THE CHADOR AND THE PARACHUTE

Afghantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89

Rodric Braithwaite: Profile Books 2011

“Many of the women here conceal their faces under the chador- a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium too, and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador* and the parachute. You don’t have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute.”

 Soviet youth advisor and journalist Vladimir Snegirev speaking in Afghanistan March 1982

During the Christmas period in 1979 I was a student in Worcester and one of my friends was an Afghan student studying agriculture. He was a passionate socialist and may even have been a member of the Afghan Communist Party, his name was Asker Olfat, and he hailed from Herat. He spent some of that Christmas holiday with me and my parents in Shropshire.
It was Asker who explained to me the internecine struggles within the Communist party in Afghanistan and that the majority of the other Afghan students at the college were Maoists, of whom he disapproved. It was the bloody climax of this internecine struggle that brought the Soviets into the country.
Asker felt that the revolution was in danger and wanted to return. I fear my obsession with the Spanish Civil war and tales of resistance to fascism may have been part of the cocktail that fuelled his anxiety. Herat in the 1980’s was not a safe place for socialists or communists.
This has bothered me ever since, since he is now certainly dead. Though nothing I said of course would have changed this.

I had never heard of Rodric Braithwaite before reading this book, but as a consequence of reading it I will now definitely seek out the other two books he has written about Russia.[1] It is a remarkable book in many ways, not least since it deals with such a poisonous period of the cold war, whilst remaining free of the usual crude Manichean discourse. Braithwaite on the contrary deals with his subject in a nuanced, humane, compassionate and sympathetic manner. He seeks to understand the rationale behind the Russian intervention in Afghanistan and in so doing ‘dispels,’ as even the Tory MP Rory Stewart an ex-army officer who served in Afghanistan admits, ‘many of the cold war myths.’ That Braithwaite was the British Ambassador in Moscow from 1988 – 1992, makes this achievement all the more remarkable.

Not that he hails the invasion of Afghanistan over the Christmas period in 1979 as one of the better decisions of the Soviet Union, or accepts the explanation given by the Kremlin for this move. What he does is seek to understand and explain from the perspective of the Soviet rulers themselves.

“…A fast growing city where tall modern buildings nuzzle against bustling bazaars and wide avenues filled with brilliant flowing turbans, gayly (sic) striped chapans, mini skirted schoolgirls, a multitude of handsome faces and streams of whizzing traffic.”[2]

Thus a guidebook, sponsored by the Afghan Tourist Board, describes Kabul in the mid 1970’s when Kabul stood along the great hippy trail. The description appears to have been fairly accurate, being corroborated by the British Journalist Jonathan Steele. Even after the invasion one journalist describes eating ice cream with pretty girls in jeans and T shirts on the University campus in Kabul.When you read these lines it is impossible not to be gripped by sadness. It is the women who were the real losers in Afghanistan’s multiple wars.

If there are any out and out villains in this book, and there are a few, then pretty high on that list must be Hafizullah Amin and the tiny clique of the Afghan Communist Party, who managed to combine bloody ruthlessness with barely credible levels of naiveté and stupidity. This group became, as Braithwaite describes, an increasing nightmare for the grey suits in the Kremlin as they destabilised the Afghan society described above.
But this Afghanistan, struggling to emerge into the 20th Century, already had implacable foes; these were the men in the mountains, the bearded mullahs and the literal interpreters of Islam, determined to exact their revenge and sweep away the godless communists, the western educated youth and enlightened middle classes. They were to find willing allies in the CIA and British intelligence services.
The real story of ‘Afghantsy’ is the story of, what were known in Vietnam as the Grunts, in Russia as the Afghantsy, the ordinary foot soldiers, the poor bloody infantry described by writers from Kipling onwards.[3]
The Russian soldiers performed the tasks given them much like soldiers anywhere. Much cold war propaganda has dismissed the performance of the red army in Afghanistan. Afghantsy gives the lie to this line. The Red Army seems to have performed certainly as well if not better than the NATO forces that fought later over the same ground. What is interesting is Braithwaite’s description of the conduct of the Muslim soldiers from the various Muslim Soviet republics. These were largely conscript peasant soldiers who lived similar lives to those of the peasants amongst whom they moved in Afghanistan and they often spoke variants of the local language. These soldiers consequently got on much better with the local population than the young squaddies from Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic Republics and a lot better than the Americans and British for whom the gulf between their own life experiences and those of the Afghan peasant communities was so much greater.
The story of the Soviet Afghan war reads very much like any other of the 20^th century conflicts. An incompetent general staff, who to begin with demonstrated minimal understanding of local conditions, considerable bravery by soldiers who were often badly equipped, senseless slaughter and the usual ghastly tally of atrocities on all sides.
I increasingly fear it is impossible to avoid atrocity in war, given the inherent barbarism involved in seeking to kill fellow human beings. It only being possible to seek to minimise there incidence and create a climate in which daylight, discovery and prosecution become increasingly likely. Such a climate, such daylight, was considerably diminished in Afghanistan during the years of the Soviet occupation and consequently atrocities abounded. However whilst cover-ups happened and blind eyes were frequently turned, crimes against the civilian population were punished, sometimes to the detriment of the propaganda line.  Braithwaite states that ‘6,412 criminal charges were preferred against Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan.’ #[4] The Afghan soldiers alongside whom the Soviet forces fought seem if anything to have been even more brutal.[5]
However for sheer savage brutality it would be hard to match the Mujahideen. One stomach churning story from the book haunts me; a Soviet conscript, a cook as it happens, had a rifle stuffed into his hands and was forced to go into combat by some dolt of an officer straight out of World War 1 central casting. His unit was quickly overwhelmed and he was captured. His captors castrated him, put a ring through his nose and dragged him through the snow before finishing him off.

