The Soviet Union in Afghanistan - Dr. Bob Baumann

good afternoon my name is Lexi Clark and I'm a member of the Dole Institute Student Advisory Board I'd like to welcome you to the Dole Institute of Politics and thank you for attending this afternoon's program the Dole Institute student visor board is composed of kayuu students committed to the hard work of the dole Institute we attend regular meetings assist in events like this and plan an essay be sponsored program every semester the Dole Institute would like to hear from you if you enjoy today's program please let us know by contacting us on facebook twitter or through our website email if you prefer to write us a note there will be a notepad and pens on the table as you exit the building your attendance and feedback help us shape future programming before we begin today I'd like to remind you to please turn off your cellphone's after the interview and the program we will have some time for some audience questions and answers if you have a question please raise your hand and I will come to a microphone and have you and come help you please ask just one brief question and now I would like to welcome dr. Valentine thank you for joining us today this is the last of the Fort Leavenworth Cold War series we have another series in the works on world war ii that should start a winter sometime February or March so I hope you'll keep your eyes open for information about that and that you'll come join us on that as well today our speaker is dr. Robert Bauman dr. Bauman has a PhD from Yale in Russian history he has spent several years working and living in the Soviet Union and he is a prolific author he is the author or co-author of numerous articles and books most importantly perhaps is the Russian Soviet unconventional wars in the Caucasus Central Asia and Afghanistan he was a member of the department of military history at the command and General Staff College for 19 years and in 2004 he moved from the Department to take over as the director of graduate degree programs for the command and General Staff College he is a engaging speaker and I think you'll enjoy him very much so thank you for joining us dr. Belman thank you very much ah my point of departure will be from the frame of reference of one who was a graduate student doing a year of doctoral research as an exchange II at Moscow University when the Soviet war in Afghanistan began so it's from that point in time that I'll start I can see as I look across the audience that many of you lived through much of the Cold War just like I do not necessarily from exactly the same perspectives but I'm sure we saw a lot of the same things what was striking in Moscow when I first arrived there in the summer of 1979 prior to what we referred to as the Soviet invasion was that at that moment relations seemed on the whole to be pretty good date on which had started really in the early 70s with the salt one greedy and President Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union still had momentum and we were embarking on new areas of exchange in cooperation with the Soviets I had every expectation when I arrived in the summer of 1979 in Moscow and got settled in the university that this would be an interesting year I had no idea how interesting I also expected that I would be accomplishing lots of work and I really did not expect they spiked intentions in us-soviet relations at that time so there were a number of surprises in store for me in fact I had only been there about a few weeks when there was a relatively famous flap at Kennedy Airport that a few of you might remember the Soviet Bolshoi Ballet had been touring the United States at the time as as part of this improved atmosphere and when they were going to depart the United States turned out that one member of the ballet decided he wasn't going back we call this defection in the old days what complicated the matter was that not only had he dropped off the tour but he had informed the FBI that his wife didn't want to go back but she was on the plane so the Soviet airliner is held up at JFK Airport for quite a number of hours while US officials have to board the plane and check out but make sure she isn't being taken away under coercion and so on and so forth well make a long story short she did go home she said she wanted to go home not sure how that was all resolved years down the road she may have left after all but the but the point is things such as that showed how quickly the relationship could turn and how complicated things could be coming in a hurry that was also a time when especially with the region of Central Asia and in particular Afghanistan the Iranian Revolution was underway all the complications what to do about the Shah where he'll get medical treatment and whatnot we're all a foot the return of the Ayatollah to Tehran was under way so there was an awful lot going on event course you had the seizure of hostages at the US Embassy so that was also part of the background the context for Afghanistan itself is something that I plan to go through for you now in in brief I understand there may be some questions I'll ask you in the interests of moving this long to hold your questions till the end I'll be happy to answer them and if we run out of formal time I'll answer more questions informally when we're done but to push this along the best if I take questions at the end when I was preparing this presentation it occurred to me the most difficult part is going to be to try to compress my observations into about 45 minutes and I was really tempted just to come in and say well cast aside the time limit time don't merrily for three hours I hope everybody brought a lunch by Deb I'm advised that's really not the best way to go about this so what what you see there is the Moscow skyline on the far left side of the picture if you can see that my angle from here doesn't doesn't show me anything it's it's night instantly so if the picture appears dark there's good reason for that is the silhouette of Moscow University which sits up in Lenin hills overlooking the river and from a distance you can see central Moscow in the Kremlin and so on and so forth so that was my my vantage point from Moscow in Afghanistan meanwhile things were already quite complicated although relatively few folks in the world took notice again against the backdrop of Carter Brezhnev Summit negotiations on the salt 2 treaty which