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The Soviet-Afghan War

How a Superpower Fought and Lost

The Russian General Staff

Translated and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress

Foreword by Theodore C. Mataxis

February 2002
392 pages, 19 photographs, 32 maps, 6 x 9
Modern War Studies
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-1186-7, $17.95

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Editors' Preface

The Russian/Soviet General Staff has a reputation for thoroughness, extensive record keeping, and a highly professional analysis of war experience to garner lessons learned from war and conflict. In fact, the most thorough analyses of Union cavalry employment in the U.S. Civil War were conducted under Russian General Staff guidance in 1875 and 1913.1 Similar detailed studies were undertaken for the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, the 1920 Soviet-Polish War, and the Russian Civil War. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Red Army was in desperate straits and chronically short of experienced officers. Yet the Soviet General Staff dedicated several of its best and brightest officers to recording the events and experiences of that fighting. Their primary purpose was not so much to record history as to conduct operations research to capture the lessons from their early mistakes and successes so that the Red Army could improve its performance throughout the war. These lessons were collected by selected officers at army and front, then compiled and published as classified documents for use by division, army, and front commanders throughout the war. The process worked, and Soviet performance improved steadily throughout the war. By the end of the war, the General Staff had produced a 60-volume classified study of war experience.2

Western analysts assumed that the General Staff was continuing this valuable tradition during their fighting in Afghanistan. Although the conflict was smaller than the major wars in Europe or China for which the Soviet Army was preparing, it was the largest Soviet expeditionary force launched outside Soviet borders since the Hungarian uprising in 1956 or the Czechoslovakian invasion of 1968. In 1995, I, editor Les Grau, learned that a General Staff study of the Soviet-Afghan War existed. I began inquiries among Russian military friends and acquaintances and learned that the study was awaiting publication. However, the Russian Armed Forces lacked funds, and very little was getting published by the military press. The General Staff authors, wanting to get this information to the serving officers, then offered the manuscript for commercial publication in Russia. However, Russia was too involved with trying to make its way into the marketplace and the world economy. Russia was also fighting another brutal guerrilla war in Chechnya, and the war-weary public was tired of anything dealing with the Soviet-Afghan War or other military developments. Russian publishers ignored the manuscript. I was approached by a Russian acquaintance and finally acquired the manuscript and publishing rights.

The first thing we discovered is that the process used to develop the material in the manuscript is different than that of the World War II war experience volumes. There was no organized General Staff program to collect, access, and analyze the Afghanistan combat experience. Rather, various Soviet staff colleges and branch schools collected information from their student officers who had served in Afghanistan. Other important material was preserved in individual journals and diaries. The 40th Army, the primary Soviet formation in Afghanistan, had also collected a great deal of material on the war but had destroyed most of it prior to, or shortly after, its withdrawal from that war-torn land. Since the war, the Soviet Union and then Russia were involved in a series of small, brutal conflicts in Northern Ossetia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, and Chechnya. Colonel Runov, a rising General Staff officer, realized that the experience gained in Afghanistan would be very useful in these similar conflicts and formed an authors' collective to create a retrospective analysis of the Soviet-Afghan War. He assembled a group of officers within the General Staff and outlying staff colleges. The authors were officers from the different branches, most of whom had served in Afghanistan. They had access to a variety of material through their various branches and personal contacts. They prepared this manuscript to help the struggling Russian Army meet the challenges of future guerrilla war.

 

The book has an introductory chapter. Following chapters deal with the organization and training of the Soviet forces and the forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan; the organization and training of their enemy-the Mujahideen; and the conduct of major operations in Afghanistan. There are chapters for combined arms (mechanized infantry); combat arms (airborne, air assault, artillery, armor, and army aviation); combat support (reconnaissance, engineers, combat security, and chemical); and combat service support (supply, maintenance, transportation, finance, post exchange, housing, and medical). The final chapter draws conclusions on the entire war. Many of the same vignettes that were used in The Bear Went Over the Mountain are also found in Chapter 5 (combined arms) of this book.3 This is because the primary data for both came from the archives of the Frunze Combined Arms Academy in Moscow. However, this book extends well beyond the scope of combined-arms infantry combat to provide an in-depth look at how the various branches fought, interacted, and served during the long Soviet-Afghan War.

