As the US and NATO grapple with a prolonged war and deployment in Afghanistan, they find they are dealing with many of the same challenges that led to the Soviet defeat there, 21 years ago. Meanwhile, curious new Russian and post-Soviet republic footprints have appeared in the landlocked Central Asian nation.
christmas day, 2001. I am pouring Stolichnaya vodka from a rusty-capped bottle of Soviet occupation vintage, at a lunch for foreign journalists in Kabul, when I learn that my seat holds the remains of Red Army soldiers.
According to my hosts, in the wooden chest beneath me lie skeletons of two Ukrainians which have been passed from place to place as people seek a way to send them home for burial.
It is a sombre reminder of a war in which 15,000 Soviet troops and 1-2 million Afghans died before Moscow’s withdrawal in February 1989, a potent addition to the rusting wrecks of tanks, armoured carriers, trucks and jeeps that monumentally litter the routes I travel.
At the end of the decade, I am back in Afghanistan again. Far from fading with time, the Soviet and Russian legacy seems oddly more pronounced as the international community and the Western-backed government in Kabul wage war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Traces and echoes of former Soviet republics are to be found across the country, not just in roadside Red Army detritus, but also in the representation of these peoples in the conflict —from Azeri and Georgian troops serving with NATO’s forces, to Uzbek and Chechen fighters among the ranks of the insurgents. And in July 2009, the remains of six more Ukrainians were repatriated from here, their Moldovan-owned Mi-26 helicopter having been shot down by Taliban in Helmand province as the civilian crew delivered aid to the locals.
The coincidence of past and present threads of the USSR and its successor states is often unexpected, eerie and puzzling. In late 2008 I accompanied New Zealand troops on a patrol of remote hilltop ruins in the central Bamyan province. On one crest sat the rusting, olive green chassis of a ZPU anti-aircraft gun, while on the wall of the crew’s long abandoned shack a recent hand had scratched russkie vernulis (“the Russians have returned”).
it is within the framework of NATO operations that the haphazard resurrection of a peculiar post-Soviet presence is most apparent. More than 500 troops from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania serve alongside British and American units, as their governments turn their backs on the past and show proud commitment to the western military alliance.
“For us it’s extremely important to work with the UK and U.S.,” said Major Janno Märk, commander of the 140-man Estonian contingent in Helmand province in the summer of 2009. “Because the United States supported us during the Russian occupation (of Estonia) we got our independence in 1991, so it’s important to contribute something back and keep those good relations. But if we mention Afghanistan back home, it gets associated with the Russian occupation here and that’s really unpopular in Estonia.”
Reflecting the contradictions of the times, the contingent’s commander in 2008 once fought in Afghanistan as a Soviet conscript. I learn this as I chat with Major Märk in a small pine sauna built by the troops, an incongruous slice of Estonia in the British-run Camp Bastion.
Later, in a nearby dining tent, two Russian civil aviation pilots tell me how they fly cargo to smaller British outposts in the desert, being swiftly rerouted by air controllers if there is any trouble in the drop zone.
“How is it down there? Are there fire fights and ambushes and stuff? It all looks so peaceful from above,” one pilot asks, genuinely oblivious to the slaughter unfolding on the ground.
On the larger U.S. bases, the barbers, massage salons and general stores are staffed mainly by Russian-speaking Kyrgyz, recruited in Bishkek by contracting firms that service NATO. And by store exits there is usually a table covered with Soviet military paraphernalia, souvenirs bearing Lenin’s visage, badges, old ruble banknotes and ushanka fur hats.
And at the former Soviet airbase at Bagram, located north of Kabul, U.S. military traffic was halted in 2003 when two soldiers spotted what appeared to be a mine buried at the roadside. Subsequent excavation by ordnance experts revealed the object to be an unopened can of Russian tuna fish.
spending $20 on a belt with a hammer and sickle buckle is one thing, but, in the minds of most foreign soldiers, there is a clear difference between them and the Soviet forces that once fought on this soil. The latter are described as invading aggressors, distinguished by carpet bombing of villages and ruthless suppression of resistance, while NATO are the “good guys,” here to build infrastructure and democracy.
