Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Sidestepping the question of his own responsibility, Gromyko acknowledged that the gamble had failed. The Soviet leadership had “underestimated” the difficulties that it would encounter. The social conditions in Afghanistan—a backward, almost medieval state—had not been ripe for socialism. There was little domestic support for the “revolution.” The Afghan army was plagued by desertion. The United States was doing its best to trap the Soviet Union in a long, drawn-out war.

“We must seek a political solution,” Gromyko concluded. “Our people will breathe a sigh of relief if we undertake steps in this direction.”

Gorbachev knew he could count on the other key figures in the room. His prime minister, Nikolai Ryzkhov, had been complaining for months that the war was placing an unbearable strain on the Soviet Union’s finances. The cost of the war had doubled over the past two years. The Kremlin was spending as much on the upkeep of 100,000 troops temporarily deployed in Afghanistan as on 380,000 troops permanently stationed in East Germany, along the front line with NATO. Annual expenditures on Afghanistan were roughly comparable to the cleanup effort after Chernobyl. 149

Afghanistan was far from being the only economic basket case propped up by Kremlin largess. As glasnost took hold in the Soviet Union, the issue of “fraternal assistance” became increasingly controversial. Every year Moscow sent shiploads of Zhiguli cars to Nicaragua, prefabricated barracks to Guinea-Bissau, radio stations to Angola, and factories to Cuba. Even the normally lucrative international arms trade turned out to be unprofitable for the Soviet Union. Revolutionary governments in Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America practically never paid hard cash for the mountains of weapons that they received from Moscow. Accustomed to viewing the world through ideological glasses, Soviet leaders chalked their losses up to “socialist solidarity.” Eventually, however, even they understood they were being conned.

“I learned to my cost what the weapons trade with ‘friends’ was all about,” Ryzkhov said later. “An ever-growing debt. Endless negotiations, in which requests for rescheduling payments were interspersed with threats not to pay at all. Constant appeals to our ‘sense of friendship.’ ” 150

Gorbachev had already lined up military backing for his attempts to end the war. The key figure here was Marshal Akhromeyev, who had helped draw up the invasion plans. The armed forces chief of staff was a complex personality, at once diehard Communist and ardent patriot. Like his patron Dmitri Ustinov, the marshal revered Stalin for his wartime leadership. A few weeks after Gorbachev’s election Akhromeyev had proposed turning the Soviet Union into an “armed camp,” ready at all times to defend itself against the imperialists. On certain matters, however, he was a progressive. He was opposed to the Soviet Union’s frittering away its resources on Third World countries like Ethiopia. 151He had helped facilitate arms negotiations with the United States. American negotiators were extremely impressed with him, crediting him with several important breakthroughs. As far as they were concerned, he was a “first-class military man”: direct, authoritative, and very loyal. 152

The commanders on the ground had told Akhromeyev that the Fortieth Army would have to be doubled in size in order to fulfill the Politburo’s order to seal the border with Afghanistan. That would mean redeploying elite combat troops from the NATO front line or the militarily sensitive Chinese border. Even then there would be no guarantee of success. The Soviet Union could not support three fronts at once. 153

A soldier-intellectual, Akhromeyev understood that the conditions of combat in Afghanistan were vastly different from those of the Great Patriotic War. When the Russian soldier was fighting to defend his own homeland, he could perform incredible feats. In Afghanistan he felt himself to be an intruder, obliged to wage war against the local population on behalf of an unpopular government. The chief of staff believed that the army had acquitted itself well in Afghanistan, under extremely adverse circumstances. The mujahedin were no match for Soviet units in set-piece battles. But the ability to seize territory had little practical significance in a land where the enemy could melt back into the mountains and wait for the Soviets to leave. The Soviet army had been given an impossible mission.

“The military fulfills the tasks that are assigned to it, but the results are zero. Military gains are not being consolidated by political gains,” the marshal complained, attempting to shift the blame back to the civilians. “We control Kabul and the provincial centers, but we cannot establish political authority on the territory that we seize. We have lost the struggle for the Afghan people. Only a minority of the population supports the government.”

The Politburo session ended in general agreement. The Kremlin would promote a political settlement between the Communist government in Kabul and the mujahedin. Soviet troops would be withdrawn in stages, over the next two years. The dream of building socialism in a backward, feudal society was officially abandoned. The goal now was to ensure “a neutral state” on the Soviet Union’s southern border. For the first time in nearly seventy years the Politburo was acknowledging that defections from the Soviet bloc were possible. Revolutions could, after all, be reversed.

The empire had begun to crack.

ENDING THE WAR in Afghanistan had been high on the list of political priorities that Gorbachev had drawn up for himself on his first day in office. Accomplishing this goal was not so simple, however. Unlike many struggles over domestic policy, the Afghanistan debate did not divide the Politburo into conservatives and reformers. The real battle over the modalities of Soviet withdrawal took place in Gorbachev’s own mind.

“Afghanistan did not fit naturally into the ideological struggle for perestroika. There was consensus on this issue. Everyone in the Politburo, including conservatives like Ligachev, was in favor of withdrawal,” said Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser, Anatoly Chernyayev. 154

Gorbachev talked about the war as “a past sin,” grumbling to his colleagues, “Soon they will be sticking this label onto us.” 155At the same time, according to Chernyayev, he still saw the conflict through the prism of East-West confrontation. He was susceptible to pressure from radical Third World leaders, such as Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, who argued that the Kremlin would lose all credibility if it abandoned one of its allies.

American support for the mujahedin helped convince Soviet leaders that they were fighting an unwinnable war. “The situation now is worse than it was six months ago,” said Gromyko in November 1986, two months after the first Soviet helicopters were shot down by Stingers. Akhromeyev complained that, even with fifty thousand soldiers deployed along the border with Pakistan, it was proving impossible to close off all the supply routes used by the Afghan resistance.

Once the decision to leave had been made, however, the U.S. covert action program may have had the paradoxical effect of delaying withdrawal. This, at least, is the view of former Gorbachev aides, who argue that it was extremely difficult for Moscow to leave a country that had been turned into a superpower battlefield. “American arms supplies only dragged out the war,” insisted Aleksandr Yakovlev, the ideological brains behind perestroika. “Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and myself were deeply convinced that we did not need Afghanistan and had no business being there. We would have lost the war anyway. We should have learned from the British that Afghanistan is a country that cannot be conquered. But the struggle between the two political systems sometimes drove us and the Americans to do stupid things. We all lost touch with reality.” 156