The Soviet and US Wars in Afghanistan: Why They Differed

The American war in Afghanistan is not over, and may well last through the winter and into the spring, but operations are sufficiently far advanced — and the Taliban sufficiently routed — that no one is speaking these days of a US repetition of the Soviet "quagmire" of the 1980s, and those critics who were speaking only a few weeks ago about the US lack of a coherent strategy are noticeably silent. As The Estimate noted last time, some critics of the war were comparing it to Vietnam when it was only a few weeks old, but what looks most like the Vietnam War in recent weeks is the speed with which the major cities fell in the end — though the Taliban were not fortunate enough to evacuate through helicopters on the rooftop.

The Vietnam comparisons were always rather feeble, but comparisons to the Soviet experience of the 1980s were somewhat more credible, as were evocations of the British defeats in the First Afghan War in 1842, when a column retreating from Kabul with 16,500 people vanished and one man, Doctor William Brydon , rode alone into Jalalabad. The Estimate, in its Dossier in the issue of October 5, 2001 (published just before the bombing began) looked at the mythology of the unconquerable Afghanistan under the title, "The Afghanistan Syndrome"; we were skeptical that the parallels would apply, given totally different objectives.

This Dossier is not an attempt to boast about being right — well, perhaps just a little — but rather a very preliminary attempt to examine why the Soviet parallels did not hold, at least so far as can be determined at this time. Admittedly, it is very early to offer such an assessment. For one thing, the war is not over, and if one looked at the Soviet position at a comparable moment — the early months of 1980 — the Soviets seemed to be in full control. Furthermore, there is much about the actual course of operations which the US has not yet revealed, and the narratives we have come from journalists traveling, for the most part, with the Northern Alliance, not with the US forces.

It may therefore be hubris to try to provide a comparison between an unfinished war whose operational history is not fully known, and the Soviet defeat of the 1980s. This Dossier should be considered a preliminary evaluation, fully acknowledging that the war is not over and the results not final. (Results in Afghanistan, one should note, are never final.)

It was not merely editorialists and armchair strategists who were warning about the possiblity of repeating the Soviet experience in Afghanistan: plenty of Russian generals and veterans were doing so as well. The Soviet Union, when it went into Afghanistan in December 1979, seemed to be at the height of its powers, extending its reach, imposing the "Brezhnev Doctrine" on straying Communist allies, projecting its powers. When General Boris Gromov walked across the bridge across the Amu Darya (the ancient Oxus) into Uzbekistan in early 1989, less than a decade later, the Soviet Union had less than three years of existence remaining; the Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Pact imploded later that same year. A great many people, including some in the Soviet military (and, of course, Usama bin Ladin) blamed the collapse in part on the defeat in Afghanistan.

Whereas the United States Army has spent decades studying and re-studying what went wrong in its defeat in Vietnam, it is less clear if the Soviet and later Russian Army has done a similar retrospective. There were real parallels between the US role in Vietnam and the Soviet one in Afghanistan (though never perfect ones): support of a local client which never really rallied to defend itself, diminishing support at home for an unpopular war; a lack of clear national interest involved. The Vietnam parallels, while imprecise, are more convincing than comparisons with the present.

Why did comparisons with the Soviet experience prove so misleading? This Dossier will suggest that there are at least three reasons:

• The missions and objectives of the Soviet intervention were vastly different from those of the United States and its coalition partners;
• The actual Soviet experience was rather different from that which has been portrayed in the mythology of the mujahedin; and
• Although many expected the United States to be portrayed as a "foreign invader" as the Soviets were, there is reason to believe that for many Afghans, the "foreign invaders" were the Pakistani, Arab, Chechen, Kashmiri and other forces in the Taliban "foreign legion".

Before looking at the arguments behind these observations, it is worth considering the overall nature of any war in Afghanistan.

The Nature of War in Afghanistan
As noted in the previously-cited Dossier on "The Afghanistan Syndrome" in the October 5 issue, Afghanistan is classic guerrilla country. While there are extensive areas of flat desert, these are largely uninhabited; most of the population (and, with a few exceptions in the west and north, the major cities) are in or surrounded by mountainous areas. Lines of communcation run through mountain valleys or, in one classic case, through the Salang Tunnel north of Kabul. The road system is therefore limited and geographically constrained, and off-road transport is difficult in many areas. As a result, cutting an occupying force's lines of communication is relatively easy. This is even more the case if the occupying force depends on logistics originating in the former Soviet Union, since all those lines of communication must pass through mountains. It is easier to sustain a force from Pakistan or Iran than it is from the ex-Soviet states because of the vulnerability of the supply lines.