Nevertheless, the distinction is often lost on ordinary and usually illiterate Afghans. They don’t have the luxury of books or television, historical and political perspectives and debates. And they still live in fear of their families, homes and crops becoming “collateral damage.” To many Afghans, the worth of any foreign troops, now as then, is measured by the goodies that can be gotten from them.
“The Russians brought much more food (than NATO), tea, matches, oil, salt and sugar, and they still couldn’t satisfy people and got kicked out,” said Mohammad, an interpreter for Norwegian troops in the northwestern Faryab province, on the border with Turkmenistan. “I think it’s not possible to catch the heart of the Afghan people — for 30 years the Afghans have been taught to fight, kill, smuggle and rob.”
What those western minds — and surely Soviet ones before them — find hard to appreciate is that, for Afghan tribes and communities, changing sides and allegiance is not personal; it’s just business. It is a self-preservation technique honed over decades of privation and misery.
“They are opportunists, they grow up like that to survive,” a Danish captain in Helmand says after an aid drop at a local school turns into a riot. “You know they are cooperating because it’s viable, but if something better comes along, they can just switch.”
A U.S. Special Forces operative who served near the western city of Herat was amazed to hear locals saying they preferred the Russians because they gave them more rice and basic products.
“I said, ‘But didn’t they kill you?’ And they said ‘Yes, but only if you opposed them.’ They told me they expected the Americans to leave before long and then someone else would come, like the Russians again, or maybe the British,” he said, struggling to get his head around this casual lumping of all foreigners, Russians included, into one pile. “It’s almost as if this country needs to be invaded by someone, that it can’t sustain itself otherwise.”
This coalescent blurring of foreigners’ faces lends itself to the mullahs, as they rally Afghan farm boys to the Taliban cause, preaching the same spirit of jihad, or Holy War, that led the mujahedin to victory against the Soviets.
In eastern Afghanistan the modern resistance is led by mujahedin warrior Jalaluddin Haqqani. This former ally of the U.S. against the Soviets served in the Taliban government before al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. He also headed the overall Taliban forces when the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom began in Afghanistan in October that year.
American hopes of winning over Haqqani as a splinter faction leader against the rest of the Taliban quickly evaporated. During a trip to Pakistan, Haqqani told reporters: “We will retreat to the mountains and begin a long guerrilla war to reclaim our pure land from infidels and free our country like we did against the Soviets.”
today the international forces face many of the same problems Soviet troops did in the 1980s, not the least being how to get close to the Afghans without becoming too vulnerable.
“To protect the lives of people, we wrap them in a 20-ton armoured vehicle. It’ll protect you from a blast, but it prevents you from talking directly to people,” a Canadian captain in Kandahar said. “And the helmet, flak jacket, ballistic eyewear, mouthpiece and wire running to our ear, all the kit makes us look like starship troopers, worlds apart from the people we are talking to. How do you be intimate enough without being too intimate?”
The late former Soviet soldier and Russian journalist Artem Borovik wrote in his 1990 book, The Hidden War: “If you want to learn about a strange country, experienced travellers say, disappear into it. But in Afghanistan we couldn’t even manage to do that. During the nine years of war we were constantly separated from the country by eight centimetres of bullet-proof glass, through which we stared in fear from inside our armoured carriers.”
With no quick fix in sight for Afghanistan, American soldiers I spoke to in the spring of 2009 seemed to understand the huge challenges they faced, just like their Soviet predecessors: “This thing is going to last decades, you’ll see your own son enlist and come here. Most of these [Afghan] guys who are fighting have to die, retire or be bought off. We don’t win wars by killing everybody. The Russians were much more brutal than us and they still could not pull it off.”
Russkie vernulis. It’s not a formal return, of course. Scars of the 1979-89 involvement run so deep that no government in Moscow would dare commit troops again to these mountains and deserts. But the Kremlin in recent years has sent large amounts of weapons and supplies to the Kabul government, mindful that if the Taliban return to power, the radical Islamist movement could destabilize the Central Asian states and threaten Russia’s underbelly.
While there is little love lost between Russia and NATO in the post-Cold War era, Moscow’s ambassador to the alliance, Dmitry Rogozin, in 2009 emphasized his country’s interest in the suppression of the Taliban.