would have to be set aside once the Soviets entered Afghanistan all of this was was taking place and much overshadowing things that were happening locally the Soviet Union which on this map is represented not just by the red zone but by the dark shaded gray zone underneath because remember this was before the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of all of what I now the Central Asian states so you can see it at the time it bordered Afghanistan and the Soviets in fact had been for decades making a considerable investment in Afghanistan they certainly had an agenda there'd been lots of aid projects they'd helped build the great Ring Road there had been dams built buildings they'd add to the University and so on and so forth they'd also been in the midst of building a client state that is to say they had been slowly molding Afghanistan to become a state in the in the Soviet orbit and you get a look at the the map of Afghanistan it itself let me mention right now that Afghanistan is quite ethnically diverse this is a subject that Americans have had a lot more opportunity to become familiar with through the news over the preceding 10 years until today along the border with the the other stands Turkmenistan Uzbekistan and Tajikistan there again then part of the Soviet Union there is considerable ethnic overlap put another way many Turkmen live on the Afghan side of the border many whose Becks live on the Afghan side of the border and many Tajiks live on the Afghan side of the border so there was considerable ethnic overlap between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan this was also true on the Pakistani side which is a matter that has come to great attention again in recent years and that would be the push student population which is almost equally balanced on both sides of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and has been the source of endless political complexity for for quite a number of years indeed since the establishment of the Durand Line in in 1893 which set the border based on lots of scientific topographical indicators and taking into account some strategic considerations of the British Empire but giving almost no account to the ethnic complexion of Afghanistan or what was then India the evolution of the Afghan flag is one way to begin to trace what's taking place 1978-79 the red flag becomes the official flag of Afghanistan this is in the wake of what the Soviets and members of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan the PDP a would refer to as the April 1978 revolution they had cast it in the template of the Russian Revolution and other so-called socialist revolutions to some real some not but they put it in that tradition and suggested that this was a major historic milestone what you essentially had really was a coup by the PDPA to take power and begin to mold Afghanistan in a different direction they had done this rather aggressively sometimes the the pupils so to speak can be more energetic than their mentors hope this is certainly the instance here in 1978 when the PDPA took power with many members of its leadership having been schooled extensively in the Soviet Union having bought into the doctrines of Marxism Leninism having studied the history of the Russian Revolution they thought that they could superimpose all this rather readily on Afghanistan disregarding pretty much the local history culture and so forth and this was long Afghans themselves so they immediately embarked on a series of Soviet style reforms that created a major backlash to further complicate the plot the PD APA was seriously torn internally between two factions that at times were violently opposed not merely in in opposition so the new regime was inherently unstable in a couple of very important ways it was not at peace with itself and it was quickly quickly putting itself in a state of conflict with the Afghan population at large and that instability is going to be the biggest factor in leading the Soviets to conduct what we will hail as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan oddly enough the Soviets had actually tried to restrain their their pupils on more than one occasion telling them hey look you want to slow this down you're making an awful lot of trouble for yourselves the meantime in the course of late 1978 and through most of 1979 you'd actually had appeals from the Afghan government for Soviet military assistance to quell the uprisings in the countryside these appeals will seem rather strange subsequently when the Soviets do invade and as a first step will replace the existing government at oh by the way the second flag is a flag that's created after the Soviet invasion as one of the steps to ameliorate popular discontent in Afghanistan with the regime created by the 1978 revolution the red flag the zealots felt would make the the national flag consistent with the colors of revolution and indicate they're part of the worldwide movement and so on and so forth that needless to say was not broadly popular with the with the Afghan population one of the things that clearly stood out was the fact that the Soviet Union was very publicly an atheist regime and Afghanistan that didn't play well the other flag the black red and green flag was much more traditional and an indication of the fact that the the Soviets and the man that they installed in power understood that an awful lot of fence-mending was going to be necessary if they had any hope of saving the regime in Afghanistan here are a couple of the figures who were so instrumental in the in the transition you had a republic created by a coup in 1973 with the replacement of Zahir Shah the ruler of Afghanistan muhammadun khan then becomes the prime minister and he will be ousted in a coup backed by the PDP 8 which i referred the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan in 1978 so things are moving along very rapidly politically other things that will be tea leaves 1978 as an insurgency begins to develop in Afghanistan and various bands start to pursue various agendas one of the things that happens is that the sitting united states ambassador adolf dove dubs rather is killed when the u.s. embassy is grabbed he's kidnapped and in an effort to rescue him in a local hotel he is killed in the in the crossfire the PDP a leadership norma hamid Taraki and Hafiz Ulla Amin are the two men who are heading the kalk fashion of the