Why did the General Staff fail to document and analyze the Soviet-Afghan War in the same fashion as they had done with previous wars? The most likely explanation is that there was an ideological blind spot in the Marxist-Leninist tenets. Marxism-Leninism defined several categories of just wars-most dealing with revolutions against capitalist states or wars fought by socialist states against capitalist states. There was no provision for a popular uprising against a socialist state.4 Therefore, since the Mujahideen uprising did not fit within the Marxist-Leninist definition of a just war, the General Staff was constrained in dealing completely with it-and so tried to ignore it. Colonel Runov, now an officer of the Russian Army, was no longer constrained by Marxist-Leninist dogma and chose to fill the void with a retrospective study.

There are some disturbing revelations in this book. First, the real Soviet casualties from the war are still a secret, but almost double the official figures released by the Gorbachev regime in a great show of glasnost (openness). The official figures are 13,833 40th Army dead, but the actual figures are in the vicinity of 26,000. Second, the Soviet military had thoroughly penetrated the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) long before the invasion. Soviet advisers permeated the ministries of government and the units of the military. Soviet military advisers were found down in each battalion of the DRA Armed Forces. A battalion of Soviet Special Forces (Spetsnaz) provided security for the DRA president. This battalion of Soviet Central Asian commandos dressed in Afghan Army uniforms and helped secure the official residence. A Soviet squadron of Central Asian pilots wore Afghan Air Force uniforms and flew aircraft with Afghan tail markings throughout the country. These units were in place up to a year prior to the invasion. Third, despite the Soviet Union's penetration and lengthy experience in Afghanistan, their intelligence was poor and hampered by the need to explain events within the Marxist-Leninist framework. Consequently, the Soviets never fully understood the Mujahideen opposition nor why many of their policies failed to work in Afghanistan.

Several facts place the Afghan War in proper perspective and permit its proper assessment in the context of Soviet military, political, and social development. First, although violent and destructive, the war was limited and protracted. Its tempo and decisiveness did not match that of the series of short Arab-Israeli wars that scarred the Cold War years. It lacked the well-defined, large-scale military operations of the Korean War and the well-defined political arrangements that terminated that war. It also differed significantly from the oft-compared U.S. war in Vietnam. In Vietnam, American military strength rose to over 500,000 troops, and the Americans resorted to many divisional and multi-divisional operations. By comparison, in Afghanistan, a region five times the size of Vietnam, Soviet strength varied from 90,000 to 120,000 troops. The Soviet's four divisions, five separate brigades, three separate regiments, and smaller support units of the 40th Army strained to provide security for the 29 provincial centers and the few industrial and economic installations and were hard-pressed to extend this security to the thousands of villages, hundred of miles of communications routes, and key terrain features that punctuated and spanned that vast region.

Second, faced with this imposing security challenge, and burdened with a military doctrine, strategy, and operational and tactical techniques suited to a European or Chinese theater of war, the Soviet Army was hard-pressed to devise military methodologies suited to deal with the Afghan guerrillas. The Soviets formulated new concepts for waging war in nonlinear fashion, suited to operating on battlefields dominated by more lethal high-precision weapons. This new nonlinear battlefield required the abandonment of traditional operational and tactical formations, a redefinition of traditional echelonment concepts, and a wholesale reorganization of formations and units to emphasize combat flexibility and, hence, survivability. During the early and mid-1980s, the Soviet military altered its concept of the theater-strategic offensive, developed new concepts for shallower echelonment at all levels, developed the concept of the air echelon, experimented with new force structures such as the corps, brigade, and combined arms battalion, tested new, more-flexible logistical support concepts (for materiel support), and adopted such innovative tactical techniques as the use of the bronegruppa (armored group).5 Afghanistan not only provided a test ground for many of these lower-level concepts, but it also demanded the employment of imaginative new techniques in its own right. Hence, the combined-arms brigade, the materiel support battalion, and the bronegruppa emerged on the Afghan field of battle, Spetsnaz units sharpened their skills, and air assault techniques were widely employed.

