- The Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s had huge
consequences for the development of international geopolitics for the next 2 decades. The Mujahideen
insurgency, which originally rose up against the Afghan Communist government in 1978, now had
the unenviable task of going toe-to-toe with a military superpower in the shape of the Soviet
Union. The subsequent resilience and tenacity shown by the Afghan guerrilla forces stunned not
only the Soviet forces but much of the world. They were duly rewarded for their perseverance
with an abundance of material and moral support from a number of pivotal allies. The 9
or so years of warfare has been argued by many to have had a significant bearing on
the outcome of the Cold War. Not to mention the fact that it would go on to play a huge role
in determining Afghanistan’s fate until today. - On Christmas Eve December 24th, Soviet
forces started moving into the country under the pretext of a pre-existing friendship
treaty. They quickly pinpointed key centres of telecommunication with the aim of disabling the
communications network so that the Soviets could take hold of the capital Kabul and carry out
Operation Storm-333 3 days later. This was the name given to the operation under which President
Amin was assassinated by Soviet Special Forces, aka the Spetsnaz, in the Tajbeg Palace. The
daring operation was a remarkable success, carried out in just 40 minutes. The very
next day, the Soviets brought in Babrak Karmal, perceived to be a more moderate
communist, as Afghanistan’s new President. By the beginning of 1980, approximately 80,000
Soviet troops had poured into the country through 2 ground routes and 1 air corridor. Their
instructions were to take control of the major urban centres and highways inside the country.
- The reaction of the international community was largely unanimous. Most of the Islamic world
strongly condemned the Soviet actions; whilst the UN General Assembly passed a resolution protesting
the Soviet invasion by a vote of 104-18. The Soviets stated that it was a legitimate
intervention since they were obliging aid requested by the official Afghan government.
However the international community was not convinced by this: why would President Amin
invite the Soviets in to kill him and topple his government? The reaction of the Afghan
people was similarly unanimous. The Soviet military’s presence did not have the desired
effect the Bolshevik high command was seeking. Instead of bringing security and stability,
it invoked a deep-seated hostility to the idea of a foreign invasion within the Afghans. The
British had had first-hand experience with the patriotic fervour of the Afghans during the 19th
century. Now that Islam was also under attack, in the eyes of the Muslim population,
there was no way that Soviets could have the early withdrawal they wanted.
- The unpopularity of this war amongst the Afghans served as the perfect
recruitment tool for the Mujahideen groups; the most prominent of which established their
headquarters across the border in Pakistan. Throughout the course of the war, roughly 6
million Afghans were forced to flee the country; that’s around a third of the entire
country. In fact, there are some that estimate that half of the world’s refugees
in the 1980s were Afghan. With more than 3 million moving to Pakistan whilst around 2
million fled to Iran. These refugee camps, especially the ones in Pakistan, served as focal
centres of recruitment for the cause of Jihad. It should be specified that this migration was
not merely an ideological reaction to the infidel Soviets. Rather, a significant amount of it was
due to Soviet military tactics and practises. Initially, the situation was characterised by the
Soviets being content with their enclave strategy, that is they were committed to defending major
cities and roads whilst avoiding large-scale pacification campaigns in the countryside
which was largely controlled by the Mujahideen. But soon after, the Soviets started to favour
more of an aggressive policy that went hand in hand with President Karmal’s calls in 1982 for
a campaign called “From City to Village” - that would try to extend communist control from
the provincial centres out to the rural areas. Naturally, this led to an
intensification of conflict. The Soviets would attack villages that they
suspected of harbouring the Mujahideen; a lot of the times, the villagers were unfortunate
that the Mujahideen attacked a Soviet convoy near their village which subsequently led to
Soviet reprisal attacks on civilians. According to the eminent Afghan historian,
Mohammad Hassan Kakar, the Afghans were the victims of a deliberate attempt at genocide; he
states “The claim of the Soviet Union that it dispatched its “limited contingent” to repulse
foreign aggression proved groundless after the uprising of February 1980, when its war machine
began to kill not only the Mujahideen but also defenseless civilians throughout the country.
Frustrated by the tough resistance and their inability to suppress it expeditiously, the
Soviets embarked on a program of genocide.” Whilst this statement may seem exaggerated,
there was certainly a conscious effort on the Soviet leadership’s part to intimidate
the countryside into submission. This included indiscriminate massacres, rape,
forced depopulation, the destruction of crops and irrigations, leaving millions of mines scattered
across the country, some of them being booby traps disguised as children’s toys. In conjunction with
this, the communist Afghan secret police KHAD was also especially feared and despised throughout the
country. Rather than breaking the morale of the Afghan people and Mujahideen, these heavy-handed
tactics only served to reinforce their stubborn resistance.
- Even though the rugged and determined nature of
the Mujahideen would prove to be the bedrock of the Afghan path to victory, it is impossible to
undermine the importance of the role played by foreign countries in supporting their efforts.
Within the Afghan resistance, the Americans saw an opportunity to undermine their Cold War rivals.