PD phat faction of the PDP a that is now running Afghanistan unfortunately they can't get along with one another and indeed Taraki goes to Moscow and is already letting it be known that he has a scheme to take down Taraki and I rather I mean excuse me and I mean in turn has heard of this and is already hatching a plan to take out Taraki upon his return to Afghanistan I mean will succeed Taraki will be killed and Amin will be sitting on top the hierarchy of power in Afghanistan for at least a short time one of means number one concerns is to reassure the Soviets that he is really their guy unfortunately for him the Soviets are aware that he's been having at least some back-channel conversations with the United States conversations that suggests he's hedging his bets in terms of which international players he might want to deal with in the long run so his personal agenda is okay I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket yeah I'm working with the Soviets and and he will go out of his way to at least make public displays of loyalty for example I mean we'll address the United Nations in Russia just to just to make a point but the Soviets in the end don't trust furthermore they seem to think that he's incompetent and at least in terms of maintaining stability in Afghanistan so they're concerned that he's going to bring the whole house of cards down the Soviets have a really big decision to make when it comes to determining whether or not to invade Afghanistan now I use the word invade cautiously because in fact you already had several thousand Soviet advisers in Afghanistan many there at the hessed of the Afghan regime so to be clear there's already an appreciable Soviet presence there there have also been many technicians and as I said there been many aid and construction projects going on so the Soviets have had a decade's long track record of being involved in Afghanistan what we refer to as the invasion of Afghanistan involves the insertion of large numbers of Soviet troops and a military takeover of the regime in Kabul with a hand-picked Soviet replacement who will be installed in power in the fall of 1979 when the leadership of the Politburo is discussing options there is some concern that going into Afghanistan this way could be a big mistake and indeed the Soviets will have rejected a series of requests from the Afghan regime to send large numbers of forces in to quell what is a nascent insurgency on the periphery of Afghanistan however an inner core of Soviet players beginning with the General Secretary of the Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev and a few of his key advisors will ultimately make the decision in kind of a small group huddle and their decision in Maidan essentially in November executed in December of 1979 is that will conduct the invasion the fundamental reason is that they cannot accept the prospect that Afghanistan might retreat from its current path to become a member of the Soviet political orbit indeed probably the the underlying thinking is contained in what was referred to as the Brezhnev Doctrine some of you will recall that in 1968 the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in order to keep it in the Warsaw Pact in the Soviet orbit prior to that in 1956 there had been an invasion of Hungary boiled down to its essentials the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine stipulated that you know once you're in the community of socialist States you're not pulling back out so not only are they thinking in terms of the Brezhnev Doctrine but they're also thinking in terms of the prior examples of its implementation when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 68 they used a template that they would try to employ again in in 1979 they used special operations forces inserted them quietly little by little on assorted sundry nonviolent missions into the capital Prague wait until the time was right and then they immediately seized key communication centers in Prague made it nearly impossible for the Czechoslovak army to respond in a timely way to a degree paralyzed the Czechoslovak government making it much easier for them to orchestrate a rapid takeover while that's occurring in Prague invasion forces have already crossed the Czechoslovak frontier from multiple directions and including forces from some of the other Warsaw Pact states so the president of Czechoslovakia Alexander Dubcek is presented with a quick fait accompli I can either fight he feels a futile fight costing the lives of perhaps thousands or even tens of of Czechoslovakia's or I can face the inevitable and capitulate to the Soviets he will take the letter option the Soviets are hoping seemingly expecting that that's the scenario that will play out in 1979 in Afghanistan the man the Soviets intend to install in power is babrak karmal also a member of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan but a member of the faction that had opposed Taraki and Amin he had actually left Afghanistan and was kind of under Soviet protection because it was a little bit dangerous for him to be in Afghanistan during the Taraki Amin regime so once again the internal Afghan politics at least within the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan are so dysfunctional to the point of violence that it guarantees a high degree of turbulence but babrak karmal they decide his is their man and he's a willing partner among those who will offer advice before the invasion is general Makarov who will later become chief of Soviet ground forces he will caution the the Politburo that they may have seriously underestimated the size of the force necessary to quell the insurgency in Afghanistan the soviet force will ultimately get up to the neighborhood of 115 thousand or so troops in afghanistan as far as he's concerned that's just a down payment on what you would probably need in the end soviet KGB leadership will be very active in assessing the situation in afghanistan in this case vladimir krutov so they too will have their say in in the Politburo and they too are somewhat cautious I've talked a bit about the the problems faced by the PDP a bottom line again as as noted here as public Marxists and atheists they're easily branded as as infidels at least Christian invaders if they're perceived as invaders in Afghanistan have the consolation of being so-called people a book which means that you do have a place