While Afghanistan has never developed a cohesive national identity, ethnic and tribal allegiances are quite strong. There is a historic animosity towards outsiders, whether foreigners or those from a different ethnic or religious grouping within the country. One of the greatest weaknesses of the mujahedin resisting the Soviets, and of their government which failed to coalesce in 1992, is that they could never overcome ethnic division. But while this prevented the mujahedin from achieving unity of command, it also denied the Soviets any clear-cut leadership to target; and the Soviets' Afghan Communist clients were never able themselves to overcome the ethnic divisions within their own movement, either.

Because of these and other considerations, Afghanistan is in many ways well suited for a classic guerrilla campaign in which the guerrillas rally the countryside in order to isolate the cities. Some have compared the mujahedin's war with Mao Zedong's classic concept of People's War, in which the guerrillas, by winning the support of the countryside, isolate and choke off the cities.

It is a valid enough comparison, though the ethnic diversity and lack of unity of command among the mujahedin meant that the sort of unified control of the countryside which Mao envisioned could never really be achieved. Instead, however, the mujahedin could from time to time isolate the cities even though they lacked unity among themselves. A better model than Mao's may be the vision of guerrilla war spelled out by T.E. Lawrence in Chapter 33 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which he recognized that a Turkish Army isolated in Medina was essentially neutralized and that control of the countryside made control of the city unnecessary and in fact a distraction.

When the Soviets intervened originally in 1979 they may have intended their occupation force — always, for propaganda purposes, called the "Limited Contingent" even when it reached 120,000 men — to provide internal security in the cities while the Army of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), the client local Communists, handled counterinsurgency. (Another element in the calculus was the Soviet desire for forward deployment of forces in the direction of the Indian Ocean, a historic Russian strategic goal.)

But the DRA forces, while they improved over time with Soviet training, were never sufficient to defeat the insurgency, and soon Soviet forces were engaged in counterinsurgency efforts themselves.

It is here that we begin to run into the problem of the mythology of the Soviet defeat. Just as the United States never actually lost on the Vietnam battlefield, so the Soviets were never actually defeated in a one-on-one battle with the mujahedin. It is important to remember that the last Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989, and the Communist Najibullah regime survived in Kabul until 1992. In part this was because of the inability of the disunited mujahedin to coalesce under a common front to administer the coup de grace, but it is worth remembering that the Communist regime in Kabul survived for longer after the withdrawal of the last Russian troops than the South Vietnamese Government did after the withdrawal of the last American troops from South Vietnam. That is easily forgotten.

The above observations do not mean that the Soviets were not defeated in Afghanistan. In Harry G. Summers study of the failure in Vietnam, On Strategy, there occurs a famous exchange: "‘You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,' said the American colonel. The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. ‘That may be so,' he replied, ‘but it is also irrelevant.'" Clearly, the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan and, after a suitable "decent interval", their client collapsed. It was a strategic defeat, though perhaps lacking in any real tactical battlefield defeats.

Rather, like Vietnam, Afghanistan became a politically insupportable war for the Soviets. Their losses of 15,000 dead were much smaller than the 58,000 men lost by the US in Vietnam, just as their total number of deployed troops was also smaller, but those losses had an impact in Soviet society, while the successes of the mujahedin helped undermine Soviet control in the Muslim republics of then-Soviet Central Asia. Glasnost and Perestroika made public opinion important (and the war was unpopular), and thus Afghanistan became an untenable proposition for Mikhail Gorbachev, one which did not fit into his "new thinking"; the Soviets cut their losses and left, though their client regime survived for three years.

That is all largely forgotten or neglected in the prevailing mythology of how the mujahedin "defeated the Soviets" and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. (That part of the mythology, though it is partly true — Afghanistan was one among many contributing factors — is a key to the Bin Ladin notion that similar tactics can defeat and even destroy the United States.)

Soviet versus US Objectives
With those caveats in mind, we can return to the observations made at the beginning. There is a fundamental difference between the objectives set by the Soviet Union in 1979 and the United States in 2001. The Soviets were attempting to shore up a weak client state and defeat an insurgency against it. They began by killing their client: the killing of Afghan President Hafizullah Amin and the installation of his rival Babrak Karmal at the outset of the Soviet invasion made clear that Soviet influence, rather than the identity of the Afghan leader, was what the Soviets were seeking to protect.

What began as a limited occupation quickly became a counterinsurgency war, and in counterinsurgency, operations are successful only if they eliminate the enemy entirely. The Soviets killed somewhere between a million and a million and a half Afghanis in exchange for losing 15,000 of their own; but as with the US in Vietnam, body counts did not decide the war. The superior will to fight of the insurgents, and their willingness to persist despite massive losses and tactical defeats, did.