And so began Operation Cyclone, one of the biggest and longest covert CIA operations ever, where
America sent financial aid to the Mujahideen. To shed more light on this, we now
go to Cypher from Cynical Historian: It should be mentioned that the Americans were
extremely careful and measured in extending their military support to the Mujahidin. The idea of
Afghanistan becoming the USSR’s Vietnam was not so enthusiastically embraced by the American
political machine at beginning of the conflict, and for good reason. For starters, unlike
America and Vietnam, the Soviet Union actually shared a border with the Afghans, thus reducing
potential logistical issues; also, the Soviets, along with their Russian Empire predecessors,
had a rich history of invasions, giving them an advantage in expertise; and lastly, the issue of
human casualties in a war was not a regime-shaking matter for the authoritarian Bolsheviks. So for
the first few years of the war, the Americans were cautious about leaving their foot print in
Afghanistan fearing that if the resistance fails, it would become another blow to them; which would
mean that the Vietnam syndrome, the American public’s aversion to involvement in overseas
conflicts, would not only not heal but it would get even worse. Therefore, the more the Afghan
resistance endured and strengthened, the more the USA would increase their military assistance.
- American aid was funneled to the Mujahideen through the conduit of the ISI, the Pakistani
secret service. The Pakistani government under the military general President Muhammad Zia Ul-Haq
threw its full weight of support behind the Afghan resistance; accommodating the millions of refugees
and providing training camps for the Mujahideen. General Zia skillfully used the Afghan issue
for his own political ambition by gripping on to absolute power for 10 years. At the same time,
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan served Zia’s national interests as well, since it deflected
attention away from the nuclear programme which Pakistan was actively pursuing. Saudi Arabia was
another major contributor to the Mujahideen cause. Officially, they stated that they would match
the USA’s financial aid. Iran played a key role in helping the Shia Mujahideen factions,
especially from the Hazara ethnic group. The communist government of China was
also involved in aiding the Mujahideen against their fellow communist rivals the Soviets. What is often downplayed is the role played
by private donations - journalist Jason Burke references an interview with the Head of the ISI
during the war Hameed Gul and states that “as little as 25 per cent of the money for the Afghan
jihad was actually supplied directly by states”. - The resolve of the Mujahideen and the
foreign aid combined to create a clinical and effective force that the Soviets and their
Afghan communist allies could not contain. The Mujahideen ensured that this would be
an Afghan style war, one which saw the tough mountainous terrain of the country being used
to produce a masterpiece of guerrilla warfare. It is tough to know for sure their true strength
of numbers but it is estimated that the Mujahideen had up to 250,000 fighters. They specialised in
hit-and-run tactics as well as ambushing convoys. Whilst they started out with
the outdated Enfield rifles, the Afghan Mujahideen moved on to the now iconic
AK-47 Kalashnikovs as their favoured weapon. A particularly menacing foe for them was
the Soviet gunships, such as the Mi-24 Hind gunships that were used in search and
destroy operations. This issue was tackled by the Americans who in 1986 started supplying the
Mujahideen with Stinger Missiles - heat seeking missiles that were shot at Soviet gunships.
Some analysts viewed the introduction of these surface-to-air missiles as a game changer;
going on to coin the term the “Stinger Effect”. Although their effectiveness is debated by others.
- Whilst on-the-ground the Mujahideen
had operational agency to determine their best course of action within their small
groups, the wider movement did have political leaders that formed their own parties which the
Mujahideen would then affiliate themselves with. The Pakistani based Peshawar Seven was by far the
most important group of parties in the war effort. They were supported by America, Saudi Arabia
and of course Pakistan. The most prominent party of the Peshawar Seven was the Hezb-i Islami,
an Islamist group led by Gulbadin Hekmatyar. This group received the lion’s share of the
aid from America, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. But the group’s leader Hekmatyar has received
intense criticism throughout the years for being an extremist that was more focused on
enlarging his own influence than the cause of defeating the Soviets. According to CIA officer
Graham Fuller, “He spent a lot more of his time fighting other mujahideen than killing
Soviets”. He has been accused on numerous occasions of ordering assassinations and attacks
on other Mujahideen factions during the war. In this regard, Hekmatyar is often juxtaposed
with Ahmad Shah Massoud a commander for the Jamiat-i Islami party. The charismatic
Massoud was lionized, by the Western media, for his tactical brilliance in guerrilla warfare
as the “Lion of Panjshir”. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial about Massoud in 1992
titled “The Afghan Who Won the Cold War”. But Massoud’s track record seems to be as
murky as Hekmatyar’s. Throughout the war, Massoud was criticized by other Mujahideen
parties for making deals with the Soviets. In 1983, he signed a year-long truce with
the Soviets where he agreed to not attack Soviet convoys on their way through the pivotal
Salang Tunnel from Soviet Central Asia to Kabul. It is tough to understate the importance
of the Salang Tunnel for the Soviets: according to General Gromov, the Commander
of the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, “Ahmad Shah could have turned Salang into a
Russian graveyard just by throwing rocks.” His supporters claim that he intended
to use this time to rebuild his forces and give the war-weary inhabitants of the
Panjshir Valley where he himself was from, a break from the constant major Soviet campaigns
in the area. But to his Afghan critics, that doesn’t change the fact that Soviet forces
could now focus on implementing their harsh and ruthless tactics on Massoud’s fellow countrymen
and women in other parts of the country. In spite of all this focus on specific leaders,
it should not lead us to romanticize their roles. Whereas in reality, the Afghan Jihad
was too big, too complicated and had too many major actors for it to be boiled
down and essentialised in the manner that Western journalists often portrayed it to be.