in the Islamic world view not so for atheists Ahmed Shah Massoud will become one of the foremost players in the insurgency he is a Taji will work largely in the Panjshir Valley in northeastern Afghanistan he will later become known as the Lion of Panjshir because he successfully on multiple occasions manages to fight and resist the the Soviets he proves the fundamental kind of tactical operational problem that the Soviets are going to face the Soviets will annually and becomes almost a Rite of Spring send a sizable division sized Force on operations through the Panjshir Valley to clear out the Mujahideen resistance and annually the Soviet forces will push through the valley about as far as they want to go they can do it they've got the they've got the force but the militia team will occupy the hills and the ridges and the nooks and the crannies and will stage all kinds of ambushes they will not stand still and give the Soviets a real battle because that's the kind of fight that the Soviets are virtually guaranteed to win given their firepower and tactical proficiency instead they will stand back they will bend but not break they will retreat into the mountains and when the Soviets pull back they will follow them with further harassing fire and inflicting as many casualties as they can so the Soviets come to the unwelcome revelation by 1982 that they're fighting a war that's not going very well and they're going to have to change their approach so the Soviets will come up with in a way their version of counterinsurgency doctrine they will certainly adjust their tactics they'll adjust their tactics back to in a way reintegrate some old patterns of thinking and operating from the Russian army the Soviets had actually had historically plenty of experiences waging guerrilla fights they had done at the end of World War two in Lithuania and Ukraine they had done it in Central Asia to liquidate the basmati resistance back in the 1920s and even into the 1930s and the Russian army I had spent half a century doing it in the Caucasus for example against the Chechens and others so there's a lot of historical experience to draw upon unfortunately the Soviets had developed after World War two kind of a one-track mind we're going to be a great conventional army and indeed they were pretty darn good what they wanted to do however was not well geared to this situation so they had to pull back and rethink and retrain they will create mountain warfare training centers in the Caucasus in Central Asia they will start to focus more on helicopter-borne troop movements they will have more specially trained forces who can fight in small units and work on ridge lines and at high altitude and so on and so forth to become more tactically adept in the meantime they will run parallel operations governmentally to try to placate the Afghan population there will be more aid projects there will be extensive propaganda they will try to negate the impression that they are anti Islamic they'll resuscitate Islamic radio programming in Afghanistan for example and do lots of other things to show that hey we really are friends with Islam and friends with with Afghans unfortunately this was hard to do simultaneously while they're using incredibly firepower intensive techniques to subjugate areas that are occupied or occasionally occupied by the resistance several afghan scholars during the 1980s will start to use the term migratory genocide to take to describe what's taking place in afghanistan it seems that the Soviet strategy perhaps slightly simplified was that you can eliminate guerrilla resistance if you drive the population completely out of the area guerrillas and this is normally a working assumption with respect to guerrillas they require a population from which they can draw essential resources from food to recruits you take away the population they've got no place to hide and they've got no friends the soviets will bomb extensively there will be heavy use of artillery and armored the they will rubble eyes virtually broad swaths of Afghanistan the result will be then in addition to hundreds of thousands of Afghan casualties that literally millions of Afghans will flee the country this will create huge refugee zones particularly in Pakistan but also in Iran the number of refugees in Pakistan was estimated at the neighborhood of four million so we're talking a very large fraction somewhere on 2/3 perhaps of the Afghan population was literally driven out of the country as a result of the the Soviet techniques so the point I'm trying to make here is that it was difficult to win over the population at the same time this is going on suggest kind of a strategic disconnect it's also real hard to as you might say put the horse back in the barn you know once you've done all this it's hard to mend your fences once this much destruction has occurred so the Soviets are facing a difficult proposition the meantime they're trying to secure the capital which they will wrap in security and they will try to keep their government in Afghanistan under babrak karmal afloat other players who lose interesting characters in all of this the President of Pakistan time Ziya al-haq Xia had in fact been encouraging resistance along the periphery of Afghanistan even before the Soviet invasion started he was a little concerned about what the Soviets had in mind there once the Soviet invasion occurs he will have an opportunity to become friends once again with the United States he had been frozen out a little bit since he had been since he had taken power by coup a short time earlier now he had a chance to get back in the reasonably good gracious graces of the Carter Administration who needed a friend somewhere in the region if the US was going to exert more pressure on the Soviets and try to neutralize their program in Afghanistan so Pakistan then becomes the conduit for all kinds of assistance that will eventually flow to the Mujahideen in in Afghanistan Pakistan will also become the sponsor of guys like Google budino Hekmatyar folks and organizations that are we considered from a u.s. perspective to be quite a nuisance today so some of them have early origins but any in any case among the Pashtun population in Afghanistan Pakistan finds a friendly medium in which to to work its influence President Carter's national security adviser is big Nia Brzezinski had in fact already put on the table months before the