Angry Planet - When the Soviets Fled Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Conquerors and nations have been trying to rebuild Afghanistan in their own image for thousands of years. The U.S. is just the latest to fail.The Soviet Union also failed, with a little push from the United States. But they learned their lesson in only 10 years, from 1979-1989.Mark Galeotti joins us today to talk about the lessons the U.S. probably should have learned from the USSR. He’s Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and has literally written the book - no three books! - on this very subject. We’ll put links in the show notes.Storm-333: KGB and Spetsnaz seize Kabul, Soviet-Afghan War 1979The Panjshir Valley 1980–86Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Last WarSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world of their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Conquerors and nations have been trying to rebuild Afghanistan in their own image for thousands of years. The U.S. is just the latest to fail. The Soviet Union also failed, with a little push from the United States, but they learned their lesson in only 10 years, from 1979 to 1989. Mark Galiati joins us today to talk about the lessons the U.S. probably should have learned from the USSR.

are. He's a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and has literally written the book. No, three books on this very subject. We'll put links in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure. Before we get to the parallels, I think it'd probably be helpful to nail the basics. What were the circumstances of the Soviet invasion? Well, I mean, obviously, totally unlike this, it was essentially an invasion based on a combination of fear and stupidity. What had happened was, look, for a long time, the Soviets had had no real problems with Afghanistan. First of all, under a king, because they didn't really care about Afghanistan that much. It was on their borders, but they just wanted someone they could deal with that wasn't

going to cause a problem. The king was deposed by a revolution, and you actually had the rise of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, an ultra-Marxist party, which you'd think, think the Soviets would be delighted about. But in fact, when the PDPA took power on a coup, Sergei Akramiev, who was at the time in the general staff and one of the sort of the sharpest of Russia, Soviet Union's senior officers, at that point, he said, we are going to have a headache with Afghanistan. Because what happened is the PDPA tried to immediately impose dramatic social change on the country, taking what is, after all, a country of a country, which one of the sort of fundamental elements of Afghan society is that Kabul pretends to govern

and the countryside allows it to pretend to govern so long as it doesn't actually take itself too seriously. Now you had the PDPA actually trying to govern from the cities, a party that was essentially of the educated middle class, trying to impose socialist values, trying to stamp out all the old practices of cultural, tradition, and of course, Islam. And they fought back. And so what was up to that point a relatively peaceful backwater as far as the Soviets were concerned, suddenly began to become a problem. You know, the rise of Islamist rebels, a government that looks as if it might fall. And this is, you know, shortly after the Iranian revolution. At the time, the big bugbear was precisely that there would be this kind of crashing wave of Islam. And from the

Soviets point of view, they looked at Soviet Central Asia, the so-called the stands, with the population that they felt could easily be won over by this kind of ideology. And so they started to get scared. And the government in Kabul was saying, police and enders troops, and they were thinking, we really don't want to get involved. But then after a certain point, there was a sense that actually, look, we need to do something. And so they came to Poster's idea that they were going to send in a sort of initial commando assault, what's called Operation Storm 333, that was going to eliminate the current ruler of the PDPA, who was a very unpleasant neo-star. Stalinist. We really don't need to shed any tears for him, but also someone who was absolutely

unwilling to make any compromises with his own country. So they were going to send in sort of a, you know, a crack team to go to eliminate him. They were going to put a much more moderate, pragmatic, as they saw it, leader in charge. They'd send in some troops to sort of sweet around the country. And really as far as the Soviets were concerned, the site of Soviet tanks would immediately cow the population. Everyone would realize that it was time to get serious and go back home. And within six months, everything would be over. Within six months, the boys would be back home.

A more moderate PDPA government would be in charge, and everything would be fine. The problem, of course, was that no one let the Afghans in on what their anointed role was to be in this plan. So, yeah, Storm 333, the attack was a very, very, I mean, although there were elements of it, aspects of it which were kind of cobbled together at the last minute, as is always the way. But it was very successful, almost bloodless from the Soviets point of view, much less so from the Afghan's point of view. And then at the same time, you had Operation Bical 79, which was the actual sending of troops into the country. And they very quickly took the cities. And again, you know, the Soviets, that they had a very urban-centered notion.

You take the cities and you've got the country. Well, not in Afghanistan. And what happened clearly was that actually this led to a massive upsurge. And this, quote, quote, six-month operation ended up being 10-year-one. Because basically, they had developed a plan which had almost no real bearing on what kind of a country Afghanistan really was. And it was this sort of triumph of imperial, we can call it a combination of arrogance and naivety, which is what brought them in. And just as one can argue, it brought the British in in the 19th century and it brought the Americans in later. And Alexander, the great couple thousand years before. Yeah, I mean, in fairness, I mean, at least he didn't have obvious examples in front of him to say,

