Afgantsy
Afgantsy: The Russians In Afghanistan 1979-89, Rodric Braithwaite
I didn’t really know much about the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and what I did know was, of course, very from much a Western viewpoint. Despite the British author this book presents a Soviet perspective.
There is a good chunk of narrative history here; if you want an overview of why the USSR went in and why it eventually gave up and left, there are surely worse places to start. Whether the KGB backed the original communist coup is left uncertain (people who ought to know deny it), but it did not do the USSR any favours; it badly destabilized the country. The initial Soviet reaction was not soldiers on the ground but advice and support for Taraki’s new regime, which they considered to be brutal and incompetent and with thoroughly counterproductive policies and methods. Matters came to a head when the internal power struggle among the Afghan communists resulted in a second coup. The Soviet reaction was to (equally violently) replace Amin’s government with one more to their taste, and put in (at its peak) over a hundred thousand troops in an attempt to put down the anti-communist rebellion.
In retrospect of course this was a disastrous error but it’s less clear what a realistic better policy would have been once the first coup had happened - staying out from the beginning would probably have resulted in an unstable, fundamentalist or American-backed regime on the southern border of the USSR, none of which will have been attractive prospects in Moscow.
Much of the book is concerned with the Soviet men and woman who served Afghanistan. There is an interesting section on the music and poetry composed by serving soldiers, for instance. Of more political significance are Anatoli Tkachev’s negotiations with Ahmed Shah Masud. At a lower level Alexander Kartsev’s experiences are an insight into the on-the-ground relations between the Soviet troops and the locals; at one point he is kidnapped to help out a mujahedin commander who has shot himself in the foot; later he persuades the same commander to release some prisoners he had been planning to kill.
In the end despite the fact that it “won all its major battles and never lost a post to the enemy” the Soviet army in Afghanistan withdrew in defeat; the current American campaign has largely the same goals and many of the same opponents, arguably making it a single conflict of three decades and counting. I can’t say this book offers a great deal of hope for the outcome.