Soldiers, units and entire brigades deserted to the resistance and by the end of 1979, the actual strength of the Afghan Army was less than half of its authorized 90,000. The government purges and executions of serving officers, coupled with officer desertions to the resistance, halved the size of the officer corps. In September 1979, Taraki’s Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin, seized power and executed Taraki. Amin’s rule was no better and the Soviet Union watched this new communist state spin out of control and out of Moscow’s orbit. The Soviet Politburo moved to stabilize the situation.
On 27 December 1979, Moscow struck with a coup de main. Using the same techniques as they employed during the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviets rapidly seized the major cities, radio stations and centers of power. They executed Amin and put an Afghan communist exile, Babrak Karmal, in power. They crushed the resistance by the Afghan Army and began consolidating their power.
The Soviets soon discovered that Afghanistan was not going to be a repeat of their Czechoslovakian experience. Their force commitment, initially assessed as requiring several months, was to last over nine years and require increasing numbers of Soviet forces. It proved a bloody experience in which the Soviet Union reportedly killed 1.3 million people and forced five and a half million Afghans (a third of the prewar population) to leave the country as refugees. Another two million Afghans were forced to migrate within the country. The countryside is ravaged and littered with mines. Clearly, on a percentage basis, the Soviet Union inflicted more suffering on Afghanistan than Hitlerite Germany inflicted on the Soviet Union during World War II.
The Soviet concept for military occupation of Afghanistan was based on the following:
stabilizing the country by garrisoning the main routes, major cities, airbases and logistics sites;
relieving the Afghan government forces of garrison duties and pushing them into the countryside to battle the resistance;
providing logistic, air, artillery and intelligence support to the Afghan forces;
providing minimum interface between the Soviet occupation forces and the local populace;
accepting minimal Soviet casualties; and,
strengthening the Afghan forces, so once the resistance was defeated, the Soviet Army could be withdrawn.1
In the end, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and the communist government was defeated. Approximately 620,000 Soviets served in Afghanistan. Of these, 525,000 were in the Soviet Armed Forces while another 90,000 were in the KGB and 5,000 were in the MVD. The Soviets invested much national treasure and lost 13,833 killed. Of their 469,685 sick and wounded, 10,751 became invalids. The Soviets lost 118 jets, 333 helicopters, 147 tanks, 1314 armored personnel carriers, 433 artillery pieces and mortars, 1138 radio sets and CP vehicles, 510 engineering vehicles and 11,369 trucks.2
There are some striking parallels between the Soviet role in Afghanistan and the United States’ role in Vietnam. Like the United States, the Soviets had to restructure and retrain their force while in the combat zone. Eventually, military schools and training areas began to incorporate Afghanistan combat experience and to train personnel for Afghanistan duty. Mountain warfare training centers sprang up in many districts. However, unlike in the United States Army, the Afghanistan war was not an all-encompassing experience for the officer corps. Barely 10 percent of the Soviet motorized rifle, armor, aviation and artillery officers served in Afghanistan. However, a majority of airborne, air assault and Spetsnaz3 officers served in Afghanistan.
As in Vietnam, tactics needed a major overhaul to meet the changed circumstances. Units which adapted enjoyed relative success while units which did not paid a price in blood. During the Vietnam war, the changes in U.S. tactics were disseminated through the branch schools, special courses at Fort Bragg, branch journals, special training publications and a series of books published by Infantry magazine entitled The Distant Challenge. These last books were a compilation of successful U.S. actions in Vietnam with commentary on what was done correctly and what needed work. The Soviets also (though belatedly) discussed tactical changes in their tactical journal Voyenney vestnik [Military herald] and taught mountain warfare in their training center in Ushgorod in the Turkestan Military District as well as the other new mountain training centers.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, U.S. relations with the Russian military have slowly changed. Tentative military-to-military contact programs are developing and attempts are being made to bridge the vast differences between our two forces with the possibility of future joint operations and peacekeeping. A considerable amount of formerly classified or hidden material is now being offered to the West. Recently I received a 1991 book entitled Combat Actions of Soviet Forces in the Republic of Afghanistan. This book was compiled by the History of Military Art department at the Frunze Combined Arms Academy in Moscow. The Frunze Academy is a three-year command and staff college for Russian combat arms officers. The Academy is named for М. V. Frunze, a famous Soviet military theoretician, Minister of Defense and the architect of Soviet victory in the mountain-desert region of Soviet Central Asia in the 1920s. The history faculty of the Frunze Academy interviewed Afghanistan veterans, analyzed their actions and then recorded the incidents and their commentary as lessons learned for future combat in mountain-desert terrain.
The book was intended for internal use only and, as such, shows both the good and the bad. Mistakes and successes both illustrate the hard lessons leamed in fighting a guerrilla in rough terrain. These lessons learned are not peculiarly Russian. Many of the mistakes and successes fit equally well with the experiences of an American army in the jungles and mountains of Vietnam and should apply equally well in future conflicts involving civil war, guerrilla forces and rough terrain. Indeed, Afghanistan is not all mountains and desert. It has forests and tangled “green zones” – irrigated areas thick with trees, crops, irrigation ditches and tangled vegetation. This then is not a history of the Afghanistan war. Rather it is a series of snapshots of combat as witnessed by young platoon leaders, company commanders, battalion commanders, tactical staff officers and advisers to the Afghan government forces. It is not a book about right or wrong. Rather, it is a book about survival and adaptation as young men come to terms with a harsh, boring and brutal existence punctuated by times of heady excitement and terror. I have translated and commented on these vignettes in the hope that the tactical ground commander of the future can use them to meet the challenges of the future and to help keep his soldiers alive.
There are 47 Frunze Academy vignettes in this book, each with its own map. I have translated the text, but put the combat narrative in the first person instead of the third person. The commentary provided by the Frunze Academy follows. To this I have added my own commentary. In addition, I have interjected my own comments as footnotes and marked them as “(ed.)”. I have added two more vignettes from Voyenney vestnik, since I felt that they would add significantly to the defensive chapter. Finally, I have added my own concluding chapter to the book. I derived much of the concluding chapter from the dozens of conversations that I have had with Afghanistan veterans – Soviet generals, officers and soldiers as well as resistance fighters. The map of Afghanistan is indexed to each action in the book. Some of the translation is rather free in order to clarify certain points for the reader. I have tried to put as much of the experience into American military English as possible. So, for example, in an air assault I talk about “first lifts” instead of “forward groups” and “ground-support aircraft” instead of “sturmoviks”. The Russian term is referenced in the glossary.