Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
Historians refer to the war in Afghanistan as the Soviets’ Vietnam. If the analogy is inexact, it underscores the angst within both the Soviet armed forces and civil-military relations. Things went poorly for the Soviets from the beginning, and drug problems were widespread. Some Soviets traded clothes, cigarettes, fur caps, even their weapons for hashish and heroin. Abroad, anger at the Soviet Army’s killing of Muslims in Afghanistan also fueled Islamic fundamentalism in the Central Asian republics and in Chechnya.
Much like Americans in Vietnam a decade earlier, not all “Afghanistanis,” often transliterated “Afghanistanys,” the Soviet troops who fought in Afghanistan, could leave their battles behind. Years later, many exhibited signs of emotional distress associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Symptoms included alcohol and chemical dependency and high suicide rates.
Belatedly, the Soviet Army recognized the inadequacy of its preparations. Soviet forces were ill-equipped for guerrilla warfare and, initially, poorly trained. Although the Soviets deployed advanced armored vehicles and attack aircraft, both rotary- and fixed-wing, they became highly vulnerable to US-supplied ground-to-air missiles. Almost anything that flew was subject to attack. The journalist Edward Girardet recounts the perhaps apocryphal exchange between two mujahedin in the war's final days. One notes that he has not seen any Siberian cranes flying over Kabul that year, which is unusual. “Have we even killed all the cranes?” replies the other.
In February 1989, the Soviets left. The last Soviet soldier to depart after the 9-year intervention was Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, who rode the final armored personnel carrier out of the country, clutching a bouquet of flowers. Years later, he would confess, without dreamy nostalgia, “I wasn’t looking back.” But US military planners, years later, would look back on the Soviet experience and scrutinize all the major battles, hoping to learn from their successes and failures.
Before they left, the Soviets handed over vast caches of weapons and ammunition to Najibullah’s still-Soviet-friendly government forces. Moscow continued to provide material support for 2 years after the Soviets’ departure, but their withdrawal left the Kabul government to fend for itself. A civil war followed, and the communist government stepped down in April 1992. Differences among the mujahedeen parties quickly surfaced, and each faction had a leader or warlord with aspirations for national power.
There was a global view that the Soviets had been defeated in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union collapsed only a few years later. The mujahedeen celebrated and savored their achievements as a victory. Some Afghans were grateful to the United States for funding, logistical support, training, and the lethally effective Stinger missiles, while others were not. Some Mujahedeen and al Qaeda hoped to defeat the world’s only remaining superpower, their former benefactor, the United States. Washington would be their next target.
Western leaders would examine Soviet successes and failures. The use of overwhelming force and relatively sophisticated weapons was not necessarily sufficient to defeat the enemy. Another lesson both the Americans and Soviets learned was the importance of domestic considerations and the necessity of popular resolve to fight a protracted, distant war.
Profile 1: Nekmuhammad – Afghanistani
Gennady Tsevam fought as an enlisted soldier in the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. A Ukrainian national, he was drafted at 18, trained in Russia and Soviet Uzbekistan, and then deployed to Kunduz to fight the Mujahedeen. He didn’t last long. His first night on sentry duty would be his last with his Red Army comrades. His outpost was attacked, and he was whisked away in a cloth sack as a prisoner of the Taliban. Unlike other Soviet soldiers who were tortured and killed, Tsevam was given the choice of becoming a Muslim or having his throat slit. He chose the former, became Nekmuhammad, took a wife, and fathered three children.
When the Soviets left Afghanistan, he stayed behind with his wife and family. He may have faced the same dilemma as other Soviet captives. How would he be greeted back home? Would the authorities and his Ukrainian family be sympathetic? There might be prison. So he stayed in Afghanistan and worked odd jobs. After the Taliban were forced from the country, Nekmuhammad took a job as a driver for NGOs. In 2004, he was working for an Italian firm as a driver. Later, he moved his family to Konduz.
But life was very difficult for him in Afghanistan, and he still suffered from a leg wound. His children were social outcasts because their father was a “shuravi,” or Soviet soldier. Other children would not play with them. By 2003, both his parents had died in Ukraine. They had not seen him since the day they saw him off at the Donetsk enlistment office 20 years earlier.
By the turn of the millennium, Nekmuhammad’s world had changed many times. The Soviet Union had been gone for years, and Ukraine had become an independent state. He had a brother in Ukraine. But Nekmuhammad confessed, ''I am frightened that if I go and cannot come back, then who will feed my family and look after them?'' So Nekmuhammad would talk to his brother on the phone, and his children would notice their father’s slow tears as he spoke, his voice cracking with emotion in a strange-sounding language they did not understand.
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