Third, the inability of the Soviet military to win the war decisively condemned it to suffer a slow bloodletting, in a process that exposed the very weaknesses of the military, as well as the Soviet political structure and society. The employment of a draft army with full periodic rotation of troops back to the Soviet Union permitted the travails and frustrations of war and the self doubts of the common soldier to be shared by the entire Soviet population. The problems so apparent in the wartime army soon became a microcosm for the latent problems afflicting Soviet society in general. The messages of doubt were military, political, ethnic, and social. In the end they were corrosive and destructive.6

 

Afghanistan's Social Structure

Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic southwest Asian state with a long tradition of resistance to central authority and foreign interference. The Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen, Hazara, Balochi, and other ethnic groups that constitute Afghanistan are 99 percent adherents of Islam, with 85 percent followers of the Sunni sect. The rest are Shia. The prewar population was over 17 million with a literacy rate of approximately 10 percent. The country was primarily rural with some 85 percent of the prewar populace living in rural mountain and desert communities. The rugged terrain frustrated the development of a comprehensive transportation system and a modern economy. There is no railroad, and truck and automobile traffic are restricted primarily to a highway ring connecting the various cities and Afghanistan's neighbors.

Afghanistan has long been a loose collection of tribes and nationalities with which the central government has had varying success influencing and controlling. Historically, the people have been known for their remarkable Islamic and ethnic tolerance. Still, tribal rivalries, tribal intractability, and blood feuds, coupled with the ambitions of local chieftains, have frequently fomented war between various regions and with the central authority. Afghanistan is at a geographic crossroads that has witnessed the passage of many warring peoples. Each of these has left its mark and involved the people of Afghanistan in conflict. The people of Afghanistan have usually mobilized based on their kinship identity. It is a country composed of fairly autonomous "village states" spread across the entire country.7 Afghans identify themselves by Qawm--the basic subnational identity based on kinship, residence, and sometimes occupation. This instinctive social cohesiveness includes tribal clans, ethnic subgroups, religious sects, locality-based groups, and groups united by interests. The Qawm, not Afghanistan, is the basic unit of community and, outside the family, the most important focus of individual liberty. Leaders of the various Qawm perpetuate blood feuds and settle them as well. Afghanistan's ancient roots and strong bonds of kinship may retard progress, but they also provide a means to cope when central power has collapsed. Historically, the collapse of the central government of Afghanistan or the defeat of its army has never resulted in the defeat of the nation by an invader. The population, with its decentralized political, economic, and military power, has always taken up resistance against the invader. This occurred during the Anglo-Afghan Wars of 1839–1842 and 1878–1880 and again during the Soviet-Afghan War.

Unlike the Communist guerrilla movements in China and Vietnam, the Mujahideen guerrillas were not trying to force a new ideology and government on their land. Rather, they were fighting to defend their families, their Qawm, and their religion against a hostile, atheistic ideology, an alien value system, an oppressive central government, and a foreign invader. Individual groups, initially unconnected to national or international political organizations, spontaneously defended their community values and traditional way of life.

 

The Great Game8

Russia expanded her empire into Central Asia beginning in 1734, and her interest in Afghanistan was apparent by the late 1830s. The term "the great game" describes the Russian and British struggle for influence along the northern frontier of British India and in the entire region between Russia and India. Afghanistan was central to this contested area between two expanding empires. Russia described her motives in the region as a desire to abolish the slave trade and to establish order and control along her southern border. The British viewed the Russian expansion into the lands of the Caucasus, Georgia, Khirgiz, Turkmens, Khiva, and Bukhara as a threat to her borders. The British believed the Russian motives were to weaken British power and to gain access to a warm-water southern port. Britain described her own actions in the great game as defensive measures to protect the frontiers of British India.
The great game spilled over into Afghanistan when British forces invaded during the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–1842. The British justified their actions as a counter to Russian influence. After hard fighting, the British withdrew. By 1869, the Russian empire reached Afghanistan's northern border–the Amu Darya (Oxus) river. In 1878, the arrival of a special Russian delegation in Kabul led to another British invasion and the Second Anglo-Afghan War. After more hard fighting, the British again withdrew. In the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, the Russians agreed that Afghanistan lay outside its sphere of interest and agreed to confer with Britain on all matters relating to Russian-Afghan relations. In return, Britain agreed not to occupy or annex any part of Afghanistan nor interfere in Afghanistan's internal affairs. This treaty held until 1919, when Afghan troops crossed into British India, seized a village, and tried to incite a popular revolt in the region. The British responded with a third invasion–and the Third Anglo-Afghan War. The political settlement resulted in Afghanistan's full independence from British influence.

