Patrick Cockburn, "The Russians Did Better... So Why Did They Lose?"
"The Russians Did Better... So Why Did They Lose?"
By Patrick Cockburn
By Patrick Cockburn
Kabul. “US forces have now stayed longer in Afghanistan than the Soviet army during Moscow’s ill-fated intervention. The US military late last month exceeded the nine years and 50 days that Soviet troops were stationed in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. The event provoked queries about similarities between the American and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan, but US foreign policy experts irritably slapped down the idea that there could be any comparison between the two.
The presence of two powerful foreign armies in the same country within twelve years of each other, both fighting an Islamic fundamentalist-led insurgency, might be expected to produce some points in common. But members of the US-led coalition, the UN, and the western media, have gone out of their way to distinguish between the two episodes. They firmly label the first period as ‘Soviet occupation’, while the presence of 130,000 American and coalition troops keeping the Taliban at bay today is a ‘peace-keeping’ or ‘stabilisation’ mission. Coincidentally, the Soviet Union had almost the same number of soldiers in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s.
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At first sight the distinction between the two interventions appears reasonable. The first began suddenly on 27 December 1979 when 80,000 Soviet troops poured across the border and Soviet and Afghan soldiers burst into the presidential palace in Kabul to kill the Communist president Hafizullah Amin. American intervention started less visibly on 7 October 2001 when the US air strikes and Special Forces backed the opposition Northern Alliance to begin a campaign to drive the Taliban from power.
“When the Soviets came in everybody wanted to fight against them,” admits General Nur-al-Haq Ulumi, a powerful leader under the Communist regime, who was military commander for the whole of southern Afghanistan. He adds that, in complete contrast, “when the Americans arrived in 2001, everybody supported them and nobody wanted to fight them.” The popularity of the Americans and their foreign allies has not lasted. They are increasingly blamed by Afghans for the continued violence and as sponsors and protectors of a deeply unpopular government. As US, Britain and almost 50 other states enter their tenth year of military action in Afghanistan, the dilemmas facing them resemble the problems that the Soviet army wrestled with a quarter of a century ago.
The Soviet Union and the US both proved unable to break a military stalemate in which they occupied the cities and towns, but were unable to crush an Islamic and nationalist rebellion in the countryside where three-quarters of Afghans still live. Geography has not changed. Today, as in the 1980s, the guerrillas cannot be conclusively defeated so long they can move backwards and forwards across the 2,500-kilometre border with Pakistan and enjoy the support (open in the case of the Soviets; covert in the case of the Americans) of the Pakistani army.
Moscow and Washington each poured in troops, money, weapons and advisers to create an Afghan state that could stand on its own. The Soviets succeeded here better than the Americans, because the Communist regime survived for three years after the departure of the last Soviet troops on 16 February 1989. Few believe that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government could exist for anything like as long after the exit of foreign forces.
It is important not to draw too close an analogy between Soviet and American actions and intentions in two different eras. Soviet military ambitions were more limited than the US. Their priority was to hold 25 cities including Kabul and the main roads linking them. They largely left the countryside to Mujahideen, as the resistance fighters were known, though their shelling and bombing of villages drove four million Afghans into Pakistan. Even the most hawkish Soviet generals saw they could not hope to win without closing the Pakistan border, a mammoth task for which they never had enough soldiers.
American aims in the war are much more far reaching. The US commander Gen David Petraeus is this year trying to inflict a significant military defeat on the Taliban in their southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Heavy hints are dropped to foreign governments and media that the tide is turning. The 30,000 US troop reinforcements, bringing American troops levels up to 100,000, are assaulting Taliban base areas while US Special Forces claim successes in killing Taliban mid-level commanders.
These tactical gains have some significance, but perhaps less on the battlefield than as part of a propaganda effort by the US armed forces to persuade a dubious American public, and even more skeptical foreign allies, that the war is winnable. These apparent counter-insurgency successes may not mean very much, say experienced observers. The influential Brussels-based International Crisis Group pours scorn on them in a recently published report saying that ‘contrary to the US rhetoric about the momentum shifting [against the Taliban], dozens of districts are now under Taliban control.’
The focus of outsiders judging winners and losers in Afghanistan is too narrowly military. The Taliban have been able to expand their influence so rapidly across the country since 2006 not only through their military prowess and ferocity, but because they are punching into a vacuum. They are fighting an Afghan government which is seen as discredited and illegitimate by Afghans.
It was not always so. The great majority of Afghans were happy when the Taliban fell nine years ago. They believed a nightmare period in their history was over. The first elections for president and parliament were more or less honestly conducted, but since then each poll has been more crooked than the last. The re-election last year of President Hamid Karzai, once genuinely liked and trusted, was openly fraudulent. The parliamentary election this year, results of which have just been announced, was even worse. The next parliament will be less representative than its predecessor. “I was interested to see that all the women in a Taliban controlled district voted 100 per cent against me,” said one defeated candidate with a cynical smile.
It is difficult to find anybody in Kabul these days who has a good word to say for Karzai or his government. In the eyes of Afghans the US, Britain and other foreign forces are keeping in power a political elite made up of racketeers and warlords. The coalition is losing the legitimacy it could claim when it supported a democratically elected government making it look more and more like an occupation force.
The Taliban’s military strength is limited and there are less of them than the Mujahideen fighting the Soviet-backed Communist government in the 1980s. “There are between 12,000 and 20,000 full time fighters today, while in the 1980s there were 75,000 Mujahideen in Afghanistan and another 25,000 in eight training camps in Pakistan,” says Said Mohammad Gulabzoy, Interior Minister between 1980 and 1989.
“The Taliban is weak but the government is weaker,” says Daoud Sultanzoi, until recently a member of parliament for Ghazni. “It is the unpopularity of the government that gives the Taliban the oxygen to breath.” Karzai does not have a core of supporters, but exists at the centre of a web of self-interested groups whose needs he tries to balance. Disillusionment is almost complete. It is a measure of the appalling leadership of Afghanistan since the fall of the Communists in 1992 that one now frequently hears Afghans say that the last Communist President, Mohammad Najibullah, tortured and hanged by the Taliban in 1996, was their best of their recent leaders.
Are there lessons to be learned and mistakes which can be avoided by comparing Soviet and American actions in Afghanistan? Why have these been ignored so far?"
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