Soviet invasion the thought that it might not be a bad idea to give at least some moral if not small-scale material support to insurgents out there on the fringes of Afghanistan so the united states had to some degree anticipated what might happen and had been proactively working on the problem just a little bit indeed Brzezinski had a hunch that the Soviets might plunge in in a big way and get themselves seriously and snarled in a major geopolitical military problem more of the context and this was something I was dealing with at Moscow University at the time Moscow was going to be host to the summer 1980 Olympics and this was going to be a truly spectacular event in the Soviet Union it had been much anticipated and was much ballyhooed I can remember the dormitory in Moscow University as you entered the cafeteria there was a a sign with a daily countdown you know how many days left before the the Summer Olympics and Moscow University was going to be extensively involved the dorms in Moscow University were going to be housing for some of the mainly East European tourists and the the cafeteria would be used by a good many of them and a lot of students from the Moscow State University where I was would be assisting as tour guides and translators and things of that sort so the university was all atwitter waiting for the Olympics to arrive this of course will become problematic once the Soviets actually invade the invasion takes place over several days roughly from the 24th the 27th of December 1979 and as the elegance of timing and luck would have it the Soviets were actually staging their special operations forces the the Spetsnaz and airborne from Tashkent the capital of modern Uzbekistan which is just a couple hour flight away from from Kabul and as luck would have it several times during that span I personally was passing through Tashkent Airport because I had been traveling through Central Asia on my winter break from the University because one of my interests had been the history of Central Asian culture and the history of the old Imperial Russian campaigns in Central Asia so little did I know that the next episode was breaking out just as I was passing through indeed the first I really heard about it getting any kind of detail was when I returned to Moscow and was reunited with my shortwave radio and started to catch up with the news I thought oh my gosh yeah that's what was happening so that explains all the excitement at Tashkent Airport for example which was in fact a staging point for the for the airlift before the Summer Games of course you had the Winter Games and prior to the Winter Games President Carter had already begun open speculation in the public domain that the u.s. might decide to boycott and indeed organized a broader boycott of the Summer Olympic Games as part of the clever planning of this they decided to get into the Winter Games before he has to make a decision of this sort but the general message to the Soviets is look back out of Afghanistan or this is one of the things the United States is probably going to have to do as a result meanwhile the Winter Games brought Americans the solace of the the Miracle on Ice the great hockey victory over the Soviets which to this day seems almost inexplicable you watch the movie and it kind of makes sense but you step back and I was a big hockey fan at the time I regularly went to Soviet hockey games and watched their big league teams and I knew full well what this bunch of American college kids was was going to be playing against and I was so convinced that the US team had no chance I did not bother to go to the dorm TV room of course the game was on in the middle of the night due to the time difference to watch the US and the the Soviets play so I was flabbergasted the next morning when in the dorm elevator a couple of Russian students congratulated me on the events of the the night before he said you're kidding we won the odds of that were astronomical in my estimation but but it happened March 21st then President Carter announces that there will be an Olympic boycott it was controversial in the United States as some of you may remember there was a great difference of opinion here as to whether or not the USO to sully the Olympics by boycotting it over this this event and then of course you had the American Olympians themselves who had sacrificed so much to be able to go they dearly want to to be able to go but in point of fact the boycott would be announced and the president would get 50-odd other countries to join in the boycott I essentially the time got to watch the response from from Moscow and the Soviets finessed this rather carefully because they did not want there to be a public perception that the Olympic boycott had anything to do with the invasion of Afghanistan rather they build this as more anti Soviet militancy on the part of the US and in particular President Carter which I found ironic at the time because President Carter did not have the image of a militarist domestically but two Soviet citizens he was a sabre-rattling menace to to peace and someone with whom the Soviets simply had found they could no longer deal and the Olympic boycott was just one manifestation of that the map shows in green the countries that participated in the Summer Olympics ultimately the grey countries did not there were some countries that split the difference you'll see a few that are light green they would send Olympic teams but not under their national flag so they would be sending athletes but they wouldn't officially be participating as a country this was another political option now one of the things that is important during wartime is public leadership from the top Leonid Brezhnev was probably not the first guy you'd pick to inspire the country in a war effort to begin Soviet politicians especially at the very top were essentially invisible grey men always seen but never in any kind of unofficial stance he had no profile other than as general secretary of the party in head of state whose face was ubiquitous on Billboard's around the country with inspirational slogans about socialist competition and this and that but otherwise he was unknown he was the antithesis of a dynamic speaker he spoke in low kind of hushed tones he mumbled a lot he was already in a state of seriously deteriorating health and this was added to the folks who watched him in public good it just so happens that at