 

The Soviet Union's Turn


From 1919 until 1978, Afghanistan's foreign policy balanced the demands of her immediate neighbors and those of external powers such as the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Normal relations with the Soviet Union led to increased Soviet investment and presence in the country. In April 1978, a small leftist band of Soviet-trained Afghan officers seized control of the government and declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), the newest client state of the Soviet Union. President Nur M. Taraki, the putsch-installed Marxist leader, announced a sweeping program of land redistribution, changed status for women, and the destruction of the old social structure of Afghanistan. The program ran counter to the national social structure and mores, and, consequently, the new government had little popular support. Armed resistance grew and civil war broke out. Religious leaders issued statements proclaiming jihad against the communist regime and bands of Mujahideen (holy warriors) formed to defend the faith. Desertions swept the army of the DRA, so that, by the end of 1979, the actual strength of the army was less than half its authorized 90,000 men. In March 1979, the city of Herat rebelled and most of the Afghan 17th Infantry Division mutinied and joined the revolt. The DRA Air Force bombed the city and the 17th Division. The DRA then retook the city. Thousands died in the fighting-including some Soviet citizens.

The DRA was a nominally socialist state governed by a communist party. The state controlled the cities, and tribal elders and clan chiefs controlled the countryside. The communist party itself was split into two hostile factions that spent more effort fighting each other than in trying to establish socialism in Afghanistan. In September 1979, Taraki's Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin, seized power and murdered Taraki. Amin's rule was no better and the Soviet leadership watched with alarm as this new communist state spun out of control. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union's aged and infirm General Secretary, determined that direct military intervention was the only way to rescue his client state from complete chaos.

The obvious models for intervention were Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. These models served the Soviet General Staff as planning guides. General Pavlovskiy, the Chief of Soviet Ground Forces, who commanded the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, led a group of 50 Soviet officers on a lengthy planning reconnaissance throughout Afghanistan during August through October 1979. However, the general staff planners failed to note that Afghanistan was involved in a civil war and that a coup de main would only seize control of the central government, not the countryside. Although the units of the 40th Army were briefed at the last minute, the Soviet 1979 Christmas Eve invasion was masterfully planned and well executed. The Soviets seized the government, killed the president, and installed their own man in his place. Apparently, the Soviet plan was to stabilize the situation, strengthen the army, and then withdraw the bulk of Soviet forces within three years. The Soviet General Staff intended to leave all fighting to the armed forces of the DRA. However, Afghanistan was in full rebellion, the demoralized DRA army was unable to cope, and the probability of a defeat following a Soviet withdrawal haunted the Soviet Politburo. Invasion and overthrow of the government proved the easy part. Now the Soviet 40th Army found itself drawn into fighting hundreds of guerrilla groups throughout the country. The 40th Army's instincts were to fight the war that they had trained for, using large-scale, high-tempo operations. But the war was actually fought at the low end of the tactical spectrum where platoon leaders tried to find and fight small, indigenous forces that would stand and fight only when the terrain and circumstances were to their advantage.

The military leadership kept recommending withdrawal, but there was little help for the embattled 40th Army from its political masters. General Secretary Brezhnev became incapacitated in 1980 but did not die until November 1982. No one was really in charge in the Soviet Union and all decisions were made by the collective leadership in committee. Brezhnev was succeeded by the ailing Yuri Andropov, who lived less than two more years. He was succeeded by the faltering Konstantin Chernenko in February 1984. General Secretary Chernenko died in March 1985. Finally Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. He did not immediately address the war in Afghanistan and 1985 proved the bloodiest year of the war. It is a matter of debate whether Gorbachev initially sought military victory or whether the orders for the increased tempo came from other quarters. Finally, however, it was apparent that the Soviets could not win the war without severe international and internal repercussions. In early 1986, Gorbachev announced a program to "Afghanize" the conflict and began to negotiate a withdrawal in earnest. The 40th Army began to withdraw in 1988 and completed its withdrawal on 15 February 1989. The Soviet intervention reportedly killed 1.3 million people and forced 5.5 million Afghans (a third of the prewar population) to leave the country as refugees. Another 2 million Afghans were forced to migrate within the country.

