Читать книгу The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War - Ali Ahmad Jalali - Страница 7

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The Soviet-Afghan War began over the issue of control. TheDemocratic Republic of Afghanistan was nominally a socialist stategoverned by a communist party. However, the state only controlledsome of the cities, while tribal elders and clan chiefs controlled thecountryside. Furthermore, the communist party of Afghanistan wassplit into two hostile factions. The factions spent more time fighting each other than trying to establish socialism in Afghanistan. InSeptember 1979, Taraki's Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin, seizedpower and murdered Taraki. Amin's rule proved no better and theSoviet Union watched this new communist state spin out of control.Meanwhile, units of the army mutinied, civil war broke out, cities andvillages rose in revolt and Afghanistan began to slip away fromMoscow's control and influence. Leonid Brezhnev, the aged SovietGeneral Secretary, saw that direct military intervention was the onlyway to prevent his client state from disintegrating into complete chaos.He decided to intervene.

The obvious models for intervention were Hungary in 1956 andCzechoslovakia in 1968. The Soviet General Staff planned theAfghanistan invasion based on these models. However, there was asignificant difference that the Soviet planners missed. Afghanistanwas embroiled in a civil war and a coup de main would only gaincontrol of the central government, not the countryside. Althoughparticipating military units were briefed at the last minute, the SovietChristmas Eve invasion of 1979 was masterfully planned and well-executed. The Soviets seized the government, killed the president andput their own man in his place. According to some Russian sources,they planned to stabilize the situation, strengthen the army and thenwithdraw the majority of Soviet forces within three years. The SovietGeneral Staff planned to leave all fighting in the hands of the army ofthe Democratic Republic. But Afghanistan was in full revolt, thedispirited Afghan army was unable to cope, and the specter of defeatfollowing a Soviet withdrawal haunted the. Politburo. Invasion andoverthrow of the government proved much easier than fighting thehundreds of ubiquitous guerrilla groups. The Soviet Army wastrained for large-scale, rapid-tempo operations. They were nottrained for the platoon leaders' war of finding and closing with small,indigenous forces which would only stand and fight when the terrainand circumstances were to their advantage.

Back in the Soviet Union, there was no one in charge and all deci-sions were committee decisions made by the collective leadership.General Secretary Brezhnev became incapacitated in 1980 but did notdie until November 1982. He was succeeded by the ailing YuriAndropov. General Secretary Andropov lasted less than two years andwas succeeded by the faltering Konstantin Chernenko in February1984. General Secretary Chernenko died in March 1985. Althoughthe military leadership kept recommending withdrawal, during this "twilight of the general secretaries" no one was making any major deci-sions as to the conduct and outcome of the war in Afghanistan. Thewar bumped on at its own pace. Finally, Mikhail Gorbachev came topower. His first instinct was to order military victory in Afghanistanwithin a year. Following this bloodiest year of the war, Gorbachev real-ized that the Soviets could not win in Afghanistan without unaccept-able international and internal repercussions and began to castabout for a way to withdraw with dignity. United Nations negotiatorsprovided that avenue and by 15 October 1988, the first half of theSoviet withdrawal was complete. On 15 February 1989, the last Sovietforces withdrew from Afghanistan. Soviet force commitment, initiallyassessed as requiring several months, lasted over nine years andrequired increasing numbers of forces. The Soviet Union reportedlykilled 1.3 million people and forced 5.5 million Afghans (a third of theprewar population) to leave the country as refugees. Another 2 millionAfghans were forced to migrate within the country. The country hasyet to recover.

Initially the Mujahideen were all local residents who took arms and banded together into large, rather unwieldy, forces to seize the localdistrict capitols and loot their arms rooms. The DRA countered theseefforts where it could and Mujahideen began to coalesce into muchsmaller groups centered around the rural village. These small groupswere armed with a variety of weapons from swords and flintlock mus-kets to British bolt-action rifles and older Soviet and Soviet-blocweapons provided to Afghanistan over the years. The guerrillacommanders were usually influential villagers who already had aleadership role in the local area. Few had any professional militaryexperience. Rebellion was wide-spread, but uncoordinated since theresistance was formed along tribal and ethnic lines.