one of the hockey games that I went to in Moscow it was Spartak against somebody else and I can't remember who the who the opponent was probably Moscow dynamo because it was a packed crowd in the sports palace and I happened to notice across the arena for me sitting in the VIP booth were Brezhnev and several other key members of the Politburo Chen Yin Co I think Kosygin and several others so I spent at least half the game watching what was going on in the VIP box just to see you know what whether there would be some lively banter or interest in the game what-have-you a rumor on the street was that Brezhnev was a Spartak fan nobody knew that for sure but that was widely widely believed any case my observation of the VIP box told me only that well these are some pretty dull guys because there was scarcely any conversation through the entire game let alone cheering or anything else they might as well have been at the Opera for all the activity that was going on up there then of course well have a change in presidents fairly early in the war and at least the rhetorical tone will escalate still for with the arrival of President Reagan one of the things that interested me and I'll make brief mention up here was the way the Soviets presented the war at home the Soviets took an approach that to me at the time was it was kind of novel they essentially pretend there wasn't a war going on given that general posture of course Brezhnev couldn't step forward in the emotional wartime leader anyway even if he had the persona and the disposition to be that guy and oh by the way he'll die in 82 and be replaced by and drop off who'll die two years later be replaced by Chen yang ko will die in about a year and be replaced by Gorbachev so they'll be moving through the older generation but until they get to Gorbachev and then you'll have someone who will finally engage the public but for the first four years or so of the war there will be scarcely any acknowledgment that there's a war so the Soviet public will know basically nothing about what's going on in Afghanistan one data point to kind of indicate you know how extreme this was Soviet citizens did not know what the official casualty total was in the war in Afghanistan until 1988 fully eight years into the war they were not told press reports for the first four years the war never described combat let alone acknowledge casualties it was said that Soviet parents did not know often for months that their sons had been killed in Afghanistan and often the story would be that it was in a training accident on the other hand since the Soviet Army at that time was discouraging public funerals for soldiers killed in Afghanistan there was darn little to be known or seen one of the indicators that I got of the level of secrecy was that about three months into the war while it was a student through a friend a friend of friends of friends there was a guy who was working at Sheremetyevo Airport who passed word out that you know what they're bringing in body bags you know several nights a week after midnight you know I was in the shadows so nobody knows and this was one of those little indicators that folks would get that that something bigger was happening than what they actually knew one of the remarkable things about the Soviet Society was that in an information vacuum you know where there were no sources to information other than what you could get officially unless he had a shortwave radio and even then it was hard because there might be jamming reception might be bad and so on and so forth remember or more youthful members of the audience this is this way predates the internet and any other form of modern communications that that you might think so Soviet citizens really did live in a cocoon in which was incredibly hard to get information to the outside and yet through the social grapevine and this was certainly true at Moscow University it was remarkable how much information they ultimately would get from one guy who knew something it would tell somebody else it would tell somebody else and so on and so forth so somehow or other information vacuums tend to be filled in the end I think the Soviets pay a serious price for this because when Gorbachev finally does level with the people about fact it's been a long bloody war we've taken a lot of casualties it hasn't been a happy experience an awful lot of folks are convinced at that point that the the Communist Party is outlived its usefulness so they really did themselves an enormous disservice like I've I think I've covered that so I want to scurry right along one of the things the Soviets did in the meantime was to disseminate documents for international distribution such as this one this is among many things many publications that I grabbed while I was at the university many of them were in Russian of course nearly all were in Russian but occasionally there'd be a nugget in English I could use for presentations like this and this was essentially a compilation of all the official statements by Brezhnev and other folks statements from the Politburo and whatnot but what was actually happening in Afghanistan from from their point of view needless to say the divergence between this and reality grew as the as the war proceeded in the end the Soviets don't accomplish their objectives in Afghanistan to a degree this is attributable to Western aid to the resistance it's often noted that the supply of Stinger missiles for example from the United States starting in about 85 or 86 limited the Soviet ability to conduct helicopter warfare or mobile warfare and to use combat aircraft it's also true that the supply of weapons to the Mujahideen mattered what was perhaps even bigger was that the program of migratory genocide that I talked about earlier blew up in the Soviets face when you stop and think about it what better place could the Mujahideen possibly have to recruit fighters from than a population of four million fairly ticked off refugees living on the other side of the Pakistan border in refugee camps you've got a huge population of young combat aged males with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no opportunity but an axe to grind and the the Mujahideen will be well supported with fighters from from that base so that really doesn't work out for the Soviets and the fact that it's in Pakistan offers sanctuary to a great part of the resistance one template against