ha, this might be a bad move. Can we elaborate on this distinction between the cities of Afghanistan and the country of Afghanistan? in? Yeah, I mean, look, if one looks at, for example, 1979 when the Soviets went in, these were two totally different countries. In the countryside, the social patterns that obtained were in many ways little moved on from medieval times. There was a little bit of technology. A lot of them would be shouldering their 303 Leenfield rifles that were actually sort of left back from English deployments there. But essentially, this is a place in which clan and tribe traditional social patterns and so forth all dominated. The cities, the towns, on the other hand,

you know, were going through a period of genuine modernisation. This is a place where, you know, young women in short skirts were going to university. It was a place in which actually there was a lot of intellectual ferment and, you know, rise of leftist ideas. And again, this is the thing, it created this sense amongst the urban population, or particularly the politically active urban population, that it was necessary to drag Afghanistan kicking and screaming into, well, I say the 20th century. I mean, frankly, they probably would have been quite happy to drag the countryside into the 19th century as a start. But this is it. I mean, in a way, the thing is that actually there was very, very little what you might think of as

kind of social mobility between the countryside. I mean, on the whole, yes, of course, there were people who shifted from the countryside into the cities, but never the other way around. No one thought, I'm going to give up all this sort of electricity and hot and cold running water and move into the countryside. And if they did and tried to actually expand their ideas, they would usually be driven out. And this was a thing. It was never the role, whether it was the king or later on, the elected government, it was never the role of the cities to try and tell the countryside what to do. The countryside would as far as possible trade with, but ignore the towns and cities, so long as the towns and cities realize where the true balance of power lay.

So why did the Soviet Union care, I mean, about the countryside? I mean, was it just a matter of putting a bow around everything and being able to say, ah, Afghanistan is all one thing? Or it just seems a little of, well, I mean, obviously they didn't get it. If one takes a look at how the Taliban have swept through the country, I mean, if you control the countryside, you will take the towns. Sometimes it'll be quick, sometimes it'll be slow. But the countryside is where the food is. The countryside is where the roads are.

Countryside are where the people are, to be perfectly honest. In due course, you have to basically have the country, or at least the majority of the country, in order to be able to bring stability. I mean, what was happening was precisely that you had a combination of rising rural unrest that was beginning to move beyond, you know, it starts with lynching the local tax collector or the person who comes in and says that,

no, actually, he's the anointed official in charge rather than the local mullah. But then what happens is that kind of resistance and in due course bands together and you start to get groups of, quote-unquote, bandits, which we would call revolutionaries or insurgents, and movements begin to form in the countryside. And so if you can't control the countryside, then actually what you will have is armies being formed there. And that's the crucial thing, because these people can then, I mean, they know where the cities are. They can always come in. There's going to be the people bringing in the food or whatever else who will come in and increasingly, we saw this in 1979, begin to launch

terrorist attacks against the power structures in the cities. So this is it. I mean, essentially, I mean, it's interesting because at this point, Leonie Bresnev, the Soviet Party General Secretary was increasingly senile. He'd already sort of died a couple of times and jumped started. And to be perfectly honest, had lost much of his capacities then. And, you know, unleashed a couple of occasions. When discussing Afghanistan, he actually got it confused with Czechoslovakia, which had been crushed in 1968. And that was that kind of an operation. You know, it was dealing with a relatively small, relatively advanced European country where absolutely the power is in the cities and once you've got your tanks in the cities and once you've made it clear that you're serious, the population thing, huh, okay, well, that's a shame. We enjoyed our little moment of relative freedom, but we're back in the fold.

That's not Afghanistan. And again, I think this is a thing. They had a very European mindset that didn't really appreciate that really Afghanistan is the countryside. So how did the Soviet Union conduct the war? Was it particularly brutal? Was it a hearts and minds campaign? How would you describe it? I mean, it was both. They absolutely were aware of the hearts and minds dimension, although, of course, they were hobbled by the fact that, you know, however much they might try to fudge it, this was still a Marxist-Leninist regime, trying to win over an essentially Muslim country and quite often in many cases ferociously Muslim. But nonetheless, they did a lot of, you know, building of roads and such. And again, that's one of the interesting things that have been cropping up of late, is people saying, well, actually, at least the Soviets built roads. But they did a lot of that kind of stuff. There was a lot of money sort of dumped in to trying to sort of show that actually modernity had value. An attempt to try and win over certain communities, you had the rise of, again, sort of local militias, trying to particularly target young people who might be dissatisfied with the old status quo, women. and other groups that really had had much more to lose. The trouble was that, however, in some cases, effective these were, there was also a phenomenally brutal war being fought.

