Soviets. But they were not in Afghanistan in sufficient numbers until the fall of 1986, and by that time a year had already passed after Gorbachev's decision to withdraw troops.
The Stingers forced Soviet helicopters and bombers to drop bombs from high altitudes and with less accuracy, but the effectiveness of the US-supplied rocket launchers was in question. According to one government estimate (cited by veteran Washington analyst Selig Harrison in Get Out of Afghanistan, co-authored with Diego Cordovets), rough estimates suggest that by the end of 1986, 1,000 Soviet and Afghan aircraft had been destroyed mostly by Chinese heavy machine guns and other less sophisticated anti-missile weapons. And in 1987, with the widespread use of stingers, Soviet and Afghan troops suffered losses not exceeding two hundred vehicles.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan was also influenced by propaganda and media control. The key source of information was the US and British embassies in New Delhi and Islamabad. In February 1996, during a trip to Afghanistan, I encountered very offensive language when Western diplomats told me that the Soviets could not operate in Paghman, the former summer residence of the royal family in the suburbs of Kabul. I demanded permission from the head of the PDPA Central Committee for Justice and Defense, Brigadier General Abdullah Haq Ulomi, to see how right the diplomats were. Three days later, an official took me to the city in an ordinary, non-armored vehicle. The villas on the high slopes showed signs of great destruction, telegraph and electric lines lay along the road. But armed Afghan police and army stood at their posts in the city and in nearby heights.
Soviet troops were not visible at all. Party officials said that sometimes at night the Mujahideen operated from the mountains above the city in small groups, but did not carry out large attacks for almost a year. So I was quite surprised when, eight days later, I heard at the US Embassy from an official in Islamabad that Paghman "appears to be firmly in the hands of the resistance, despite repeated efforts by the regime and the Soviets to assert their military control."
When the last Russians left Afghanistan in February 1989, I was the head of the Guardian Moscow bureau. And I was sure that rumors among ordinary Russians, as well as among Western governments about impending bloody battles, were exaggerated. In accordance with their plan to withdraw troops in nine months, the Russians had already left Kabul and the areas between the capital and the Pakistani border in the fall of 1988, and the mujahideen were failing to capture any of the cities abandoned by the Russians. They were chaotically divided, and commanders from rival factions sometimes fought each other.
The Afghan army was supported by thousands of bureaucrats in Kabul's government offices, and by most of the rest of the Kabul secular middle class, who were horrified at what a mujahideen victory might bring. The idea of a pro-mujahideen uprising in the city seemed fantastic. So when the Afghan flight of Ariana, which I flew from Moscow, when landing at the Kabul airport, made a stunning turn, dodging flares of anti-aircraft artillery shots, diverting possible mujahideen missiles that could be launched from the ground, I was more concerned about the safety of the landing than what awaited me on earth.
With no chance of success, the leader of the PDPA, Mohammed Najibullah, installed in Moscow in 1986, declared a state of emergency and fired the non-partisan prime minister he had appointed a year earlier in an unsuccessful attempt to expand the basis of the regime. I watched a huge military parade rumble through the city center to show the strength of the Afghan army.
It took Gorbachev two and a half years from the first decision to withdraw troops to its actual implementation. Initially, like Obama, he tried to take a leap, following the advice of his military commanders, who argued that one last push could crush the mujahideen. But this did not bring success, and therefore, in early 1988, his exit strategy gained acceleration, helped by the opportunity to conclude a decent deal, which arose in the negotiations with the United States and Pakistan, held under the auspices of the UN. Under the terms of the agreement, US and Pakistani aid to the Mujahideen was terminated in exchange for Soviet withdrawal.
To Gorbachev's annoyance, at the very end, before the signing of the agreement, the Reagan administration included a promise to continue arming the mujahideen if the Soviets armed the Afghan government before withdrawing. By that time, Gorbachev was too deeply compromised to back out of his plans - much to the wrath of Najibullah. When I interviewed Najibullah a few days after the Russians left, he was extremely critical of his former allies, and even hinted that he worked hard to get rid of them. I asked Najibullah about British Foreign Secretary Jeffrey Howe's speculation about his resignation, which would facilitate the formation of a coalition government. He replied, "We got rid of one dictate with such difficulties, and now you are trying to introduce another," and went on to say that he would like to turn Afghanistan into a neutral country and hold elections in which all parties could take part.
One of the many myths about Afghanistan is that the West "retired" after the Russians left. We are told that the West will not repeat such mistakes today. In fact, in 1989 the West did not leave. He not only continued to supply weapons to the Mujahideen with the help of Pakistan, hoping to overthrow Najibullah by force, but also urged the Mujahideen to abandon any initiative of Najibullah for negotiations, including the proposal to return the exiled king to the country.
But the most unshakable of these myths is about the victory of the Mujahideen over the Soviets. The myth was constantly voiced by every former mujahideen leader - from Osama bin Laden and Taliban commanders to warlords of the current Afghan government - and was thoughtlessly taken on faith and became part of the Western interpretation of the war.
The Kremlin certainly suffered a huge political setback when Moscow's initial assistance in establishing a long-term modernizing, anti-fundamentalist and pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan through invasion and occupation for security ultimately failed. But after the Soviets left, it took three years for the regime to fall, and when it collapsed in April 1992, it was not at all the result of defeat on the battlefield.
In fact, UN negotiators persuaded Najibullah to withdraw into exile, which would increase the chances of a PDPA coalition with other Afghans, including the Mujahideen (his departure was interrupted at the airport and he was forced to seek refuge in UN buildings in Kabul). General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a key PDPA ally and leader of the Uzbeks in northern Afghanistan (still a strong figure today), committed treason and joined forces with the mujahideen after Najibullah appointed Pashtun governor of a key northern province. In Moscow, the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin cut off oil supplies to the Afghan army, reducing its ability to operate. In the face of such attacks, the PDPA regime collapsed and the Mujahideen entered Kabul without resistance.
A couple of weeks before leaving for Kabul to cover the Soviet withdrawal, in a gloomy Moscow apartment building, I tracked down a group of veterans and listened to their complaints. Unlike the SGA and British troops serving in Afghanistan today, they were conscripts, so there may have been a strong sense of anger in them. “Remember that mother who lost her son? - Igor said (they did not give me their names). - She kept repeating that he fulfilled his duty, he fulfilled his duty to the end. This is the most tragic thing. What is the debt? I guess it saved her, her understanding of duty. She hadn’t realized yet that it was all a stupid mistake. I speak calmly. If she opened her eyes to our Afghan actions, she might have found it difficult to endure."
Yuri told me that the first glimpses of the futility of the war came when he realized how little contact he and his comrades had with the Afghans, with the people they were supposed to help. “Most of our contacts were with children in the villages through which we passed. They were always running some kind of small business. Traded junk, sold it. Sometimes drugs. Very cheap. We felt that the goal was to pick us up. There were no contacts with Afghan adults, except for Saranda,”he said.
When I listen today to NATO officials explaining to their soldiers the "cultural awareness" of training in Afghanistan, there is a strong sense of déjà vu. “They gave us a small sheet of paper, which said that you can’t do and a small dictionary,” Igor explained. - There was: not to enter into friendly relations. Don't look at women. Don't go to cemeteries. Don't go to mosques. " He disdained the Afghan army and compared it to “spirits,” a standard Soviet term for invisible enemy mujahideen who ambushed and nightmarishly attacked at night. “Many are cowards. If the spirits fired, the army scattered. " Igor remembered asking one Afghan soldier what he would do when the conscription service ended: “He said he would join the spirits. They pay better."
Shortly before the Russians completed their withdrawal, I wrote in the Guardian: “The Soviet invasion was an outrageous event that most of the world's nations rightly condemned. But the way they left is extremely noble. A combination of factors led to the 180-degree turn: the political mistakes of their Afghan allies, the knowledge that the introduction of Soviet troops turned the civil war into a crusade (jihad), and the realization that the mujahideen cannot be defeated. This required the new leadership in Moscow to acknowledge what the Russians had known privately for a long time.
Yuri said rudely: “If we had brought in more troops, it would have become an open occupation or genocide. We thought it was better to leave."
Jonathan Steele, an international affairs columnist, was the head of the Moscow bureau and the Guardian's leading foreign correspondent. The British Press Award honored him in 1981 as International Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