The Soviet invasion changed the nature of the Mujahideen resis-tance. Afghanistan's neighbors, Pakistan and Iran, nervously regard-ed the advance to the Soviet Army to their borders and began provid-ing training and material support to the Mujahideen. The UnitedStates, Peoples Republic of China, Britain, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia,Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates began funneling military,humanitarian and financial aid to the Mujahideen through Pakistan.Pakistan's assessment was that the Soviet Union had come toAfghanistan to stay and it was in Pakistan's best interests to supportthose Mujahideen who would never accept the Soviet presence. ThePakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) began to funnel aid through various Afghan political factions headquartered in Pakistan.Eventually there were seven major Afghan factions receiving aid. Thepolitics of these factions were determined by their leaders' religiousconvictions—three of which were Islamic moderates and four of whichwere Islamic fundamentalists. Pakistan required that the variousethnic and tribal Mujahideen groups join one of the factions in order toreceive aid. Over time, this provided the leaders of these factions withpolitical power which they used to dominate the politics of post-communist Afghanistan. The Pakistani authorities favored the most-fundamentalist groups and rewarded them accordingly. This aiddistribution gave the Afghan religious leaders unprecedented power inthe conduct of the war. It also undermined the traditional authority ofthe tribal and village leaders.

The Mujahideen were unpaid volunteers with family responsibili-ties. This meant that they were part-time warriors and that spoils ofwar played a major role in military actions. Mujahideen sold mostlycaptured weapons and equipment in the bazaars to support theirfamilies As the war progressed, mobile Mujahideen groups emerged.The mobile Mujahideen groups were larger and consisted of young (under 25), unmarried, better-trained warriors. Sometimes the mobile Mujahideen were paid. The mobile Mujahideen ranged over a muchlarger area of operations than the local Mujahideen and were moreresponsive to the plans and desires of the factions.

The strategic struggle for Afghanistan was a fight to strangle theother's logistics. The Mujahideen targeted the Soviet lines of commu-nication—the crucial road net work over which the Soviet supplieshad to travel. The Soviet attack on the Mujahideen logistics was twophased. From 1980 until 1985, the Soviets sought to eliminateMujahideen support in the rural countryside. They bombed granariesand rural villages, destroyed crops and irrigation systems, mined pastures and fields, destroyed herds and launched sweeps throughrural areas—conscripting young men and destroying the infrastruc-ture. The Soviet leadership, believing Mao Tse Tung's dictum that theguerrilla lives in the population like a fish in water, decided to kill thefish by draining off the water.^[1] As a result, Afghanistan became anation of refugees as more than seven million rural residents fled to the relative safety of neighboring Pakistan and Iran or to the cities ofAfghanistan. This Soviet effort denied rural support to theMujahideen, since the villagers had left and most of the food now had to be carried along with weapons and ammunition and materials ofwar. The Mujahideen responded by establishing logistics bases insideAfghanistan. The Soviet fight from 1985 to withdrawal was to findand destroy these bases.

Terrain, as any infantryman knows, is the ultimate shaper of thebattlefield. Afghanistan's terrain is varied and challenging. It isdominated by towering mountains and forbidding desert. Yet it alsohas lush forests of larch, aspen and juniper. It has tangled "greenzones"—irrigated areas thick with trees, vines, crops, irrigation ditch-es and tangled vegetation. It has flat plains full of wheat and swampyterraces which grow delicious long-grained rice. It is not ideal terrain for a mechanized force dependent on fire power, secure lines of commu-nication and high-technology. It is terrain where the mountainwarrior, using ambush sites inherited from his ancestors, can inflict "death from a thousand cuts". The terrain dictates different tactics,force structure and equipment from those of conventional war.

This book is not a complete history of the Soviet-Afghan War.Rather, it is a series of combat vignettes as recalled by the Mujahideenparticipants. It is not a book about right or wrong. Rather, it is a bookabout survival against the overwhelming firepower and technologicalmight of a superpower. This is the story of combat from the guerrilla'sperspective. It is the story of brave people who fought without hope ofwinning because it was the right thing to do.

1 ↑ Claude Malhauret, Afghan Alternative Seminar, Monterey, California, November 1993.