It was these fighters, determined to return Afghanistan to the early Middle Ages, whom the West, in the form of the CIA and British Intelligence were supporting and there is a wonderfully ironic/comic moment in the book which describes Charlie Wilson, the famous/infamous US Congressman describing one particularly brutal Mujahideen leader, by the name of Jalaluddin, as ‘goodness personified.’ After 9/11 Wilson’s hero found himself at number three on the US most wanted list. Many a Soviet Afghan veteran must have taken grim satisfaction at the impact of such ‘blowback’ on the US whilst watching images of the Twin Towers disintegrating on their television sets.

Braithwaite’s book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand these later events, and the mistakes made by NATO forces following the overthrow of the Taliban. It demolishes more cold war myths that I have been able to keep track off. Perhaps most importantly he describes how the Politburo, far from being possessed by surge of aggressive gung-ho, was slowly dragged into the quagmire of Afghanistan more often than not against their better judgement and that some of the attempts at nation building, including attempts to improve the position of women, were every bit as idealistic as similar attempts made later by NATO.
Ultimately the intervention in Afghanistan was a disaster for the Soviet Union and was certainly a factor in its eventual demise. The legacy of that conflict haunts Russia today every bit as much as the war in Vietnam haunted American society.
Anyone reading this book in the hope of finding good guys will be very disappointed, and for me some of the most bitter passages are those describing how the Americans deliberately sabotaged attempts by the Soviet Union to leave behind some sort of stable state after their departure. The resulting civil war caused much more death and destruction than the preceding years of Soviet occupation.[6]

The Afghan tragedy ultimately lies not with the Soviet Union or NATO invasions, not even with the insane clique of the Afghan Communist party who so destabilised the Afghan state, but with the men in the mountains, the bearded mullahs and fanatical Islamists; they are the enemies of progress.  As long as they hold sway the future for this poor benighted country will remain bleak. It would seem that for the time being the struggle between the chador and the parachute is being won by those who wish to enforce the chador.

*One suspects he means the Burqa

# One wonders how this compares to the number of GI's prosecuted for crimes committed during the Vietnam war

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[1] My only quarrel with Braithwaite’s book is it’s title, since this book is about the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, of which Russia was technically only a component part. Indeed one of the most interesting elements of this book is the dimension those soldiers who hailed from the Muslim republics of the USSR brought to the struggle in Afghanistan. The Other two books are Across the Moscow River and Moscow 1941.

[2] Afghantsy, page 34

[3] I was amused to read that Kipling enjoyed a small readership amongst the Soviet 40^th Army in Afghanistan, the Afghantsy finding a resonance in his words, obviously much to the disapproval of the commissars.

[4] Afghantsy,  P 227

[5] It is perhaps not realised by some ill-informed people that The Russians were fighting with and for a considerable Afghan army, loyal to the Communist government in Kabul, the Russians having been invited in by this same government.

[6] Kabul for example, largely untouched during the years of Soviet occupation, was devastated by the civil war. Always in the background is the hand of Pakistan; Pakistan had signed the Geneva accords prohibiting foreign intervention in Afghan domestic affairs. The Pakistani president cynically commenting that it was permissible for Muslims to lie in a good cause. The central problem of the region is not Afghanistan but Pakistan. What to do about this unstable rogue state which is poisoning all its neighbours is one of the central foreign policy questions of our age. President Obama has commented that it is what keeps him awake at night.  

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