I

Baiting the Bears

To understand and fully appreciate the current position of our forces in Afghanistan, it is instructive to know something of the Russian experience during their occupation of this extraordinary country in the 1980s. In fact, from a military perspective, it is imperative: lessons learned from the shedding of their blood yesterday will save that of our soldiers today. Why? Because the armed forces of the then Soviet Union were immense and powerful, and yet they lost. They had armour, attack aircraft, bombers, helicopters, special forces and a massive conventional army. On paper at least, it should have been a cake-walk. For the Russians, Afghanistan was their Vietnam. The political and military fall-out of their bitter experience in the 1980s lives on to this day. For them, it all started to go wrong in 1979 – when they made the fatal decision to invade.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan stemmed from a desire to control – following the disastrous reaction of the Afghan people to the new Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government – the destiny of a new socialist state, governed by a communist party. The Soviets felt that they had no choice but to come to the aid of the new government and felt compelled to act immediately. The need for quick, robust action was urgent because the state only controlled some of the cities, and even there, the position was parlous. Outside the cities, it was the tribal elders and clan chiefs who ran the countryside; and sensing that their new government was totally ineffective, they quickly exploited the situation to their own advantage. The primary reason for this government’s failure was simple. They were split down the middle, and were so engrossed with infighting that they took their eye off the ball, stalling the very purpose of their mission: the spreading of the gospel of socialism. Worse still, their message of creating a new egalitarian society by means of equal land distribution, the emancipation of women and the sweeping away of traditional Afghan values found little support amongst the Islamic tribes. Ironically, the only good thing to come from this government was the fact that they were so hated by the Afghan people that they actually succeeded in galvanizing all the factions and power bases at the same time, bringing them together, a feat that nobody else had managed in centuries. The final straw came when the President of Afghanistan was murdered by his prime minister, an illustration, if any were needed, of how bad the faction fighting had become. (Nowthat’s political infighting.) The prime minister quickly became the new president, but was worse than the previous one, which is saying something. The army mutinied, law and order broke down, and villages and cities revolted, culminating in civil war.

THE SOVIET INVASION

It was 1979, and the Soviet General Secretary Leonard Brezhnev had seen enough. He decided to act before his client state of Afghanistan disintegrated before his very eyes. He gathered his General Staff together, and they recommended using the intervention model that was used in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, but with some variations. Their plans however, were seriously flawed; as they were to discover later in the mission phase. The key truth that