The Role of the Stinger
It is easy to romanticize the guerrilla. From T.E. Lawrence to Che Guevara, guerrilla leaders have often become figures of legend; the late Ahmad Shah Mas‘oud, who was indeed a highly skillful fighter and tactician, emerged as the legendary figure from the war against the Soviets. But Lawrence (who, despite his legend, was only an advisor, not a commander of Arab forces) did not defeat the Turks merely through the guerrilla tactics mentioned above. The Arab irregulars with whom Lawrence fought used armored cars, artillery, and aircraft, and even so it was ultimately British and Australian forces (along with Arab regulars who are often forgotten) who beat the Turks. Mao Zedong's guerrillas might swim like fish in the sea of the people, but it was regular People's Liberation Army units which defeated Chiang Kai-shek. No Afghan mujahedin leader ever took a city or even a major town from the Soviets.

It is also easy to romanticize the traditional role of the mujahedin fighters, as of the Northern Alliance today. Photos of US Special Forces on horseback and one US advisor's report of having witnessed a "spur-to-spur" cavalry charge may give an image of an ancient sort of warfare, but the Northern Alliance advances began after B-52s and AC-130s had pulverized Taliban positions.

Similarly, what made the difference in the resistance to the Soviets was not just the endurance and will to fight of the mujahedin, but the provision by the United States, via Pakistan, of aid, advisors, and most of all, Stinger missiles.

Since Vietnam the importance of the helicopter in counterinsurgency has been understood. In Afghanistan in particular, where the mountainous terrain and the vulnerability of lines of communication and supply make ground-based convoys particularly dangerous, the helicopter became a mainstay of Soviet counterinsurgency efforts. But the steep sides of Afghan mountain valleys and the degree to which the mujahedin fortified these valleys as secure bases (as the Taliban and Bin Ladin have also done) meant that a helicopter-borne assault was vulnerable to attack not only from the ground but from the sides of the canyons. Once the mujahedin had the American shoulder-launched SAMs, the Stingers, they were able to bring down Soviet helicopters on a regular basis, ratcheting up the Soviet combat casualties. Overall, the military technology of the Soviets was massively superior to that of the resistance, but the Stingers provided a force multiplier that negated some of the Soviet edge. Without the Stingers and the financial support of the US, as well as military and other support from Pakistan, the mujahedin might well have been crushed by the Soviets long before 1989.

One area where a parallel does obtain is that the US will face similar challenges if it seeks to carry out helicopter-borne operations in the mountains, looking for Bin Ladin. But whereas the mujahedin enjoyed a continuing source of supply of missiles via Pakistan and the US, the Taliban/Al-Qa‘ida forces presumably have a fixed and depletable stock. But the US objective is not to eradicate every possible fighter — which the Soviets would have had to do to eliminate the insurgency altogether — but to remove the Taliban and Al-Qa‘ida leadership. And the US also enjoys tribal support, which was only rarely the case for the Soviets.

Who is the Foreigner?
In 1979, Soviet forces rolled into Kabul. As of this writing, few if any US military personnel are in the Afghan capital. The US has let the Northern Alliance in the north and various Pashtun tribal elements in the south do most of the fighting and all of the occupying, except for some British and French forces at airbases in Bagram and Mazar-i-Sharif and the US Marines south of Kandahar. Though the Soviets in 1979 also claimed to be merely supporting a local faction, they did so by changing the leadership of the Afghan Communists; the US is working with pre-existing forces.

The celebrations in Kabul as women took off their burqas and men shaved their beards seemed to surprise many who had been predicting a bitter Taliban resistance. But the Taliban had become increasingly dependent on their "foreign legions", the Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Arabs, Chechens, Albanians and other radical Islamists recruited and trained by the Bin Ladin network. This time, the traditional Afghani xenophobia worked in favor of the US: the foreigners this time were not Soviet invaders but radical Arabs and Chechens; the US has not generally been perceived as a foreign invader so much as a force driving out the foreigners. Afghani xenophobia also combined with the traditional Afghani tendency to change sides as soon as it appears one side is winning, to undercut the Taliban except in their Kandahar heartland.

Of course, the war is not over, and Taliban resistance in the mountains may prove intense. An assessment of the Soviet intervention only a few weeks after they rolled into Kabul would have seen them as successful as well. But the limited objectives of the US operations and the successes so far argue that a repetition of the Soviet experience is impossible because the US is not trying to do what the Soviets were; and the Soviets almost succeeded, at that. Arguing against the Soviet analogue may seem easy now, but even at the beginning it was never a particularly valid model for the present campaign. Those armchair generals who insisted on fighting the last war were wrong, as they usually are.

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