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.
The Soviets Invade – The “Afghanistanis”
The tranquility of the 1970s was shattered in December 1979. The Soviet Union tried to shore up a moribund, secular Afghan government by deploying troops. What was intended as a quick intervention quickly stalled. Over nearly 10 years of occupation, Soviet forces and their Afghan communist allies reportedly killed 1.3 million Afghans, shattered infrastructure in urban and rural areas, and forced 5.5 million Afghans to flee to refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. The turmoil in Afghanistan escalated into an insurgency and then a civil war. Finally, it took elements of a world war for the United States to enter the fray.
The Soviets’ muddle in Afghanistan afforded Washington an opportunity to inflict a slow–bleeding wound on Moscow. At a relatively low cost and without deploying any US combat forces, the United States supplied the mujahedin with lethal ground-to-air Stinger missiles in November 1986, which Soviet aircraft were not adequately protected against. At the same time, Soviet dissidents circulated disparaging war-related news. Informal information networks among parents who had lost their sons expanded. This war, compounded by the long-declining standard of living, ushered in the last days of the Soviet Union.
As the war progressed, more international players joined the fighting. Iranian support went largely to the Hazaras, who are Shia. The Saudis supported, in contrast, a Wahhabi network and a rival warlord, the brooding Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is still an active player. The Saudis also sponsored Wahhabi-guided madrassas to expand their influence in the country.
The Soviet experience in Afghanistan illustrates the failure of military pacification efforts. Stephen Pomper, a military analyst, notes that the Soviets recognized early in the conflict that they would have to train local forces and secure and maintain their sympathies, similar to the US turn-of-the-20th-century counterinsurgency efforts in the Philippines, or they would have to field an army of over 600,000 men. This would have required a significant diversion of troops from Europe, a proposition unacceptable after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, or a vast increase in military personnel and expenditures.
Like the opponents they faced, the Soviets could be ruthless. A RAND Corporation study cited the devastation caused by napalm and fragmentation bombs and the widespread use of antipersonnel mines, which maimed and killed indiscriminately. The study compared Soviet pacification tactics to those of the Nazis, a historic analogy that stirred American sympathy for the Afghans. Their use of booby-trapped toys and the execution of civilian hostages horrified many Americans. A 1986 Amnesty International study concurred, charging that Afghan prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured, sometimes to death, in extreme cold or heat. Some described electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, and others witnessed the slaughter of fellow prisoners.
The Soviets tried to soften their image but failed. Soviet operators were, at best, marginally capable and unimaginative, and ill-equipped to persuade a highly devoted, religious, and tribal society. The propaganda was largely directed at an Afghan population that could not process its largely secular messages. The Soviet-generated themes focused on class struggle and dialectical materialism but were heard by Afghans as muddled twaddle. The quality of the transmission equipment was also poor. Finally, Soviet hubris assumed that military superiority could trump the Afghans’ primitive tactics. They were wrong.
The Soviets refined their tactics as they expanded operations and tried to use honey. Moscow hoped to engage Afghans in international prestige projects, such as sending an Afghan into space aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. Hovering in the stratosphere, Afghan cosmonauts would conduct scientific research. Few Afghans were impressed. On the ground, Moscow offered 15,000 Afghans free education in the Soviet Union and brought 50 professors from the Soviet Union and East Germany to the American-built Kabul University. It didn’t work. Frustrated Soviet workers grumbled, “It’s all the Middle Ages… We just sink money in.” This disenchantment was reciprocated by an Afghan who retorted that all the Russians had done was create a “filthy, bloody mess of our country.”
Afghans agonized. In the spirit of the Mongols, the Soviet armies laid waste to vast stretches of Afghanistan. The war ravaged the economy, throwing millions of Afghans, already living on the margins of human existence, into despair. Corruption, always a problem in Afghanistan, thrived during the war years of the 1980s. In the 1980s, households postponed long-term economic planning because of uncertainty about the future. Above all, most Afghans tried to survive, a task that was often difficult.
If the Soviet information operations were fruitless, the Taliban effectively terrorized their Soviet enemy. Soviet prisoners were tortured and mutilated, and their corpses were photographed. This had a chilling, demoralizing effect on the Soviets, many of whom became afraid to engage the enemy. These morbid propaganda effects would be replicated by the Taliban years later and directed against Americans.
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