The nine-year war against Afghanistan became the USSR's Vietnam.
The specifics of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan might have little in common with the present international crisis, but can still shed some light on the current US-led military actions in that country. This is especially true after the Taliban have declared that they would use the same strategy as during the Soviet-Afghan war.
To people of my age "Afghan" (short for Afghanistan) sounds like Vietnam to older Americans. One of my friends was one of 15,000 military servicemen killed in Afghanistan between 1979 to 1989. And he wasn't even a military man. We were quietly studying Orient languages in Moscow State University, he studied Pashtu and I studied Chinese. He went to Afghanistan as an interpreter for one of Soviet advisors and was killed by machine-gun fire, and like thousands of others was taken back home by one of the transport airplanes -- nicknamed "black tulips" which carried "cargo-200" -- bodies of perished soldiers.
Real wars don't wrap up neatly, with the good guys scoring clean and satisfying victories; they can go on and on in messy, gruesome, vague circles for years with neither side prevailing.
Unprepared
When at the end of 1979 several elderly Politburo members took the decision to help one side in Afghan civil war, they never knew how it ended -- all of them were dead by that time. The war in Afghanistan was the most tedious war the Soviet Union has fought after World War II, and when in 1989 the Soviet troops withdraw and the Empire collapsed. Soviet troops were in Kabul three days after the operation started, but they weren't prepared for what came after. It is no secret that Afghanistan is one of the toughest places on earth to wage war. Soviet forces fought a war against the mujahidin that lasted over 10 years in terrain which many veterans say rendered the inhospitable country a virtual fortress.
Veterans of the disastrous Russian campaign in Afghanistan warn that any attack on the country would be difficult. They are convinced that Afghanistan is a place where a war cannot be won, where high mountain gorges still hold the terrifying memories of a thousand ambushes and where controlling the cities never meant subduing the land. They say the US should avoid mounting any ground-based action in Afghanistan.
More than 100,000 Soviet troops were stationed there at any one time during the war. It became a brutal, asymmetrical struggle in which Russians often resorted to overwhelming force in unsuccessful efforts against elusive targets, a strategy similar to that conducted more recently inside their own borders, in Chechnya.
One of the most renowned Russian war journalists wrote in a book: "For nearly 50 years, we prepared for a global war, but in Afghanistan we've had to conduct small-scale warfare. We weren't prepared for it at all."
In Afghanistan, most combat units were spread out in small outposts, surrounded by totally hostile terrain. Barren mountains demand a different kind of fighting: small groups of specially trained men, not a massive airborne assault. Russian Afghan vets say that US soldiers must be prepared for extreme conditions: "It will be 10 times worse than Vietnam."
Guerilla tactics
In their protracted war with the mujahidin, the Soviet forces faced guerilla tactics, including ambushes and mine war. From that time on Russian troops sit on top the armored carriers when they go on combat missions and not inside -- more chances to stay alive if the mine explodes. They still do so in Chechnya. According to Russia's General Alexander Lebed, "Afghanistan is a `terminally ill' country. A whole generation born and raised there has been exposed to only two means of education: the Koran and military training.
Afghans have more than 150 years of experience in warfare: the British fought there for more than 150 years -- and Soviet troops for nearly 10 years -- but none of them achieved anything by introducing troops into that country. Besides which, there are serious concerns that the US will attack the wrong targets. Of course, Kabul could be razed to the ground, with only a hole remaining in its place, but I am deeply convinced that bin Laden and his retinue have had `modest' underground villages (at their disposal) for a long time now. Quite a few were dug out during the war with the British."
He said in an interview: "Even if the world's entire stockpile of bombs were dropped on Afghanistan, this would not result in much change. I would be sorry if this were to happen. Soviet troops learned from their own biter experience that by killing civilians, even if inadvertently, they generated a host of mortal enemies every day who needed nothing on this earth -- neither decorations, nor money, nor glory."
If the US must go, it should set a tightly limited military objective, to wipe out guerilla training camps and kill the most odious figures, then get out.
Arkady Borisov is a senior journalist based in Moscow.
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