Twenty years ago, the Soviet Union’s client regime in Afghanistan was starting to unravel.
For two years, Mohammed Najibullah, the latest leader the Soviets had helped install, had been trying to keep his country together without the Soviet 40th Army — relying on a combination of crack troops, Soviet weaponry, patronage, and the divisions and overconfidence of his enemies. His tenacity had even impressed President George H.W. Bush, who in mid-1990 told U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar that “I was dead wrong about Najibullah; I thought he would fall when the Soviet troops withdrew.” But with the Soviet Union itself crumbling and crucial financial support for Kabul drying up, Afghanistan’s prospects of emerging as a semblance of a stable state were beginning to look hopeless.
The cliches about Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires — an ungovernable mix of ethnic groups, tribes and harsh terrain where conquering armies find themselves lost and unable to fight committed insurgents — are familiar and perhaps too fatalistic. Even so, as President Obama approaches the initial July 2011 deadline that he set a year and a half ago to begin scaling down forces in Afghanistan, he and his advisers would do well to look back on how the Soviets grappled with their own decision to withdraw from their decade-long war in that country.
Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachevmade leaving Afghanistan a priority as soon as he became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 — but three years later, more than 100,000 Soviet troops were still there. Records of Politburo discussions show a pattern of deadlines set and then abandoned; one or two more years and then we’re out, Gorbachev insisted in 1985. He said the same in 1986 and again in 1987.
Gorbachev may have disagreed with his predecessors’ decision to intervene in Afghanistan in the first place, but he was committed to preserving the Soviet Union’s great-power status. He did not have the chauvinistic or xenophobic patriotism of some of his colleagues, but Gorbachev did believe in the achievements of the Soviet Union and the promise of socialism. He viewed the Afghan war through this prism and could not countenance, at least in his early years in power, the notion of defeat. Certainly, there were real security considerations as well — Afghanistan was the Soviets’ southern neighbor, after all — but the collapse of central authority in Kabul would make the Soviet Union look like a poor ally indeed: all those years of fighting, only to abandon ship.
Throughout the occupation, Soviet leaders launched a series of initiatives aimed at helping their Afghan allies stand on their own feet — to gain domestic and international legitimacy and to develop the wherewithal to fight off insurgent campaigns. This would in turn allow the Soviets to withdraw honorably. Each effort was announced with great fanfare, implemented and eventually found wanting.
Years of economic and development aid — employing thousands of Soviet specialists and costing billions of rubles — were found to have been largely wasted because of poor planning and corruption, and programs were pared back. The advisers the Soviet Union had placed at every level of the Afghan government, military and ruling party were doing the Afghans’ work for them, rather than developing competent and independent bureaucratic cadres, and Gorbachev withdrew them. Ambassadors were changed, generals shuffled, military strategies adjusted. Special forces were used with increasing frequency, and there was an effort to push the Afghan military into taking a more prominent role in operations — an effort made more difficult because Soviet officers often didn’t trust the Afghans.
Loading...
Comments