Massoud’s ceasefire with the Soviets is a perfect example of this sloppy portrayal as well as the
multi-faceted nuances of the Afghan resistance: how can a man who had a ceasefire with
the enemy, be regarded as a leader of the resistance?
- In 1985, the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev came
to power in the USSR and the Soviet need to exit Afghanistan gained fresh impetus. In preparation
for their withdrawal, the Soviets gave greater responsibility to Afghan communist government.
In 1986, they replaced President Karmal with Mohammad Najibullah, the former head of the
Afghan secret service. President Najibullah was clearly given instructions to take a policy of
rapprochement with the opposition that would bring an end to hostilities. A program of National
Reconciliation was put forward and in 1987 a new constitution was ratified which, amongst
other things, showed a greater role for Islam. Already severely weakened by thousands
of soldiers defecting every year, the Afghan communist government welcomed the idea
of a power-sharing scenario with the Mujahideen. But the notion of making peace with a weak
puppet communist regime that was ideologically antagonistic to Islam was not enticing for the
Mujahideen leadership. Regardless, Gorbachev had to find a way to withdraw from Afghanistan,
which he described as a “bleeding wound”. Finally, in April 1988 the Geneva Accords were
signed by Afghanistan, USSR, Pakistan and USA, securing the withdrawal of
Soviet forces from the country. The Mujahideen leadership, however, was furious
that they were left out of the Geneva talks. By February 15th 1989, the last
Soviet soldiers had left Afghanistan. They had lost around 15,000
soldiers in the conflict. But the war took an especially heavy toll on
Afghanistan. More than 9 years of fighting had left anywhere between 500,000 to 2 million Afghans
dead. A third of the population was forced to flee the country, whilst there were more than a million
Afghans displaced within the country. More than 2 million Afghans were left wounded; a number that
was guaranteed to increase even after the Soviets pulled out because they had left more than 10
million unexploded mines scattered throughout the country. If we consider that pre-war Afghanistan
had a reported population of about 15 million, we can see that the Afghan- Soviet war subjected most
of the nation to becoming a casualty of some form. As for the future of the country, the words of
a Soviet Captain who served in Afghanistan would prove fateful: “Children born in Afghanistan at
the start of the war... have been brought up in war conditions, this is their way of life.”
- The aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal did not bring an end to war and conflict; in
fact it led to a number of around the world. The USSR, already in the throes of
a permanent decline, would collapse within 2 years and all of its constituent
member states would gain independence. As for the Americans, their interest in
Afghanistan declined considerably now that their main strategic goal of dealing a blow
to their Soviet counterparts was achieved. But it should be noted that up until the fall
of the Afghan Communist government in 1992, the USA still sent hundreds of millions
of dollars in aid money to the Mujahideen. Globally, it is hard to understate the importance
of the Afghan-Soviet war to the prominence of Militant Islamic Fundamentalism that would come
to define the 2000’s. The most famous example of the link between the two was Osama bin Laden and
how the roots of his terrorist group Al-Qaeeda can be traced back to the battlefields of Afghanistan
where he fought with the Mujahideen against the Soviets and Afghan communists. But for more
on the ‘War on Terror’ and how it developed, definitely check out Cynical Historians video
which is dedicated purely to that topic. As for the Afghans, their woes and anguish were
not over. It took 3 years of hard fighting for the Mujahideen to finally bring down the
Afghan Communist government in 1992. Then, the world watched in horror as the Mujahideen
groups immediately turned on each other and initiated a bitter 4 year long civil war that
saw the destruction of the capital Kabul; and it was only brought to an end in
1996 by the emergence of the Taliban. 41 years after war began in Afghanistan, the
country is still in a state of warfare today. - As usual I wanna thank my Patreons for their generous support, especially my newest
Patreons Alexander & Burak. If you wanna support the channel, there’s a link to my
Patreon in the description to this video. - Making this video and its first half
counterpart were pretty special to me, being that I am Afghan. Now I know this topic can
be relatively complex, so if I have missed out any important details please comment them down below.
One thing that was a little bit of a bummer was not being able to find any free images or videos
of the Mujahideen leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. - Also, check out Cynical Historian’s video on the
Global War on Terror. Not only is he an academic but he actually served in Afghanistan with the
US Army. So he has both theoretical and practical insight into the subject matter.
- Until next time, Peace!
