Veterans of Soviet war see same errors by US

Financial Times: 

The Soviet 40th Army comprised 120,000 troops at the height of the war, and operations focused on manoeuvring helicopter-borne paratroopers on to mountains, to control high ground, and then moving tanks through the valleys.

In a decade nearly 15,000 Soviet troops lost their lives – and hundreds of thousands of Afghans – in many of the same places that US forces and their allies are struggling to control today: the border regions in the south-east of the country near Pakistan, and the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand.

“The war, all 10 years of it, went in circles. We would come and they [the insurgents] would leave. Then we leave, and they would return,” Gen Rodionov said.

Other former senior Soviet officers see a similar futility in US efforts in Afghanistan.

“More soldiers is simply going to mean more deaths,” said Gennady Zaitsev, former commander of the KGB’s elite Alpha commando unit, which took part in some of the most critical operations of the war.

“US and British citizens are going to ask, quite rightly, ‘why are our sons dying?’ And the answer will be ‘to keep Hamid Karzai [the Afghan president] in power’. I don’t think that will satisfy them.”

For Gen Rodionov, the news emanating from the conflict is disturbingly familiar.

“They [the US and its allies] have to understand that there is no way for them to succeed militarily. The only way is politics. And Karzai has no popularity amongst the people, he just runs a mafia.”

Relations between the Afghan people and the Soviets determined the outcome of the war, Gen Rodionov believes. “It was a social, a political problem which we utterly failed to grasp with our military mindset,” he said.

Like the Nato forces, the Soviets had a honeymoon for one to two years after their 1979 invasion. Infrastructure projects went ahead – most of the high-rise buildings in Kabul are Soviet even now. But then, as Gen Rodionov remembered, around 1982 things drastically worsened.

“Of course the problem was the same – the 40th army was a highly armed and trained force. It answered every shot directed at them with 10 shots. They created many casualties among civilians.

“We would bomb a village because there were one or two Mujahideen there. Women and children would die and this created the insurgent movement. It was a classic partisan war.”

Russia’s Afghanistan veterans say the US is in danger of winning militarily but losing politically, echoing their own experience.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols