2RHPZ
05-27-2004, 01:46 PM
THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE IN AFGHANISTAN: RUSSIAN DOCUMENTS AND MEMOIRS
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya
October 9, 2001
Recently declassified documents from archives in the former Soviet
Union and memoirs of senior Soviet military and political leaders
present the complex and tragic story of the ten years of the
Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan. Most observers agree
that the last war of the Soviet Union created or aggravated the
internal dynamics that eventually culminated in the dissolution of
the country itself. The documents presented here shed light on
the most important moments in the history of the Soviet war in
Afghanistan?the Afghan government?s requests for assistance, the
Soviet Union?s initial refusal of troops, the reversal of this
policy by a small group of the Politburo and the Soviet decision
to invade; the expansion of the initial mission to include combat
operations against the Afghan resistance; early criticism of the
Soviet policy and of the People?s Democratic party of Afghanistan
(PDPA) regime; and the decision to withdraw the troops. Taken
together, these materials suggest some lessons that might be drawn
from the Soviet experience of fighting a war in Afghanistan.
The decision to send troops was made after a long deliberation
and repeated requests from the leadership of the PDPA, Prime
Minister Hafizullah Amin and President Nur Mohammad Taraki. The
Politburo discussions show that the Soviet leaders were very
reluctant to send troops, and responded to the Afghan requests
with shipments of military equipment, but not troops, throughout
the spring and summer of 1979. However, the overthrow of Taraki
by Amin in September just after Taraki?s return from Moscow
heightened Soviet paranoia about the possibility that Amin would
become another Sadat and turn towards the U.S. The actual
decision to invade was made in secret by a very small group of
Politburo members, against the strong and openly expressed
opposition of the military, and only then rubber-stamped by the
other Politburo members. Both Chief of USSR General Staff Marshal
Ogarkov and his Deputy General of the Army Akhromeev voiced strong
objections to introducing troops on the grounds that the proposed
limited contingent of forces would not be able to fulfill its
objectives.
The decision to send troops was made on the basis of limited
information. According to Soviet veterans of the events, KGB
sources were trusted over the military intelligence (GRU) sources.
This partly reflected the growing influence of the KGB Chairman
Yu. V. Andropov, who controlled the flow of information to General
Secretary Brezhnev, who was partially incapacitated and ill for
most of 1979. KGB reports from Afghanistan created a picture of
urgency and strongly emphasized the possibility of Amin?s links to
the CIA and U.S. subversive activities in the region. (President
Carter had already signed a secret ?finding? in July 1979
authorizing covert aid to the Afghani opponents of the Taraki-Amin
regime.)
Afghanistan did not fit into the mental maps and ideological
constructs of the Soviet leaders. Their analysis of internal
social processes in Afghanistan was done through the conceptual
lens of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which blinded the leadership to
the realities of traditional tribal society. Believing that there
was no single country in the world, which was not ripe for
socialism, party ideologues like Mikhail Suslov and Boris
Ponomarev saw Afghanistan as a ?second Mongolia.? Such
conceptualization of the situation led to the attempts to impose
alien social and economic practices on Afghan society, such as the
forced land reform.
The Soviet decision makers did not anticipate the influential
role of Islam in the Afghan society. There were very few experts
on Islam in the Soviet government and the academic institutions.
The highest leadership was poorly informed about the strength of
religious beliefs among the masses of the Afghan population.
Political and military leaders were surprised to find that rather
than being perceived as a progressive anti-imperialist force, the
Afghanis as foreign invaders, and ?infidels.? Reports from
Afghanistan show the growing awareness of the ?Islamic factor? on
the part of Soviet military and political personnel.
The Afghan communist PDPA never was a unified party; it was
split along ethnic and tribal lines. The infighting between the
?Khalq? and the ?Parcham? factions made the tasks of controlling
the situation much more challenging for Moscow notwithstanding the
great number of Soviet advisors at every level of the party and
state apparatus. The Soviet underestimation of ethnic tensions
within Afghan society was one of the reasons of the unsuccessful
policy of national reconciliation.
The war in Afghanistan had a major impact on domestic politics
in the Soviet Union. It was one of the key factors in the
delegitimization of Communist Party rule. Civil society reacted to
the intervention by marginalizing the Afghan veterans. The army
was demoralized as a result of being perceived as an invader. .
The prominent dissident and human rights activist, Academician
Andrei Sakharov, publicly denounced the atrocities committed by
the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. The image of the Soviet Army
fighting against Islam in Afghanistan also contributed to a rapid
rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Central Asian republics and
possibly to the strengthening of the independence movement in
Chechnya, both of which continue to pose major security threats to
Russia today.
The Soviet Army also quickly realized the inadequacy of its
preparation and planning for the mission in Afghanistan. The
initial mission?to guard cities and installations?was soon
expanded to combat, and kept growing over time. The Soviet
reservists, who comprised the majority of the troops initially
sent in, were pulled into full-scale combat operations against the
rebels, while the regular Afghan army was often unreliable because
of the desertions and lack of discipline.
The Soviet troops had absolutely no anti-guerrilla training.
While the formal mission of the troops was to protect the
civilians from the anti-government forces, in reality, Soviet
soldiers often found themselves fighting against the civilians
they intended to protect, which sometimes led to indiscriminate
killing of local people. Operations to pursue and capture rebel
formations were often unsuccessful and had to be repeated several
times in the same area because the rebels retreated to the
mountains and returned to their home villages as soon as the
Soviet forces returned to their garrisons. Soviet traditional
weaponry and military equipment, especially armored cars and tanks
were extremely vulnerable on Afghani terrain.
The Soviet troops also suffered from the confusion about their
goals?the initial official mission was to protect the PDPA regime;
however, when the troops reached Kabul, their orders were to
overthrow Amin and his regime. Then the mission was changed once
again, but the leadership was not willing to admit that the Soviet
troops were essentially fighting the Afghan civil war for the
PDPA. The notion of the ?internationalist duty? that the Soviet
Limited Contingent was fulfilling in Afghanistan was essentially
ideological, based on the idea that Soviet troops were protecting
the socialist revolution in Afghanistan whereas the experience on
the ground immediately undermined such justifications.
The realization that there could be no military solution to
the conflict in Afghanistan came to the Soviet military leadership
very early on. The issue of troop withdrawal and the search for a
political solution was discussed as early as 1980, but no real
steps in that direction were taken, and the Limited Contingent
continued to fight in Afghanistan without a clearly defined
objective.
Early military reports emphasized the difficulty of fighting
on the mountainous terrain, for which the Soviet Army had no
training whatsoever. Parallels with the American War in Vietnam
were obvious and frequently referred to by the Soviet military
officers.
Note on Soviet sources
The main Soviet sources on the decision to intervene in
Afghanistan come from the Russian Presidential Archive, the
Ministry of Defense Archive and from the published memoirs of
Soviet officers and political leaders. They belong to the
following categories: the minutes of the CC CPSU Politburo
discussions, which were declassified by President Yeltsin?s
executive decree in 1992, the KGB and military intelligence
reports from Kabul, many of which were published in the
influential study The Tragedy and Valor of Afghan by veteran of
the Afghan War General Alexander Lyakhovsky, political letters
from USSR Ambassadors in Afghanistan to the Soviet Foreign
Ministry from the Russian Foreign Ministry Archives, memoranda of
conversations of the Soviet Ambassadors and other leaders with
their Afghan counterparts found in the Center for Preservation of
Contemporary Documentation in Moscow, analytical letters to the
Central Committee and the military leadership also found in the
Center for Preservation of Contemporary Documentation. Among the
most important memoirs on the Soviet war in Afghanistan are those
by former Deputy USSR Foreign Minister Georgy M. Kornienko and the
last Commander of the Soviet Limited Contingent of Forces in
Afghanistan, General Boris Gromov. Some of the most important
documents on the Soviet War in Afghanistan were published in the
English translation in the Cold War International History Project
Bulletin, No. 8-9, Winter 1996-1997.
In March 1979, the Soviet leadership had to face a difficult
situation as a result of the violent uprising in Herat, where
several Soviet military advisers were executed, and the situation
seemed to be spinning out of the PDPA's control. The Afghan
leadership asked for urgent Soviet military assistance. Overall,
there were over 20 requests for military assistance from the
Afghan leadership in 1979. In the telephone conversation with
Afghan Prime Minister Taraki, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin
explains to his Afghan counterpart that the Soviet Union would not
send troops, and encourages Taraki to rely on the local
population, and specifically to mobilize industrial workers of the
Herat province, which shows the lack of understanding of the local
situation on the part of the Soviet leadership (industrial
workers, the ?proletariat,? which was supposed to be the base of
the socialist revolution were practically non-existent in
Afghanistan). The Politburo session, convened urgently to discuss
the situation in Herat, shows the differences of opinion among the
participants: while practically all Politburo members were against
sending Soviet troops to Afghanistan, some of them at the same
time argued that ?we cannot lose Afghanistan.? The decision
arrived at after much deliberation and summed up by General
Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev was that economic and military
assistance with equipment and advisers would be provided but no
Soviet troops would be sent to Afghanistan.
Minutes of Conversation between Brezhnev and Honecker, and
Andropov-Gromyko-Ustinov-Ponomarev?s reports to Brezhnev in the
summer and fall of 1979 shed light on Soviet thinking on wider
geostrategic implications of the situation in Afghanistan, the
impact of the Iranian revolution in the region, perceived U.S.
goals, and the suspected cooperation between Amin and the American
special services. All these considerations contributed to the
sense of urgency among the Soviet leadership.
According to former USSR Ambassador to the United States Anatoly
Dobrynin, this unusual memorandum from Andropov to Brezhnev was
especially influential in changing the General Secretary?s
position on the issue of sending Soviet troops into Afghanistan.
Excerpts from Lyakhovsky?s book and Georgy M. Kornienko?s memoir
The Cold War: Testimony of a Participant (Moscow, Mezhdunarodnye
otnosheniya, 1994) present detailed accounts of how the final
decision to send troops was made. The only documentary evidence
of that highly secret decision is the handwritten document ?On the
Situation in A? of December 12, 1979 signed by the Politburo
members.
The Politburo sessions of January 17 and 28, 1980 carried
extensive discussions of the situation in Afghanistan. Lyakhovsky
and other authors report that at the same time, the top Soviet
military and political leadership held secret deliberations on the
possibility of early withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the first combat operations of the Soviet troops led
to the change in the original mission of the Limited Contingent to
include combat operations against the rebels.
The letter of ?Pravda? correspondent Schedrov to the CC CPSU of
November 12, 1981 reflects early criticism of Soviet involvement
in Afghanistan along with a realization of the inadequacy of a
military solution.
At the Politburo session of October 17, 1985, General Secretary
Gorbachev proposed to make a final decision on Afghanistan and
quoted from citizens? letters regarding the dissatisfaction in the
country with the Soviet actions in Afghanistan. He also described
his meeting with Babrak Karmal during which Gorbachev told the
Afghan leader: ?we will help you, but with arms only, not
troops.?Chernyaev noted Gorbachev?s negative reaction to the
assessment of the situation given by Defense Minister Marshal
Sergey Sokolov.
The first serious Politburo discussion of the need to withdraw
Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which included the testimony of
Marshal Sergei Akhromeev is reflected in the Minutes of November
13, 1986.
In his remarks to the Politburo on February 23 and 26, General
Secreatry Mikhail S. Gorbachev return to the issue of the need to
withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan several times. He
emphasizes the need to withdraw the troops, and at the same time
struggles with the explanation for the withdrawal, noting that ?we
not going to open up the discussion about who is to blame now.?
Gromyko admits that it was a mistake to introduce the troops, but
notes that it was done after 11 requests from the Afghan
government.
Criticism of the Soviet policy of national reconciliation in
Afghanistan and analysis of general failures of the Soviet
military mission there is presented in Colonel Tsagolov?s letter
to USSR Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov of August 13, 1987. This
letter represents the first open criticism of the Afghan war from
within the military establishment. Colonel Tsagolov paid for his
attempt to make his criticism public in his interview with Soviet
influential progressive magazine ?Ogonek? by his career?he was
expelled from the Army in 1988.
On May 10, 1988, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
the USSR issued a ?closed? (internal use) letter to all Communist
Party members of the Soviet Union on the issue of withdrawal of
troops from Afghanistan. The letter presents the Central
Committee analysis of events in Afghanistan and Soviet actions in
that country, the problems and the difficulties the Soviet troops
had to face in carrying out their mission. In particular, the
letter stated that important historic and ethnic factors were
overlooked when the decisions on Afghanistan were made in the
Soviet Union. The letter analyzes Soviet interests in Afghanistan
and the reasons for the withdrawal of troops.
The Politburo session of January 24, 1989 deals with issues of
troops withdrawal and the post-war Soviet role in Afghanistan, as
well as possible future development of the situation there.
On April 7, 1988, USSR Defense Minister signed an order on
withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. In February 1989, the
Defense Ministry prepared a statement of the Soviet Military
Command in Afghanistan on the issue of withdrawal of troops, which
was delivered to the Head of the UN Mission in Afghanistan on
February 14, 1989?the day when the last Soviet soldier left
Afghanistan. The statement gave an overview of Soviet-Afghan
relations before 1979, Soviet interpretation of the reasons for
providing internationalist assistance to Afghanistan, and sending
troops there after the repeated requests of the Afghan government.
It criticized the U.S. role in arming the opposition in disregard
of the Geneva agreements, and thus destabilizing the situation in
the country. In an important acknowledgement that the Vietnam
metaphor was used to analyze Soviet actions in Afghanistan, they
military explicitly referred to ?unfair and absurd? comparisons
between the American actions in Vietnam and the presence of Soviet
troops in Afghanistan.
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya
October 9, 2001
Recently declassified documents from archives in the former Soviet
Union and memoirs of senior Soviet military and political leaders
present the complex and tragic story of the ten years of the
Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan. Most observers agree
that the last war of the Soviet Union created or aggravated the
internal dynamics that eventually culminated in the dissolution of
the country itself. The documents presented here shed light on
the most important moments in the history of the Soviet war in
Afghanistan?the Afghan government?s requests for assistance, the
Soviet Union?s initial refusal of troops, the reversal of this
policy by a small group of the Politburo and the Soviet decision
to invade; the expansion of the initial mission to include combat
operations against the Afghan resistance; early criticism of the
Soviet policy and of the People?s Democratic party of Afghanistan
(PDPA) regime; and the decision to withdraw the troops. Taken
together, these materials suggest some lessons that might be drawn
from the Soviet experience of fighting a war in Afghanistan.
The decision to send troops was made after a long deliberation
and repeated requests from the leadership of the PDPA, Prime
Minister Hafizullah Amin and President Nur Mohammad Taraki. The
Politburo discussions show that the Soviet leaders were very
reluctant to send troops, and responded to the Afghan requests
with shipments of military equipment, but not troops, throughout
the spring and summer of 1979. However, the overthrow of Taraki
by Amin in September just after Taraki?s return from Moscow
heightened Soviet paranoia about the possibility that Amin would
become another Sadat and turn towards the U.S. The actual
decision to invade was made in secret by a very small group of
Politburo members, against the strong and openly expressed
opposition of the military, and only then rubber-stamped by the
other Politburo members. Both Chief of USSR General Staff Marshal
Ogarkov and his Deputy General of the Army Akhromeev voiced strong
objections to introducing troops on the grounds that the proposed
limited contingent of forces would not be able to fulfill its
objectives.
The decision to send troops was made on the basis of limited
information. According to Soviet veterans of the events, KGB
sources were trusted over the military intelligence (GRU) sources.
This partly reflected the growing influence of the KGB Chairman
Yu. V. Andropov, who controlled the flow of information to General
Secretary Brezhnev, who was partially incapacitated and ill for
most of 1979. KGB reports from Afghanistan created a picture of
urgency and strongly emphasized the possibility of Amin?s links to
the CIA and U.S. subversive activities in the region. (President
Carter had already signed a secret ?finding? in July 1979
authorizing covert aid to the Afghani opponents of the Taraki-Amin
regime.)
Afghanistan did not fit into the mental maps and ideological
constructs of the Soviet leaders. Their analysis of internal
social processes in Afghanistan was done through the conceptual
lens of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which blinded the leadership to
the realities of traditional tribal society. Believing that there
was no single country in the world, which was not ripe for
socialism, party ideologues like Mikhail Suslov and Boris
Ponomarev saw Afghanistan as a ?second Mongolia.? Such
conceptualization of the situation led to the attempts to impose
alien social and economic practices on Afghan society, such as the
forced land reform.
The Soviet decision makers did not anticipate the influential
role of Islam in the Afghan society. There were very few experts
on Islam in the Soviet government and the academic institutions.
The highest leadership was poorly informed about the strength of
religious beliefs among the masses of the Afghan population.
Political and military leaders were surprised to find that rather
than being perceived as a progressive anti-imperialist force, the
Afghanis as foreign invaders, and ?infidels.? Reports from
Afghanistan show the growing awareness of the ?Islamic factor? on
the part of Soviet military and political personnel.
The Afghan communist PDPA never was a unified party; it was
split along ethnic and tribal lines. The infighting between the
?Khalq? and the ?Parcham? factions made the tasks of controlling
the situation much more challenging for Moscow notwithstanding the
great number of Soviet advisors at every level of the party and
state apparatus. The Soviet underestimation of ethnic tensions
within Afghan society was one of the reasons of the unsuccessful
policy of national reconciliation.
The war in Afghanistan had a major impact on domestic politics
in the Soviet Union. It was one of the key factors in the
delegitimization of Communist Party rule. Civil society reacted to
the intervention by marginalizing the Afghan veterans. The army
was demoralized as a result of being perceived as an invader. .
The prominent dissident and human rights activist, Academician
Andrei Sakharov, publicly denounced the atrocities committed by
the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. The image of the Soviet Army
fighting against Islam in Afghanistan also contributed to a rapid
rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Central Asian republics and
possibly to the strengthening of the independence movement in
Chechnya, both of which continue to pose major security threats to
Russia today.
The Soviet Army also quickly realized the inadequacy of its
preparation and planning for the mission in Afghanistan. The
initial mission?to guard cities and installations?was soon
expanded to combat, and kept growing over time. The Soviet
reservists, who comprised the majority of the troops initially
sent in, were pulled into full-scale combat operations against the
rebels, while the regular Afghan army was often unreliable because
of the desertions and lack of discipline.
The Soviet troops had absolutely no anti-guerrilla training.
While the formal mission of the troops was to protect the
civilians from the anti-government forces, in reality, Soviet
soldiers often found themselves fighting against the civilians
they intended to protect, which sometimes led to indiscriminate
killing of local people. Operations to pursue and capture rebel
formations were often unsuccessful and had to be repeated several
times in the same area because the rebels retreated to the
mountains and returned to their home villages as soon as the
Soviet forces returned to their garrisons. Soviet traditional
weaponry and military equipment, especially armored cars and tanks
were extremely vulnerable on Afghani terrain.
The Soviet troops also suffered from the confusion about their
goals?the initial official mission was to protect the PDPA regime;
however, when the troops reached Kabul, their orders were to
overthrow Amin and his regime. Then the mission was changed once
again, but the leadership was not willing to admit that the Soviet
troops were essentially fighting the Afghan civil war for the
PDPA. The notion of the ?internationalist duty? that the Soviet
Limited Contingent was fulfilling in Afghanistan was essentially
ideological, based on the idea that Soviet troops were protecting
the socialist revolution in Afghanistan whereas the experience on
the ground immediately undermined such justifications.
The realization that there could be no military solution to
the conflict in Afghanistan came to the Soviet military leadership
very early on. The issue of troop withdrawal and the search for a
political solution was discussed as early as 1980, but no real
steps in that direction were taken, and the Limited Contingent
continued to fight in Afghanistan without a clearly defined
objective.
Early military reports emphasized the difficulty of fighting
on the mountainous terrain, for which the Soviet Army had no
training whatsoever. Parallels with the American War in Vietnam
were obvious and frequently referred to by the Soviet military
officers.
Note on Soviet sources
The main Soviet sources on the decision to intervene in
Afghanistan come from the Russian Presidential Archive, the
Ministry of Defense Archive and from the published memoirs of
Soviet officers and political leaders. They belong to the
following categories: the minutes of the CC CPSU Politburo
discussions, which were declassified by President Yeltsin?s
executive decree in 1992, the KGB and military intelligence
reports from Kabul, many of which were published in the
influential study The Tragedy and Valor of Afghan by veteran of
the Afghan War General Alexander Lyakhovsky, political letters
from USSR Ambassadors in Afghanistan to the Soviet Foreign
Ministry from the Russian Foreign Ministry Archives, memoranda of
conversations of the Soviet Ambassadors and other leaders with
their Afghan counterparts found in the Center for Preservation of
Contemporary Documentation in Moscow, analytical letters to the
Central Committee and the military leadership also found in the
Center for Preservation of Contemporary Documentation. Among the
most important memoirs on the Soviet war in Afghanistan are those
by former Deputy USSR Foreign Minister Georgy M. Kornienko and the
last Commander of the Soviet Limited Contingent of Forces in
Afghanistan, General Boris Gromov. Some of the most important
documents on the Soviet War in Afghanistan were published in the
English translation in the Cold War International History Project
Bulletin, No. 8-9, Winter 1996-1997.
In March 1979, the Soviet leadership had to face a difficult
situation as a result of the violent uprising in Herat, where
several Soviet military advisers were executed, and the situation
seemed to be spinning out of the PDPA's control. The Afghan
leadership asked for urgent Soviet military assistance. Overall,
there were over 20 requests for military assistance from the
Afghan leadership in 1979. In the telephone conversation with
Afghan Prime Minister Taraki, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin
explains to his Afghan counterpart that the Soviet Union would not
send troops, and encourages Taraki to rely on the local
population, and specifically to mobilize industrial workers of the
Herat province, which shows the lack of understanding of the local
situation on the part of the Soviet leadership (industrial
workers, the ?proletariat,? which was supposed to be the base of
the socialist revolution were practically non-existent in
Afghanistan). The Politburo session, convened urgently to discuss
the situation in Herat, shows the differences of opinion among the
participants: while practically all Politburo members were against
sending Soviet troops to Afghanistan, some of them at the same
time argued that ?we cannot lose Afghanistan.? The decision
arrived at after much deliberation and summed up by General
Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev was that economic and military
assistance with equipment and advisers would be provided but no
Soviet troops would be sent to Afghanistan.
Minutes of Conversation between Brezhnev and Honecker, and
Andropov-Gromyko-Ustinov-Ponomarev?s reports to Brezhnev in the
summer and fall of 1979 shed light on Soviet thinking on wider
geostrategic implications of the situation in Afghanistan, the
impact of the Iranian revolution in the region, perceived U.S.
goals, and the suspected cooperation between Amin and the American
special services. All these considerations contributed to the
sense of urgency among the Soviet leadership.
According to former USSR Ambassador to the United States Anatoly
Dobrynin, this unusual memorandum from Andropov to Brezhnev was
especially influential in changing the General Secretary?s
position on the issue of sending Soviet troops into Afghanistan.