I mean, in 10 years, the Soviets lost about 15,000 people, a casualties in dead. The Afghans probably lost, and this is all ballpark, because unfortunately, about a million. and the Soviets and indeed their PDPA allies, you know, we're often using exceedingly brutal methods. You know, we're talking about carpet bombing areas. We're talking about clearing out villages. There was even a suggestion that they were involved in what someone's called migratory genocide, where you try and depopulate whole parts of the country. Personally, I don't think that was ever a strategy. But on the other hand, that was often the effect of the kind of very indiscriminate methods.

using. And the point is you can't combine the two effectively. It's all very well building a school here. But when at the same time you're bombing the village next door, no one's going to think of you actually as a benign friend of the people. And the thing was a lot of it was political because what you had is, again, this initial operation, which was expected to be really just about intimidation and flying the flag that actually generated a backlash. You had whole units of the Afghan army defecting or just simply dissolving as everyone just went home, but often went home, taking their Kalashnikov with them. And so there was a steady building up of forces. And at first, you might say there wasn't a strategy, because this is not what they were expecting

to happen. And so, you know, you throw in a few thousand more troops here and a few thousand more troops there and you try various things. But there's also a period of constant political change. This is a period in which actually there was the old joke about, you know, do you have a permit to be at this official funeral, no, it's okay, I have a season ticket because Soviet general secretaries were dropping on an almost biennial basis. Brezhnear finally died. Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB, took over. Now, Andropov had supported the invasion for political reasons, even though he actually had serious doubts about it himself. But he had his eye on the prize. He couldn't afford to look weak in defense of Soviet national interests. But in fact, I mean,

Andropov was even beginning to look at the possibilities for withdrawal. And this is just two years into the war. He very quickly suffered massive kidney failure. He spent most of his next year of his life and political career in permanent dialysis. So he didn't really have the political capital to put into anything there. His successor, Konstantin Tchenenko, probably the most tedious of all Soviet leaders, which is sometimes saying a lot. Actually, clearly he was trying to to basically at least find something that the history books could write about him. And he unleashed a massive campaign of really indiscriminate violence in Afghanistan. Then Gorbachev comes in. Now, Gorbachev was not a part of the initial decision to invade. He has no real support for the

war. But on the other hand, he has a wafer thin political majority within the Communist Party Central Committee. So he can't just simply say, oh, we're pulling out. He has to build that way. And in something part of that is, again, he has to keep the military off the leash for a while. He has to allow them to basically try all the things they're going to try. And when that fails, he says, okay, we need to do something else. So even in the early Gorbachev years, you actually have very high levels of combat operations taking place in Afghanistan. And by this time, you know, in some ways, the Soviets have got quite good at what they're doing. They understand how to launch major combined arms operations, particularly the pension of that.

which is arguably the most important of all the various combat theatres. Periodically, the Soviets will be able to roll in and take it back from the exceedingly effective Mujahideen rebel group that controls it under Ahmad Shama Soud. But the point is, you can't have a military solution to an insurgency. At some point, the Soviets will have to pull their troops back, and at which point the Mujahideen retake the valley. In many ways, the panchia was a metaphor for the war as a whole. You know, the Soviets learned all kinds of tactical and operational lessons, but they never

acquired a strategy, which was going to allow them to. For me, I mean, obviously, there are parallels here between what the United States has tried and what the Soviet Union tried. I do find it interesting that the Soviets also took a two-prong approach. In other words, building the roads. Did they do that in the Panjira as well? I mean, did they try to, I'm going to put this in quotes, improve life for people there when they took it over? Or was it, again, just military?

Well, they never really had a chance to, because what would happen is, again, they would roll in with their offens when the main combat forces were withdrawn, as they had to, because you can't keep them sort of there and at full fighting tempo. What they tended to do was originally they would leave behind garrisons of Afghan troops. And that very clearly proved to be a non-starter. And so they started stiffening them with Soviet forces, particularly paratroopers, who had much more initiative, much more capacity to really sort of go and take the battles out. But the point is they never really had the time to actually move beyond the immediate post-combat phase. And after a certain point, to be perfectly honest, I suspect, again, I don't think any Soviet commander would ever admit this, but I suspect they pretty much gave up. I mean, all they really wanted to do was neutralize the panchia. The thought of winning it over was pretty much a non-star.

So I apologize for laughing, but they tried to stand up the Afghan forces so that they could at least hold the panpshire while, as you said, they couldn't keep up a full combat operations all the time there. So did they have any commitment from Afghan forces? Do you think that there were actual loyal people? Was it sort of, I mean, one of the most striking things. Loyal to what, though. Well, right, exactly. That's just as loyal as the Afghan troops turned out to be in this. Well, I mean, I think that's complicated.

All right. Well, so, so, how so? I mean, talking about then or now, but I think there's always been a different group of Afghan mostly middle class and city dwellers that have have a dream of a different Afghanistan that have kind of used these empires coming in to try to stand up that dream. And again, I think it's complicated to think a lot of people have different motives for things. But I think the one thing I would push back on yesterday in Biden's speech was the kind of throwing the Afghans completely under the bus.

But anyway, I don't want to derail this into that whole conversation. But I'm sorry, it's early. You had a question there. You were going to ask, Jason. Well, actually, can I just pick up on a point that, well, I mean, apart from saying, as well as throwing the Afghans under the bus, I couldn't help but notice that America's allies didn't get anything really like a name check there. Amazing. I never realized that this is a war being fought entirely by the United States. But of course, we're not. No, that's another excellent point. There was a lot of, it was not like Iraq. There was a lot of coalition forces in Afghanistan. There's a lot of other countries fighting there. Britain was there, of course. in large numbers, right? I guess actually the British were also very much involved in Basra in Iraq and major operations there as well, much to Tony Blair's political consternation?

Consternation, yes, I think rather than regret. I don't think he regrets it. Right. Yeah, exactly. So were the people fighting against the Soviets essentially the same people who were fighting against the United States, whether they had the name, the United States? and whether they had the name the Taliban, whether they were organized in Pakistan, but, I mean, were they people with the same aims? I mean, I think an extent is true.

I mean, look, let me go back at first to your comment about the people who are actually fighting with the Soviets. A lot of them were conscripts, but, I mean, the Soviets themselves would freely admit that the trouble is that you recruit a certain number of, you know, a certain number of thousand, and within a couple of months, a huge proportion of those will have already just gone AWOL. If you want to look at the ones who really actually did make a difference, and there were, absolutely, they were Afghan units that demonstrated that they could fight bravely and effectively. They tended to be often drawn precisely from the cities. And that's why often we see an arm of

servicing. I mean, for example, the Air Force, much more of a technical arm of service, much more recruited from educated urbanites, the middle class and such like. Within the military, you had, for example, the commander units, which had their own, their own distinctive uniforms and this breed of corps and such like. And again, this is a classic pattern that we've seen. And actually, the commander units were often very effective. And Shana Bhastani, who is the Afghan commander of them, in due course, would, the Soviets would actually allow him to command set-piece combined arms operations. Another one who actually had an Afghan who was giving the orders, including to Soviet units, which says something about the faith they had in his loyalty, but also in his

professionalism. And there are other units. I mean, in some cases, it was motivated by, by political support. You know, there was, because this was an ideological struggle, you know, there were people who were genuinely supporters of the PDPA and this vision of recreating Afghanistan along Marxist-Leninist lines. And so, you know, that was one of the factors. You had people who were motivated just simply out of horror and disapproval of the rebel. And you had a lot of people who are fighting for the reasons why most soldiers fight, which is basically their mates, they're, you know, the particular commander who actually managed to inspire them and such. Although on the whole, the Afghan officer corps did not really cover itself with glory.

Again, there were exceptions. So, so, so it's a mix. But the point is particularly a counterinsurgency war in which inevitably, this is much more of a sergeants and lieutenant's war. than anything else. You know, it's not like a big set piece, you know, mechanized operation where your basic maneuver unit is more like to be in Soviet terms a division. No, this is one where you had to rely a lot more on smaller units, small garrisons stuck out in the middle of nowhere and so forth. And to do that, there clearly had to be a certain degree of a sprit of core within at least some elements of the Afghan military, which again is a pattern that we've seen replicated in the more recent war. And likewise, the people who were fighting against them,

it was a mix. I think that to a large extent, it was driven at least at first, simply by a pushback, a sense of precisely, you know, we have our ways, we have our culture, and it is not appropriate for anyone else to tell us how to run our affairs. There is a very, very strong streak of, frankly, bloody-mindedness within Afghan culture. And often this was organized precisely under traditional leadership lines. You know, because you have, this is a multi-ethnic country. So, you know, you have a whole variety of different ethnic groupings, which are often actually going to be fighting against each other, as well as against the regime forces and the Soviets. You know, so in that context, it was really about resistance. What one does get over time,

though, is precisely the rise of more sort of purposefully Islamist elements within the resistance, who have a bigger agenda than just get the Soviets out and push Kabul back into its little box, who actually had this bigger ambition. And this is very much, let's be honest, sort of groups that because their ideology often gave them the capacity to operate across ethnic and regional boundaries, They were more effective, they were higher profile, and these are the ones who, on the whole, got the foreign support. You know, we know about the CIA program and the Stinger missiles, but, you know, the Saudis dumped a lot of money into sort of basically buying weapons and arming the militias of their choice, the Chinese likewise, and Pakistan on a massive scale. So, anyway, you have a variety of different sort of foreign patrons who, you know, with different agendas in mind, but clearly, they are going to be supporting the groups that are best able to both mobilize in country,

but also project themselves out of country. You had to be, on some level, a lobbyist, by which I don't mean to say that you had an office on K Street and you wore a jacket and tie, but you precisely had to know, you had to be the kind of group that would welcome in Western journalists to come with you and get some excellent footage of you mortar bombing. an Afghan army checkpoint or something like that. You had to be precisely the sort of person who could present yourself as a useful connector. So I think what happened is over time, although the main reason for the resistance was precisely that it was resistance. You also had the rise of much more ideological, and this tended to mean Islamist movements within that wider resistance.

Right. This war kind of created these Mujahideen fighters, right, as this Islamist force. And I do think that it's important to remember as you just said that it was something that was, that was foreign powers had a big part in propping that up, right? Because it wasn't just material and it was people as well, right, came from Saudi Arabia and came from other Middle Eastern countries to fight in this. war. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why was this Islamist project at this time a part of this? I mean, I think it was, again, you know, what has to think of the time. Again, as I said, this was in the post-Iranian revolution moment when it wasn't just that both the Soviets and the West were worried about a rising Islam. It's also actually within the Islamic world. What you actually got was this emergence of a variety of different. strands that actually simply said, look, Islam is not just about supporting a bunch of fat monarchs and existing structures. It is something which ought to be rekindled, revived and pushed back against

the power blocks of essentially secular powers. Because at that point, United States were not necessarily regarded as the crusaders. That's something that comes along later. At the time, the United States, the Soviets, and indeed the Chinese, were all very much seen as secular power. They were irreligious, anti-religious. And in a way, the only, as far as they were concerned, real religious power was Islam. And in that context, you know, first of all, you had people who are excited by the thought of precisely going and fighting. Secondly, you had people who are encouraged, and particularly from the Saudis, this has always been, well, I say always, for a long time has been quite a Saudi specialty, which is exactly to position yourself as, you know, as the great champion of Islam, while also making damn sure that all those dangerous Islamists go somewhere else and with a bit of luck get killed by, you know, actually, so the Saudis were encouraging sort of more radical figures that way. There's an element in which the Pakistani military intelligence, the ISI, was also sort of tapping these people to be their context. Now, although

it has to be said that the overwhelming majority of the Mujahideen were Afghan, there's no question. But the point is the foreigners would tend to come in, and they would come in, they would be friends with benefits. They would be coming in precisely. They were also the people who could get you access to the Chinese mortars, the Egyptian-made Kalashnikovs, and in due course, the blowpipe and Stinger missiles and whatever else. They tended to be also the ones who were the conduits, or at least had the contacts with the people who were the conduits. So I think this is why they had a disproportionate impact. Did it make all the difference that there was outside support? Or would the Mujahideen actually have succeeded without it?

I suspect they would have succeeded without it. The real outside support that matters, I think, is more in the sort of middle stages. Again, everyone fixates on the Stinger. And in part, quite frankly, I think that's an excellent bit of marketing by the people who make Stinger missiles. because in fact, it didn't have a massive impact on Soviet military operations. At the time when the Stinger missiles were coming in, already the Soviets were moving towards casualty reduction as one of their priorities. So they were already very much cutting down the tempo of their military operation.

So they were just dam-sight fewer helicopters in the sky for a start. And yes, the Stingers meant that they had to operate differently. But actually, the Soviets, again, they were very good at, responding to what we might think of a straightforward military challenges. I mean, what they did is they would launch Spetsnaz, special forces operations, precisely to go and hunt the caravans, which bring in the Stingers and grab the Stingers, and that's why actually the Soviets ended up with a fair stock of them. They would devise new tactics to allow, admittedly, less accurate, but nonetheless to allow their helicopters and close air support to operate without being too vulnerable to the Stinger and so

forth. So yes, it has some impact. The real, I think, game changer, if there was one, was actually in the earlier stages when the Mujahideen had lots and lots of small arms. But what they lacked were the kind of man-portable anti-tank weapons and mortars, crude, simple things, you know, RPGs, recoilist rifles. And a lot of those came in, a lot of those being Chinese knockoffs of Soviet kit. But a lot of that was provided. And that really did make a difference because it allowed them to basically in the rough terrain of Afghanistan take on the armour that the Soviets still so heavily depended upon, particularly at that point in the war. They really like to be behind something solid and metal. And

that's what really allowed them to shift to a much more offensive and ambush-oriented style of warfare. So look, could they have done so regardless, probably, because they were also in a position to buy or steal a lot of stuff from Afghan troops or indeed from Soviet troops, who, after all, this was the time when, unfortunately, the Soviet Union got to meet the opium poppy. And it, you know, it led to a lasting problem. And still to this day, Russia has one of the highest heroin addiction rates in the world. So, you know, there was a lot of opportunity for black marketeering. But nonetheless, I said, I think, you know, it's that kind of unglomerous military support that I think made the most of a difference. Can we talk for a minute about the Soviet

home front. We have talked about in this country how there hasn't been much popular support for the war in Afghanistan for quite some time. But it was actually a real factor in the Soviet Union, too, even though in the United States, we'll skip over that, don't we? I would say, just real quick, sorry, to defend America. I would say it's not so much a lack of popular support. It's that complete negligence and ignorance on the part of the American people. I would bet that there were a lot of people that were shocked to learn that we were still in the last few days. Anyway, that's... No, I think that's fair.

I just want to throw that out there before we get back to it. Sorry. Well, if many Americans were shocked to learn that America was still in Afghanistan, I mean, a lot of Soviet citizens were shocked to discover that they were in Afghanistan in the first place. I was going to bear in mind. And look, I mean, this is a topic. I haven't done my PhD explicitly on the impact of the Afghan war on the Soviet Union.

I could clearly talk for the next three hours, but I suspect your, you're listening. would rather, I don't. But, I mean, one of the interesting things was precisely the extent to which the Soviet leadership, not only did it never expect that it was going to have to, shall I say, get the population on side, remember, because this was going to be a surgical little six-month operation. It never really learned how to deal with that. I mean, the fascinating thing is, the point at which Soviet troops are rolling across the border into Afghanistan, the only official, closest thing there is, shall I say, to an official notice is there was a little sort of one-column-inch piece in, I think it was Pravda. It just simply said a new chapter in Soviet-Afghan relations was open, which is one of the nicer ways of describing, we have just invaded their country and killed their leader. But anyway, for years, there was no war in Afghanistan. It was totally suppressed. And the soldiers, when they were going, weren't told they were going to Afghanistan. You had a lot of cases of soldiers being sold. Yeah, yeah, we're flying you to read a deployment in Poland. And suddenly you unload at Kabul airport. And over time, you know,

Yuri Andropov mentioned the next Soviet leader. I mean, he realized that you couldn't, especially as boys were coming home traumatized or in many cases, you know, injured, or in some cases not coming home at all. You couldn't totally hold the line. So instead, we started to get sifting into the media accounts whereby there are. There are some Soviet soldiers in the country of our great ally, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, and they are conducting military exercises with Afghan forces, when sometimes they are attacked by bandits, to whom, of course, they deliver a convincing armed rebuff. So it was a way of just trying to kind of ease the way into saying, okay, yeah, there is a bit of shooting going on, but there's no war.

It was only actually, I mean, ironically, it happened under Chen Yenko, who was not in any way a liberal, it's because he was sort of stuck into decisions that had made before his period, where you actually started to get real articles coming out. And then with Gorbachev and with Gorbachev's glass-lost, his openness campaign, which is very much about sort of relaxing censorship, you suddenly got, get this blizzard of information about Afghanistan. But the point is, at that time, the journalists, the writers, the publicists, anyway, they were intoxicated by the new freedoms. And if you wanted to get readership, you on the whole had to write critical stuff. And so actually, when you start getting public discussion of Afghanistan, it's almost invariably

negatively couched, or it's really, really leaden official style propaganda. I mean, I had to kind of look through every single issue, for example, of Krasnayas Vestar, the army's newspaper, for the whole 10-year span of the war for my doctorate. And my goodness, you know, the capacity to make a war, both opaque and dull at the same time, is really quite impressive when you read some of those military, quote-unquote, journalists. So obviously, that never really had much of traction, that the government tried to sort of create heroes of the war and fate them as carrying out their internationalist duty. But by that point, no one really cared. I mean, this is a point when the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart, when there just wasn't food in the

shops, when the miners are on strike and you're worried if there's going to be electricity for the next long, cold, hard Russian winter, all that kind of thing. The fact that there's some soldiers off in Afghanistan, you didn't necessarily like it, but you didn't really, it wasn't really important to you when you had so much else on. And the thing is, what happened was Afghanistan was never really important to the Soviets people, but it became a metaphor for whatever it is you really wanted to bitch about. If it was the fact that your country was ruled by a bunch of stupid old men. You use Afghanistan and the decision to go into Afghanistan as the example of that. If you wanted to complain about the fact that corruption was everywhere

and didn't allow people to get their own rights, you use the fact that the veterans who would come back were often totally denied the kind of medical care and the social provisions that they had been promised. But when it comes down to it, you were talking about Afghanistan, but you weren't really caring about the Afghan war or indeed the Afghani, the veterans. You were just using them as an example of whatever was your wider concern. Final example I'll give. This was, after all, Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic federation of happy smiling builders of socialism. The thing that really struck me was that when I would travel around in the sort of the dying days of the Soviet Union, pretty much every ethnicity

was convinced that it was their boys who were being sent disproportionately to this nasty, gritty war. And often they felt it was precisely because Moscow was trying to bleed them dry. So you talk to bolts, you talk to Ukrainians, you talk to people in Central Asia. They'd all have the same thing. I couldn't ever find, because obviously the Soviets didn't really want to release this kind of thing, couldn't ever really find data on the ethnic composition of the soldiers who went. But what I did manage to find was a breakdown of casualties. Now, we have to assume that an Estonian is not more bulletproof than Akirghis. and essentially, you know, it's a crude index, but it gives us a sense of participation.

And the thing was, if you factor out the fact that the paratroopers did much of the real sort of hard fighting, and they tended to be recruited from Russians and Ukrainians and Belarusians, Slavs, factor that out. And basically the casualty rate maps very, very closely over to the ethnic distribution of the Soviet population. In fact, there's no evidence to suggest that there was any kind of discrimination as to who got sent to the war. But that doesn't matter, because what mattered was what everybody believes. And again, everybody believed, again, they used Afghanistan as an example for why they were being hard done by within the context of the Soviet Union. And obviously, that's part of the process that actually leads to the breakup of the Soviet Union because everyone thinks, Moscow is screwing us. we will be so much better on our own.

Do you think that, do you think that Afghanistan accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union? Again, this is, you know, when you do your PhD, you want to be able to prove that this is a really, really important thing. And it was, you know, with the greatest of pain that I have to confess, I don't think it really was a particularly important factor. You know, it was actually really sustainable. And again, this links into the kind of debates about the U.S.

commitment to Afghanistan these days. Take the total casualty rate, 15,000. I mean, obviously, that's 15,000 tragedies. But, I mean, more than that, died in road accidents in the average year in the Soviet Union. The costs were, you know, irksome, particularly at a time when your economy is in crisis, but again, relatively bearable. You know, a million Soviet, not just soldiers, but also civilian advisors and so forth, cycle through Afghanistan in the course of that 10-year war. This is a population of 280 million. So actually, this was a war they could have continued. And they didn't, in part, because there was a sense of, look, we're not going to win.

When the general staff were told, okay, what would it take for you to win? I mean, I'm slightly sort of short, you know, sort of caricaturing the discussion. But the first question they asked was, can we use nukes, knowing full well that they wouldn't be able to? But in part, that was a way of trying to kind of bring home to the civilian leadership that this was a major thing. And then they say, well, look, if you really want us to be able to win this quickly, we'll need a million troops. Which, again, was totally unsupportable. So winning, I mean, sustaining the current level of operation was entirely possible. Winning was inconceivable in military, political and economic terms.

So, I mean, A, it was a case of just biting the bullet. But B, look, it was a very different political situation. Gorbachev was trying desperately to improve relations with the West. He needed Western technology. He needed Western investment. And he knew this was a way of killing two birds with one stone or Kalashnik or bullet. That on the one hand, he could relieve a pressure, you know, a mild pressure, but a pressure nonetheless on the system. And on the other hand, he could do something that the West would regard as a major step forward in international relations.

So, but that's why he withdrew. It's not because he had to. You know, if for political reasons, it would have been necessary for Soviet troops to stay there, they would have stayed there as long as there was a Soviet Union, probably. So how does this end for the Soviet Union? What is that like? Once they decided that they were going to pull out, I mean, essentially you had really sort of a two-year process in which there is an element of stage withdrawal, but there is also a very strong commitment to building up the forces of the Afghan regime so that it would be in a position to withstand what was to follow. And part of that was making it clear what was going to happen. Because, you know, Kabul did. not want the Soviets to, the Soviets by this point had imposed a new leader, Dr. Najibullah, of the Khad and the Afghan secret police. And, you know, when I tell you that he was a medical doctor who worked within the secret police, you'll begin to get some kind of sense of what sort of a chap he was. But on the other hand, he was very, very smart. And he understood the importance of precisely

building alliances. So he made a major move to basically woo tribal leaders to both divide the opposition, but also to win groups over. And that meant actually stepping back from a lot of the sort of state building campaigns that Kabul had been involved in. So you get a stage process of withdrawal. You get substantial Soviet commitment to standing up the DRA forces while making it clear that they would be standing up. So in a way, this is why it's in your interests to be ready, because it's going to happen.

Support for a much more sophisticated and much more inclusive, a little campaign to try and build support elements and break up the unity of the rebels. And find where necessary, some major and massive military offensives, both to kind of clear the route and also to essentially give the DRA regime, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan regime, a bit of a breathing space. So, for example, I mean, the Panshir Valley gets absolutely hammered by a very sort of major offensive. They have other ones along the route of the withdrawal and so forth. So it's actually, again, you see, this is it. The Soviets were very good at planning things. They were very bad at responding to things that didn't go by plan. But when they had a plan,

they sorted it out and they handled it. At the same time, there was a major commitment to the international side of things to try and get the other countries which have been involved, willing to basically agree that if the Soviet Union was going to pull out, they too would stop arming and supporting various factions. And look, it worked. I mean, this is the irony. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan outlived the Soviet Union. And the reason why it fell, I mean, there were internal tensions.

But above all, it's because Boris Yoltsin, the new leader of post-Soviet Russia, decided he was just going to cut off all remaining support that was being provided, which essentially overnight, for a start, grounded the Afghan Air Force. And anyway, at that point, Again, the magic momentum swang against Kabul. But up to that point, you know, Kabul had looked relatively, I mean, I'm not saying pleasantly, but relatively well managed, relatively stable. And the opposition had resorted to the kind of classic Afghan pastimes, which is of fighting amongst each other, rather than being unified. Again, this is a thing. When the Soviets went,

that single unifying force, the godless foreigners, was no longer able to cohere what were often very, very harshly competitive rebel movements. So what is your reaction over the past few days, Mark, watching the news coverage of America leaving? And do you make any parallel connections there at all? I mean, I think for me, what's interesting is that the American and allied forces fought the war better and ended the war vastly more badly. And again, I think in part, this is about geography. It's quite interesting when one looks at current Russian discussion of what's going on. I mean, obviously, there is an element of Chardonn-fright.