which you can look at the outcome of this war and I'll use this as a kind of a closing point then I'll open the floor to questions is an idea actually coined by my good friend dr. Tom Huber who just happens to be sitting in the front row called compound war and indeed an eighth of an even higher state fortified compound war essentially what the resistance had going for it were the following they had a lot of capable guerrilla fighters they had sanctuary across the frontier in Pakistan where the Soviets could occasionally cheat and conduct hot pursuit but in general they couldn't strike at the refugee camps moreover they had the indirect support of a major regular force the Soviet Army in the in the largest part is still tied down in Europe holding the inter German border eyeballed eyeball with NATO forces so that always restricts the Soviets ability to divert more strength to Afghanistan and then you have the diplomatic and material leverage provided by the United States and others United States with a lot of technology a lot of the money coming from Saudi Arabia and a lot of the expertise and assistance on the ground going through Pakistan and so the Soviets really have an awfully difficult problem to try to deal with and they're unable to successfully get over the top again I also go back to the initial conditions that they set for the war the way they took over the government the way the PDPA had antagonized the population the way the Soviet style of combat further antagonized the population created a nearly impossible problem that was going to be incredibly difficult to resolve by military means to be sure the Soviets accomplished a lot tactically during the war and they want a lot more fights than they lost but that doesn't necessarily mean that you achieve your political strategic objective and they didn't Gorbachev is the man then who finds the exit door for the Soviets he's in an advantageous position to do this he was not one of the inner circle who made the decision to go into Afghanistan so he doesn't own the problem it's not his fault so he can make the step to withdraw furthermore he now has every incentive to Gorbachev has figured out in a way that his predecessors had not that the war in Afghanistan was he used the expression at one point a bleeding wound it also prevented him from doing what he thought was necessary to get the Soviet Union out of its political and economic malaise and that was engagement from the West they needed a new dynamism they needed new technology they needed to break out of the old muddle the Cold War he couldn't do it and he knew it as long as they were in Afghanistan so he's got both the motive and the opportunity to change political course and he will with that I'll stop and I'll be glad to entertain questions yes yeah fundamentalists objection in getting all the weapons circulated through Pakistan so he can divvy amount was and this was in his process of Islamic izing all of Pakistan back in that day his thought was that if he had all the weapons stockpile and he can funnel those weapons out to the most Islamic fundamentalist groups but the best weapons and the greater numbers and then work his way down from there that's largely the way it works out I'm not sure that's the entirety was of his motivation it's often pointed out also that a lot of the groups that were most willing to fight happened to be those Islamist factions so there's a combination of things that's where his sympathies way but that's also where the largest number of folks who wanted to carry the fight to the Soviets could be found so I think it was probably those two factors that influenced that a lot I remember at the time that there seemed to be a lot of speculation in US news in general about the fact that the Soviets were really after a deep warm water port etc and in looking at the map again of course seeing that big swath of Pakistan that looked rather far-fetched what's your take on that whole story that seemed to have a lot of credence at the time amongst the US did and it certainly was probably the biggest thing that created an alarm and and told US policymakers we better do something my feeling at the time and my feeling when I wrote my book on the war in Afghanistan and still today is that the Soviets were not doing this in order to get to take Iran and get the deepwater port or somehow get farther south this was really about Afghanistan in in this case the Soviets did not actually want to create the kind of international crisis that they created and I think to the extent we've had archival releases since then of decision making policy documents from the from the Politburo there's there's nothing to suggest that they had grander objectives than Afghanistan they simply wanted to keep Afghanistan in their orbit and they were after much deliberation committed to doing it did the Soviets send any political agents into Pakistan to create a pro-soviet movement they perhaps tried I'm not aware of any major effort to to do that Pakistan was not fertile soil for the Soviet message and indeed there'd been tensions between Pakistan and the Soviets the Soviets also at that time had to be worried about the Chinese response and indeed in some of the early Politburo thinking one or more Soviet experts had offered the opinion you know if we invade Afghanistan and provoke the wrath of the United States and Pakistan want this is going to be a real gift to China which will be happy to pile on and make it that much harder in in Afghanistan so the Soviet ability to influence what was going on in Afghan in Pakistan sorry was pretty limited and they were also still trying to do what they could in in Iran which was a highly volatile situation and if you'll recall in Iran the Soviets were often referred to as the the other Great Satan so they had some public relations issues kind of across the the southern periphery of the whole whole country the question was what did the PDPA do about the ethnic divisions they were not successful in in dealing with all of that indeed the early politics of the PDPA had in fact to a degree reinforced ethnic divisions so it was it was highly highly problematic and once the Soviets invade their while there will be starting about 80 for a campaign of national reconciliation so-called promulgated from the from the government and there will even be a change of leadership when they decide that babrak karmal has lost all