“I can responsibly say that, in the event of NATO’s defeat in Afghanistan, fundamentalists who are inspired by this victory will set their eyes on the North. First they will hit Tajikistan, then they will try to break into Uzbekistan... If things turn out badly, in about 10 years our boys will have to fight well-armed and well-organized Islamists somewhere in Kazakhstan,” Rogozin said.
In 2002, Russia’s Defense Ministry signed a contract with Afghanistan to provide military-technical assistance, delivering motor vehicles, fuel and lubricants, communication equipment, truck-mounted repair workshops, automobile and armor equipment, and spare parts. Before the shipments were suspended in 2005, ostensibly to avoid “duplication” of U.S. aid, this military-technical assistance exceeded $200 million. More goods were sent after 2007.
“Russia Aid to Afghanistan” read the stencilled words on the door of a ZiL communications truck I saw parked at an Afghan army base. And, as during the jihad, Russian-made weapons are the mainstay of the arsenals of both the insurgents and the Afghan government forces.
Meanwhile, food aid donations continue to arrive from Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, which in 2009 was to have supplied 23,000 tons of flour and cargo vehicles to Afghanistan. Aid wagons arrive via Uzbekistan in the Afghan port of Hairaton, a name that for many former Soviet soldiers is synonymous with defeat.
Hairaton is where the last Soviet troops in Afghanistan withdrew via the giant Friendship Bridge across the River Amu Darya on February 15, 1989. The last soldier to cross was General Boris Gromov, commander of the 40th Army, who recalled the day in his 1994 book Limited Contingent:
I glanced at my watch and gave the order, “Start the engines!” The boys made a real effort, everyone moved off in unison, which rarely happens, and the whole column drove off past me. There were tears in many of their eyes, and not from the wind either.
I waited a while and at exactly 0945 the wheels of my carrier started to move along the last few hundred meters of Afghan soil before drawing up to the bridge. Some of our border guards were sitting in trenches on the slight bend there and as we passed I waved and shouted, “Good luck, and remember there are no more of us left in Afghanistan!”
There was no one on the bridge itself, which was absolutely empty. But on the Soviet side in Termez a throng of people was waiting to meet us, including relatives of fallen soldiers and officers. Despite having received official death notices and holding funerals for their loved ones, some still bore out hopes that they might now appear.
So that no one got hurt by accident I gave the order to drive as slowly as possible across the bridge. On the one hand I still remember today how the crowd met and congratulated us with hugs and kisses, and threw flowers before the tracks of the vehicles. But I also remember how not one single boss in Moscow had thought to organize an official reception for the 40th Army. This attempt to gloss over our withdrawal from Afghanistan was just another example of the tactlessness of those sitting in the Kremlin. It seemed to me they wanted to casually heap all the mistakes of their predecessors and Gorbachev’s cronies onto us, as if to say there’s no need to greet those who survived Afghanistan because it’s not the kind of war you want to remember anyway.*
Twenty years and one month later, Lt. Kadyr, the small, moustachioed head of the Afghan Border Police’s local anti-smuggling unit, leads me onto the bridge, around the bend where the Soviet guards sat in their trenches, past a large portrait of President Hamid Karzai and a sign in Russian saying “Welcome to Afghanistan.” As on that February morning in 1989, it is completely empty ahead of us and I can almost hear the groaning of Gromov’s carrier as it makes that final journey.
I ask the lieutenant if he speaks Russian. His face cracks in a big smile as he tells me of four happy years spent as an Afghan army cadet in Moscow, Vladimir and Sochi during the 1980s.
“I would like to travel the world, but I’m stuck here,” he says sadly as we walk off the bridge. “What is it that we have in Afghanistan that everyone seems to want, and why does everything get destroyed all the time?”
afghanistan’s location on East-West trade routes, wedged between former empires is a large part of the explanation. The “Great Game” that Russia played against the British in and around Afghanistan in the nineteenth century was revived in the post-9/11 world. The recent negotiation of NATO overflight rights in Russia is a case in point.