There is an element of, ha, you thought you could succeed where we failed. welcome to the real world. But there's also actually a much, much greater degree of trepidation. Because the thing is, although the Soviet Union is gone, and although the Russian Federation no longer actually has a direct border with Afghanistan, Afghanistan is in Russia's strategic neighborhood. And what they're concerned about is the classic three Afghan exports of instability, drugs and terrorism, sloshing into Central Asia, and Russia. And, Russia being forced to have to do something about it. So, I mean, I think the issue is more that from, I mean, although obviously there's

concerns about, you know, terrorism and such like, really Europe and America can pull out of Afghanistan and watch Afghanistan collapse as it has. And just think, isn't that sad? And it's a series of distressing news items on the television, which in a day or a week or a month will be supplanted in the news cycle by something else. And it's just another example of how, gosh, the world out there is an awful place. You know, the Soviets and the Russians now, obviously they have to think of it in different terms because they have to live with the outcome. And I think that's the big difference. The Soviets put a lot of effort into thinking,

we need to have something sustainable, something stable in place. And, you know, they were willing, to alter their timeline. They didn't get totally caught up on dates. If things looked as if it was getting worse, then they were willing to surge forces back in or slow things down or indeed to go back on agreements made. They were interested in the outcome rather than the sort of minutiae of the timeline and the process that have been drawn out in advance. That clearly wasn't the case here. And I think that this is a pretty perfect case study of how you do. don't end a war. If you care about what's happening, the area you're leaving, and I think, again, the corollary of that is it's clear that I wouldn't say nobody cares about Afghanistan,

but Afghanistan's tragedy has always been that the people who really make the decisions don't have to live there or anywhere close by. So, Mark, can you tell us a little bit about these books you have coming out and also, you know, what you see is the relevance for the current situation. Sure. Well, I mean, I've got three books, two already out, one coming out very shortly on Afghanistan. I mean, there's the book of the PhD, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union's last war, came out in 1995. Still, I think it actually holds up quite well. I'd love to go back to it, actually, and rewrite it, but too many projects, too little time. It is, of course, an academic book, and therefore, obscene the expensive. But nonetheless, I mean, what it does is it runs through

all the different ways that Afghanistan influence the Soviet Union, everything from, how it changed military strategy to what it meant for the rise of protest movements and civil society and so forth. Now, obviously, that's very much a case study of what happens in an authoritarian regime. So I don't expect any of this to really sort of be playing out in the West after after what goes on. The two books that this year, both of them with Osprey publications, and therefore they're sort of written much more for a general readership. One of them is called Storm 333, which is very much a minute by minute play through of the commando operation that was launched to topple the Afghan dictator, seize the presidential palace and prepare the ground for the invasion.

And I mean, I think it's interesting, well, obviously, because I think all my books are interesting, but I think in relevance, shall we say, precisely in that it shows actually that within the context of an industrial war, I mean, there is still a lot of scope for special forces. you're dealing with essentially structured hierarchical organizations, exactly the kind of organization the Mujahideen and indeed the Taliban are not. And the second book, which comes out in October, and yet is available for pre-order, is on the Panshir Valley campaigns. It said, for me, it was the crucial battlefield, frankly, of the whole war. And I think what really that comes out and that is the way that the Soviets acted as a learning institution, that despite all the constraints,

despite the fact that they're in a war, which I think it's fair to call unwinnable, nonetheless, they did their best to adapt. And it's worth noting this because we have a tendency often to fate ourselves for our wonderful capacity to come up with new ideas and develop new technologies. And we tend to assume that the other guy is either totally brilliant or totally stupid. And actually, we should realize that even quite kind of hulking and clumsy military institutions like the old Soviet Red Army, that could learn as well and often learn quite well. But I mean, put them together, I mean, and I am struck by the degree to which, although so much of the detail varies. But in terms of the warfighting experience, it really has demonstrated this

point that you can have effective military organizations who can develop good tactics and good operational planning. But if you haven't got a strategy, that is plausible, that is realizable, and that above all is connected to the realities on the ground, the social, political, realities on the ground. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how good your trigger pullers are. They will do their best, but their best is never going to be enough if you put them into, again, what are effectively unwinnable warfighting situations. Yeah, that doesn't sound familiar at all. Mark Galiati, thank you so much for coming onto Angry Planet and walking us through this. I'm really looking forward to reading this Storm 333, KGB and Spetsnaz Seas, Kabul. The story of that

Raid is absolutely fascinating, and I look forward to going through that. And thank you again for coming on the show, as you're so often do and being our Russia explainer. I appreciate it. It's always a pleasure for me. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, we have a substack. And if you're listening on the substack now, you are listening to commercial free for just nine. dollars a month, you get commercial free episodes as well as access to two bonus episodes every month. The next bonus episode will be rolling up in a few days. It's another conversation about

Tigray. It was going to be on the main feed, but Afghanistan happened. We're all back from vacation. We're working very hard. We've got some great stuff coming up. We're happy that you're tuning in. Thank you for bearing with us. Again, go to angryplanet.substack.com or Angry Planet Pod to subscribe for just $9 a month.