History Repeats Itself
The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan by Gregory Feifer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'm old enough to remember the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the fears that it was the beginning of a wave of aggression in that area. At the time we really thought that the Soviet Union was a peer in terms of military power and ability to project it, rather than realizing that much of the Red Army's might was a Potemkin village of pipes painted to look like missile launchers and the like.
This is the story of the invasion and occupation from the view of ordinary Soviet soldiers and mid-ranking officers, trying to carry out missions with inadequate equipment and haphazard logistics. The barely-concealed contempt for Communist ideology when the zampolit wasn't around. The "foraging" (robbing the locals) to make up for the inadequacy of Soviet logistics, and how it antagonized Afghans who might have been sympathetic.
And then the discovery that getting back out of a bad war is much harder than getting in, when Gorbachev decided it was time to put an end to the mess. Except just going to defensive only meant that they were doing as much fighting, given how angry much of the Afghan population was about their presence.
It's a lesson that seems to have never been learned. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan, intending to remake it into a Western democratic nation, and had as much success as the USSR did in turning it into a Marxist workers' paradise. And when American politics shifted and a new Administration decided it was time to leave, that turned into a disaster about which the less said, the better.
And now post-Soviet Russia's invasion of Ukraine has turned into a mess at least as disastrous as Afghanistan -- except Ukraine is a modern nation-state, not a collection of disparate tribal peoples in a "country" with borders drawn by the former colonial empires of the 19th century.
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