credibility they'll switch him out with dr. Najibullah it's a fresh start but not very fresh because he too is pretty well tied to version they are they are anchored by the past and they're also in a way handicapped by the Soviet presence the Soviet presence is paradoxically a burden as well as a support the Soviet invasion did one thing for the various resistance factions that could not have happened otherwise that is it could cause them to unite so they united across tribal and ethnic lines to fight Russians and one of the reasons that the PDPA regime would last a couple of years after the Soviet withdrawal is that when the Soviets pull out these divisions are to some degree moderated and there's a kind of a new round of jockeying for position to see who's going to who's going to succeed in getting power so it's a rather complicated position but back to your starting question I know they didn't accomplish a whole lot not that they didn't make some effort but they they couldn't do it yes um I can't help but notice the timing these would be the Vietnam War was there any sense in the Russian military that they were not making the same mistake simply because the American mistake had been the jungle and this is their chance to use the helicopters use the technology absent the so it was all going to turn out so much better that's a great question and I think your what you suggest is well taken the Soviets were of course fully aware of what happened to the u.s. in Vietnam and how complicated and troublesome that war became they were pretty sure they could avoid those problems and I think the the difference in scenery had a lot to do with it yeah this is a war in a completely different environment but they'd also kind of deluded themselves into thinking but that course you know the cause of North Vietnam and we get comm course that was that was righteous so of course the Americans would lose our cause here in Afghanistan is righteous so we'll be fine they managed to avoid drawing really serious comparisons until they were staring them in the face there were a few folks who early on saw this could be problematic but for the most part they couldn't sell it to the politicians who made the decisions are what lessons do you think our country could get from the Soviet experience well that that's probably a longer presentation than the one I just gave it's also pretty complicated what's clear in the aftermath of all that is that Afghanistan is a pretty complicated place to work it's a complicated place for Afghans to work you've you've never really had a highly functioning centralized government in Afghanistan that enjoyed popular legitimacy across the country so you're breaking all precedent just trying to do that because of all the historic ethnic and tribal divisions the potential for insurgencies of one stripe or another seems perpetually there so you've got a a really big problem trying to surmount that in a way the one of the greatest problems of the last decade has been the legacy of the civil war in that followed the Soviet war Afghanistan did not lapse into peace it fell into a civil war where the factions Rheda vided up and fought one another for control of Kabul and that's what eventually put the Taliban in power in 1996 and interestingly the the one of the reasons the Taliban collapsed so quickly when we arrived is that they'd been in power long enough to develop a track record so that most Afghan --ax Atkins could be satisfied whoa really don't like these guys so any changes has got to be good and so we enjoyed the benefit of that wave when when the United States entered so there are no really easy solutions in Afghanistan and you bred up you got to bring a lot of patience and a lot they're going to have to work some things out themselves to a large degree we have time for one more question uh could we have two because she's been waiting a while okay thank you well how many wars have been fought in Afghanistan it's like US and Russia and had there been a lot of worden ations fighting in Afghanistan or just talking out through third history through history uh it's yeah in the scene of many wars it's kind of a myth that Afghanistan has never really been conquered but it is true it's never been conquered for long it's never been a particularly hospitable place for unwelcome foreigners to stay and the the warrior culture grounded in tribalism in Afghanistan has made them capable of producing a a formidable resistance very very very difficult to to overcome but there have been other periods you know if you go back to the pre 1978 period Afghanistan had had several decades of relative calm and by local standards prosperity it's in a way the Soviet invasion that that tips them over the edge because they were making little by little progress towards stability and modernization and then the whole thing unravels and even as the US comes in in in 2001 it's already still a highly turbulent situation it's amazing that the u.s. is able to establish the level of stability that it has yeah well since this is a seminar on history oh and we should learn from history historically Alexander the Great didn't have any luck Genghis Tom pecan and then the Soviets came in and they ended up with 12 countries and we're there and I'm wondering what business are we why are we there spending billions of dollars when it really has not been a winning situation historically well there's another question that could probably take a long-winded answer and I guess my proper has answer as a as a historian is we'll have to wait and see how how this one comes out it's Afghanistan is an important regional strategic player however turbulent and troublesome it might be and outcomes in Afghanistan matter also greatly to what happens in Pakistan which is another important strategic strategic player it's a region of the world that is difficult to ignore even perhaps more than ever in the current timeframe but the rest give me another 10 years to get some more perspective sorry about that lame answer

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 89,404

Rating: 4.6095443 out of 5

Keywords: Afghanistan, Soviet Union, Dr. Bob Baumann, Dole Institute of Politics, Ft Leavenworth, 2012, Soviet War In Afghanistan (Event), Bob Baumann, Fort Leavenworth, KU, University of Kansas, Military History

Id: JgIkhXaTBUw

Length: 63min 2sec (3782 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2012