Initially the Mujahideen were local residents who took up arms and came together into large, unwieldy forces that seized district capitals and looted arms rooms. The DRA countered these efforts where it could. The Mujahideen then coalesced into smaller groups centered around the rural village. Their commanders were usually influential villagers who were already community leaders. Few had any professional military experience other than conscript service. The rebellion against the DRA was widespread but uncoordinated.

The Soviet invasion changed the nature of the Mujahideen resistance. Pakistan and Iran nervously considered the increased presence of the Soviet military on their borders and began providing training and material support to the Mujahideen. The United States, Peoples Republic of China, Britain, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates began funneling aid to the Mujahideen through Pakistan. Various Afghan political factions headquartered in Pakistan began representing the various Mujahideen groups and serving as focal points for aid. Pakistan required that the various ethnic and tribal Mujahideen groups join one of these major factions in order to receive aid. Eventually there were seven major factions-three moderate and four Islamic fundamentalist. The Pakistani authorities favored the most fundamentalist groups and distributed aid accordingly. This aid distribution gave Afghan religious leaders unprecedented power in the conduct of the war and undermined the traditional authority of the tribal and village leaders.

The Mujahideen were unpaid volunteers with family obligations. This meant that they were part-time warriors and that the spoils of war played a major role in military actions. Mujahideen sold captured weapons and equipment in the bazaars to support their families. As the war progressed, mobile Mujahideen groups of young, unmarried, better-trained warriors emerged. Sometimes these Mujahideen were paid. They ranged over a much larger area of responsibility and were more responsive to the desires of the factions.

The strategic struggle for Afghanistan was a fight to strangle the other side's logistics. The Mujahideen targeted the Soviet lines of communication (LOC)--the critical roads over which the Soviet supplies traveled. The Soviets attacked the Mujahideen logistics in two phases. From 1980 to 1985, the Soviets sought to eliminate Mujahideen support in the rural countryside. They destroyed crops and irrigation systems, bombed granaries and rural villages, mined pastures and fields, machine-gunned herds of livestock, and launched sweeps through rural areas to conscript young men and destroy infrastructure. This turned Afghanistan into a nation of refugees and forced the Mujahideen to transport food along with weapons, ammunition, and other materials of war. The Mujahideen responded by establishing logistics bases inside Afghanistan. After 1985, the Soviets concentrated their fight against these bases.

This book is a professional examination of this long war. Unlike many military histories, it does not dwell exclusively on the combat. Rather, it presents a unique look at the role and missions of all the branches involved. It will probably be the only General Staff examination of that war since contemporary Russia is involved in a series of guerrilla conflicts. Russia's military barely has time to draw breath from the conclusion of one such contest before it is involved in another. In the long term, the value of this General Staff retrospective is that it provides a critical examination of how a modern mechanized force with overwhelming technological superiority became embroiled in someone else's civil war on rugged terrain. It shows how the war was fought to a military draw and a political defeat. It is a testament to the inherent strengths and weaknesses of a guerrilla movement and the minimal operational impact that technology has on that type of war. It shows how quantities of quality light infantry are essential to successfully fight this type of war, but, more importantly, it provides a unique look at the role of the other combat, combat support, and combat service support branches in conducting this type of war. It shows how the branch efforts were integrated and how the Soviet penchant for large-scale sweeping operations obstructed tactical combat and the goal of gaining an advantage over their enemy. Finally, it shows some of the disillusionment with the Soviet system that the soldiers brought home with them. Their loss of faith spread to the general Soviet society and proved a key element in the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire.

 

Editors' comments are enclosed in brackets, put in footnotes, or added to the end of each section in italics. The maps are copies of original Soviet hand-drawn maps from after-action reports and planning sketches. We translated the Soviet maps, but left the original Soviet map symbols. For those not familiar with Soviet map symbols, a Key to Map Symbols is provided. A glosssary is also included. The Russians use the word formation to indicate divisions and brigades, units to indicate regiments, and separate battalions and sub-units to indicate battalions, companies, and platoons. We have followed that convention. Times are given in military time using the 24-hour clock.

Lester W. Grau
Michael A. Gress

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