In 2008, as the Taliban encroached on U.S. military supply routes into Afghanistan from Pakistan, the Khyber Pass supply route became untenable. The most viable alternative supply route was by air, over Russia.
About this same time, coincidentally, Kyrgyzstan received a two-billion-dollar Russian “aid package.” Shortly afterward, the Central Asian state announced it would terminate U.S. use of its territory and air space as a supply route to Afghanistan for personnel, weapons and supplies. Washington was forced to conclude agreements for an alternate Russian route. This concord, Moscow stressed, was contingent on respect for Russian security concerns, namely opposition to Georgia and Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO. The issue also strengthened Kremlin objections to a U.S. missile shield in Europe, plans for which were subsequently dropped by the Obama administration.
Prior to all this, Russia’s then ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, liked to comment darkly that NATO was making the same mistakes as the Soviets in Afghanistan, while declining to elaborate. But in 2008, at a session of the Russia-NATO council in Brussels, he urged the alliance to change its tactics and strategy in Afghanistan. Negligence of the Afghans’ national, religious and cultural traditions was a grave error, the diplomat warned. “If things carry on like this, it will be a complete defeat, military and political, and when this will happen is only a question of time,” Kabulov concluded.
among the geopolitical power plays, observers in Afghanistan continually run up against the relics and reminders of the Soviet past. These can be the “microrayon” districts in Kabul, where the tatty, five-story “Khrushchevka” apartment blocks are still some of the city’s most expensive accommodations. Or the numerous Afghan police and army officers who speak fluent Russian and drift into dreamy nostalgia as they recall drinking vodka and chasing girls in the Crimea. Or the documentaries about Red Army deserters who stayed behind in 1989, went native, adopted Islam and mastered Dari or Pashtu, grew full beards, browned under the Afghan sun and sired children with no inkling of Dad’s origins in Murmansk or Kiev.
The scars of this period’s violence still run deep for Afghans and former Soviet combatants alike. But for the Estonian commander who served as a paratrooper in Kandahar in 1986-87, returning to Afghanistan under NATO offered a curious balm.
“After serving there during the Soviet campaigns, the nightmares remained for years,” he wrote in an email, requesting not to be named. “After being there again, things have kind of clicked into place in a good sense. Now, some dreams haunt, but in general, my soul is at peace.”
Like the six ill-fated Ukrainian airmen, Russian helicopter pilot Sergei delivers humanitarian aid for the United Nations. He also served in Afghanistan two decades ago as a military pilot, and was surprised during recent assignments to meet many Afghans who were genuinely happy to make his acquaintance.
“In Mazar-e-Sharif, people reacted excellently to me, without regard to what happened in the past — they hear Russian and even invite you to their homes for dinner,” he said, sitting at a coffee house at Kandahar Airfield and chatting with the hairdressers from Bishkek.
He laughs when I ask if he ever recognizes his surroundings from his active service.
“When I left in 1987, I wanted to come back someday and see the place again, see what became of it. Nothing has changed here, it’s the same mountains, the same heat, the same dust. And they’re still fighting.” RL
FIRST CONTACT: The first Russian embassy to visit Afghanistan was under Ivan III, in 1465. It visited the city of Herat and arrived with “an expression of love and a desire for friendship” and was “met honorably” by the ruler of Herat, Abu Said. In 1490, ambassadors from Herat made a return visit to Moscow. [Alexander Naumov, “The Russian Diaspora in Afghanistan,” Russkiymir.ru journal, 2009]
THE NOT SO GREAT GAME: Modest Russian explorations of Afghanistan in the 19th century led to a grossly disproportionate response from the British, who feared their colony in India would be threatened by a pro-Russian Afghanistan. The arrival of Lieutenant Ivan Vitkevich in Kabul in 1837 and the start of Russian-Afghan negotiations led directly to the first Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842) and indirectly to decades of inept British intervention in Afghanistan and multiple massacres of Britons, Indians and Afghans.
Soviet Russia was the first state to recognized Afghan independence after the state declared its autonomy from British rule in 1919. Decades of Russian foreign aid and meddling in Afghan affairs followed, eventually culminating in the ill-advised invasion of December 1979.
* Translated from Boris Gromov, Ограниченный контингент [The Limited Contingent], Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1994.
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