Excerpts from Lyakhovsky?s book and Georgy M. Kornienko?s memoir
The Cold War: Testimony of a Participant (Moscow, Mezhdunarodnye
otnosheniya, 1994) present detailed accounts of how the final
decision to send troops was made. The only documentary evidence
of that highly secret decision is the handwritten document ?On the
Situation in A? of December 12, 1979 signed by the Politburo
members.
The Politburo sessions of January 17 and 28, 1980 carried
extensive discussions of the situation in Afghanistan. Lyakhovsky
and other authors report that at the same time, the top Soviet
military and political leadership held secret deliberations on the
possibility of early withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the first combat operations of the Soviet troops led
to the change in the original mission of the Limited Contingent to
include combat operations against the rebels.
The letter of ?Pravda? correspondent Schedrov to the CC CPSU of
November 12, 1981 reflects early criticism of Soviet involvement
in Afghanistan along with a realization of the inadequacy of a
military solution.
At the Politburo session of October 17, 1985, General Secretary
Gorbachev proposed to make a final decision on Afghanistan and
quoted from citizens? letters regarding the dissatisfaction in the
country with the Soviet actions in Afghanistan. He also described
his meeting with Babrak Karmal during which Gorbachev told the
Afghan leader: ?we will help you, but with arms only, not
troops.?Chernyaev noted Gorbachev?s negative reaction to the
assessment of the situation given by Defense Minister Marshal
Sergey Sokolov.
The first serious Politburo discussion of the need to withdraw
Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which included the testimony of
Marshal Sergei Akhromeev is reflected in the Minutes of November
13, 1986.
In his remarks to the Politburo on February 23 and 26, General
Secreatry Mikhail S. Gorbachev return to the issue of the need to
withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan several times. He
emphasizes the need to withdraw the troops, and at the same time
struggles with the explanation for the withdrawal, noting that ?we
not going to open up the discussion about who is to blame now.?
Gromyko admits that it was a mistake to introduce the troops, but
notes that it was done after 11 requests from the Afghan
government.
Criticism of the Soviet policy of national reconciliation in
Afghanistan and analysis of general failures of the Soviet
military mission there is presented in Colonel Tsagolov?s letter
to USSR Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov of August 13, 1987. This
letter represents the first open criticism of the Afghan war from
within the military establishment. Colonel Tsagolov paid for his
attempt to make his criticism public in his interview with Soviet
influential progressive magazine ?Ogonek? by his career?he was
expelled from the Army in 1988.
On May 10, 1988, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
the USSR issued a ?closed? (internal use) letter to all Communist
Party members of the Soviet Union on the issue of withdrawal of
troops from Afghanistan. The letter presents the Central
Committee analysis of events in Afghanistan and Soviet actions in
that country, the problems and the difficulties the Soviet troops
had to face in carrying out their mission. In particular, the
letter stated that important historic and ethnic factors were
overlooked when the decisions on Afghanistan were made in the
Soviet Union. The letter analyzes Soviet interests in Afghanistan
and the reasons for the withdrawal of troops.
The Politburo session of January 24, 1989 deals with issues of
troops withdrawal and the post-war Soviet role in Afghanistan, as
well as possible future development of the situation there.
On April 7, 1988, USSR Defense Minister signed an order on
withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. In February 1989, the
Defense Ministry prepared a statement of the Soviet Military
Command in Afghanistan on the issue of withdrawal of troops, which
was delivered to the Head of the UN Mission in Afghanistan on
February 14, 1989?the day when the last Soviet soldier left
Afghanistan. The statement gave an overview of Soviet-Afghan
relations before 1979, Soviet interpretation of the reasons for
providing internationalist assistance to Afghanistan, and sending
troops there after the repeated requests of the Afghan government.
It criticized the U.S. role in arming the opposition in disregard
of the Geneva agreements, and thus destabilizing the situation in
the country. In an important acknowledgement that the Vietnam
metaphor was used to analyze Soviet actions in Afghanistan, they
military explicitly referred to ?unfair and absurd? comparisons
between the American actions in Vietnam and the presence of Soviet
troops in Afghanistan.