Rodric Braithwaite - Afgantsy

That evening a grand ceremony was held in the Kremlin. The veterans could feel that after two decades their service and their sufferings in Afghanistan were at last receiving some kind of recognition—even if the state for which they had fought no longer existed.

In December 1989 the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union passed a resolution which said that the decision to intervene in Afghanistan was ‘deserving of moral and political condemnation’. In subsequent years right-wing politicians and leaders of veterans’ organisations such as Frants Klintsevich attempted to get the resolution formally overturned, or argued that it was not intended as an outright condemnation. 1But however contorted the wording, it goes rather further than many other countries have done towards apologising for a failed war.

The death and destruction which passed over Afghanistan in the years after 1979 were not unprecedented. When a war of intervention is combined with a local civil war, and especially when one side has an overwhelming technical superiority, the disproportion between the casualties of the two sides is very large. The figures for civilian casualties in such wars are impossible to determine with any accuracy, so that the proportions cannot be accurately drawn. By no means all the blame can be laid on the foreigners: very many Afghans and Vietnamese and Algerians were killed by their own countrymen. But however imprecise the figures, one thing is sure. In a war of intervention the local people die at a much greater rate than the soldiers of the invading force; and the chances of winning hearts and mind—the core of all counter-insurgency theory—is much reduced (See Annex 4, ‘Indo-China, Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan: A Comparison’, page 348.)

For the Soviet Union it was nevertheless, by most measures, a comparatively small war; those who later argued that Russia had lost a whole generation of young men were greatly exaggerating. 2Some 620,000 young men and a few young women served in Afghanistan in the course of nine years. Of these 525,000 were in the armed forces; the remainder were from the KGB’s frontier and special forces and the Ministry of the Interior. This was a mere 3.4 per cent of those eligible for military service. Throughout the war in Afghanistan most Soviet soldiers continued to serve in the Far East or, above all, in Europe, where the main threat lay.

The official figure for the dead was 15,051: 2.4 per cent of those who served. The figure includes those from the KGB’s frontier forces, those who went missing in action, and those who died of illness or wounds, including those who died after they left the army (about 5.5 per cent of the total) or in accidents (about 12 per cent). Fifty-two of the dead were women, four of them warrant officers in the military, the rest civilians.

Soldiers from all the peoples of the Soviet Union fought in Afghanistan, from the largest group, the Russians, to some of the very smallest. There were Soviet Germans, Poles, Greeks, Romanians, one Gypsy, one Finn, one Hungarian, and one Czech among the dead. The burden of the war was not evenly distributed, but 52.7 people were killed per million of the Soviet population as a whole. The peoples of Central Asia suffered proportionately the most—65 killed for every million of the population—the story that Central Asians were unwilling to fight their co-religionists in Afghanistan is a myth. For the Slavs as a whole, the figure was 53.5 per million; for the Russians 51.1 dead per million. The peoples of the Caucasus and the Baltic States believed that they were deliberately targeted for service in Afghanistan because the Kremlin thought they were politically unreliable. The figures show that this was another myth: only 25.8 per million Caucasians and 17 per million Balts died in Afghanistan.

Apart from the dead, more than fifty thousand were wounded, and more than ten thousand became invalids. Many others suffered various forms of post-traumatic stress disorder, took to crime or drugs, or were unable to hold down a permanent job. For these victims of the war the available statistics are thin, misleading, or both. No one disputes the huge overall figure of 469,685—88 per cent of all those who served—who fell sick or were wounded during the war. 3

Western intelligence reports at the time produced wild casualty figures extrapolated from anecdotal evidence. One such estimate was that 20–25,000 Soviet soldiers had died by the end of 1981 and 50,000 by the end of 1983. 4But the Defence Ministry and the Russian regions produced Books of Remembrance with details of each dead soldier. Local websites tracked the fates of local boys who had served and died. Interest in the issue inside Russia eventually died away, and the official figures were more or less accepted as the best that were likely to become available.

Large claims were made, not least by the mujahedin themselves, about the contribution that the war in Afghanistan made to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In spring 2002 Burhanuddin Rabbani said in Mazar-i Sharif, ‘We forced the Communists out of our country, we can force all invaders out of holy Afghanistan… Had it not been for the jihad, the whole world would still be in the Communist grip. The Berlin Wall fell because of the wounds which we inflicted on the Soviet Union, and the inspiration we gave all oppressed people. We broke the Soviet Union up into fifteen parts. We liberated people from Communism. Jihad led to a free world. We saved the world because Communism met its grave here in Afghanistan!’ 5

The reality was more complicated. The war was an economic and military burden on the Soviet Union, but not a particularly large one measured against the country’s overall commitments. 6The failure in Afghanistan did reinforce the lack of confidence of the Soviet people in their government which was growing throughout the 1980s. But that dissatisfaction was also fed by many other factors: the humiliating spectacle of one gerontocrat succeeding another at the head of government which preceded Gorbachev’s election in 1985; the revelation of incompetence and government deceit which followed the explosion at Chernobyl nuclear plant in April 1986; the strains of the arms competition with the United States; an economic malaise which turned into an economic catastrophe towards the end of the decade; the uncertainties and upheavals engendered by Gorbachev’s own reforms. All these were the symptoms that the Soviet economic and political system was no longer viable. It was collapsing even without the contribution of the war in Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union was thus damaged not so much by the material losses of the war as by the political costs both domestic and foreign. Domestic opposition to the war was never on the scale that it reached in the United States during the war in Vietnam: that would have been inconceivable, given the nature of the Soviet political system. But the early realisation that the invasion had been a mistake, the moral revulsion which began to be felt by some people even inside the government and the army, the anger of ordinary people as they started to realise what was happening—all this increased pressure on the politicians to find a way out of the quagmire.

For the Afghans, of course, it was not a small war at all. For the mujahedin it was a battle for national dignity and national liberation in which they were prepared to fight—literally—to the death. The casualty figures we have are more or less inaccurate guesses, often put into circulation for propaganda reasons. But probably somewhere between 600,000 and 1.5 million Afghans were killed in the Soviet war. 7Millions more were driven from their home to seek refuge in Pakistan and Iran. The complex relationships which governed the Afghan way of life were overturned almost beyond repair. But the people of Afghanistan, like the people of Vietnam, had one irreducible advantage over the invader: they were going to stay, while the foreigner would eventually leave. As the saying goes, the foreigners had the watches, but the locals had the time.