December 9, 2015 | Ryan Evans
One might be forgiven for thinking that one of Russia’s state-owned media organs recently took over Forbes. Last month, the venerable business news magazine featured President Vladimir Putin as the world’s most powerful person. U.S. President Barack Obama placed third, after German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And one gets the sense that his is a distant third. Forbes characterizes Obama’s influence as “shrinking” and reports that “he’s outshined by Angela Merkel in Europe, and outmaneuvered by Putin in the Middle East.” This assessment is not an outlier. It follows prolonged rending of clothing over Russian military operations in Ukraine and Syria. The Obama administration’s critics in Washington have viewed Russia’s intervention in Syria in particular as evidence of a weak foreign policy pursued by a feckless president enabled by feeble advisers. These critics’ underlying assumption is that Russia has acted from a position of strength and re-inserted itself into the Middle East as a power to be reckoned with. Obama’s insistence that Putin acted in Syria from a position of weakness was widely derided, especially by Republicans.
The United States often overreacts to foreign interventions by adversaries, attributing aggressive, expansive designs when, on further inspection, we discover motivations rooted in insecurity, fear, and defensiveness.
How can we better balance our understanding of these interventions? Will historians look back on this period and argue that Putin’s engagement in Syria was not only a decision made out of weakness, but one that was a grand-strategic mistake? Or will they interpret it as many of Obama’s critics do today? It is, of course, far too early to know for sure. Events are still ongoing. Developments such as the recent Turkish shootdown of a Russian tactical bomber and jihadist attacks in Paris have the potential to change the game (although they have not yet). And we do not have the kind of documentary access that future historians will hopefully enjoy. There is, however, a striking historical parallel—another episode when many Americans thought Russia had outsmarted and outmaneuvered a U.S. commander-in-chief similarly accused of being weak and feckless.
This intervention began in December 1979, nearly 2,000 miles east of Damascus, in Kabul. When we revisit Russia’s path to that war and the American interpretations of it, we find many of the same debates we are seeing today about strength and weakness in the Kremlin and the White House. The lesson is simple: Perceived weakness and strength—and especially perceptions of one’s own weaknesses—are often powerful drivers of world events and they are often incorrect. Further, actors tend to conflate a perception of strength in an opponent with good strategy and weakness with bad strategy when, in fact, these are distinct attributes. An adversary can be acting out of weakness and have a good strategy just as he can be acting from strength and executing a bad strategy.
The dominant narrative of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to this day still holds that President Jimmy Carter’s anemic approach to foreign policy was responsible; that the Soviets moved because America had left a power vacuum. We now know from archival evidence that this was not the case. The Soviets acted, in large part, due to fears of American strength and the potential consequences of losing a client state. With arms negotiations ongoing, Moscow wanted to preserve what was left of détente. The Politburo was averse to a military intervention until the 11thhour. Even then, the decision to intervene was strongly resisted by the chief of the general staff, who was literally shouted down in the Central Committee. We also now know that the Soviet Union’s strategy in Afghanistan was a poor one and that the rocks upon which Moscow’s campaign would founder were foreseen by members of the Politburo’s Central Committee.
Setting the Scene: Détente on the Rocks
American and Soviet weaknesses and strengths were then measured in the context ofdétente, under which the superpowers would respect the status quo in the interest of relaxing tensions between them. At its center were arms control negotiations—the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT)—but détente was meant to encompass and limit a wide range of activities that could bring the United States and Soviet Union into conflict. President Richard Nixon, the key architect of détente along with Henry Kissinger, wanted to reduce the risk of nuclear war, limit nuclear weapons, end America’s war in Vietnam, and improve trade. Détente reached its peak with the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 during the Ford administration. For General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, the key appeal of détente was found in its tacit promise that the United States would not seek to become overly involved in the internal affairs of communist regimes.
In the latter half of the 1970s, a series of crises left détente on the rocks and the two superpowers watched each other warily. In Washington especially, détente was losing support. When facing pressure on his political right flank from Ronald Reagan, President Gerald Ford forbade members of his administration from even using the word “détente,” and sought to distance himself from Kissinger, his secretary of state, who was most associated with the policy. The hawks pressing for a more assertive foreign policy claimed that the Soviet Union had used détente as cover to meddle in the third world and to achieve a usable superiority in terms of their nuclear arsenal. If so, détente was a losing deal and should be abandoned.
In Washington, this was perhaps the most heated strategic debate of that period. The hawks organized themselves under the umbrella of groups like the Committee on the Present Danger and wrote broadsides in Commentary. The Committee on the Present Danger was a vehicle for confidants and supporters of the hawkish Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson such as Eugene Rostow, Paul Nitze, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Richard Pipes, and Norman Podhoretz.
During Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, Zbigniew Brzezinski—who would become Carter’s national security adviser—wrote a note to the candidate in which he described détente as“desirable,” but not “reciprocal” enough. He added that détente “cannot be the basis for coping with global problems.” Carter, although never as activist as Brzezinski wanted him to be, came to embrace this position, but he would continue to try to have it both ways. He sought to appeal to hardliners by being tough on the Soviets on human rights issues, while also seeking to continue the SALT process to appease liberals. This Goldilocks approach to national security (which also suffuses the current presidential administration) left no one satisfied. In most respects, Carter’s foreign policy was a less skillfully executed continuation of those enacted by the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Not long after Carter entered the Oval Office, he received a report from the National Intelligence Council claiming that the “Soviets still see basic trends in the world as positive for themselves and negative for the United States.” While there was some truth to this—indeed, Moscow did see détente as a net gain and eyed the West, wracked by two oil crises in the 1970s, with some confidence—it elided the Politburo’s deeply ingrained paranoia and sense of insecurity.
Part of this Soviet feeling of insecurity was ideological, but much of it was pragmatic. As one Soviet general later put it, “By the seventies we had concluded that there was no chance in hell that we would survive” in the event of a nuclear war. The Soviets felt, in the words of historian Gordon S. Barrass, “at a considerable disadvantage in the psychology of deterrence.” They did not have faith in their ability to retaliate due to problems with their ability to detect a nuclear attack early enough and, once an attack had started, to maintain sufficient command and control for nuclear retaliation. Consequently, the Kremlin sought to project a sense of bullish confidence about its ability to prevail in a war, nuclear or conventional, with the unintended consequence of feeding the hawkish narrative in Washington. Soviet leaders would sometimes say that a nuclear war was unwinnable, but at other times insist that if one broke out, they would undoubtedly win. At the same time, the Soviets made heavier investments in their conventional and strategic forces (as well as an elaborate network of bunkers) that many Soviet leaders correctly viewed as unsustainable. In 1977, Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy head of the Central Committee’s International Department, wrote in his diary, “If we do not undertake a real change in our military policy, the arms race aimed at our economic exhaustion will continue.” This was, crucially, when U.S.–Chinese ties were beginning to flourish, much to the Soviet Union’s chagrin.
The Americans were also highly anxious over their ability to survive a nuclear attack and retaliate.In an influential article in Commentary in July 1977, Richard Pipes accepted as a given that “the Soviet leadership thinks it possible to fight and win a nuclear war,” not understanding the insecurity that pervaded the Politburo. Pipes had led the Team-B exercise the prior year that inflated Soviet capabilities and intentions in an effort to pressure the Ford administration to adopt a more aggressive posture.
Pipes’ derisive disquisition on American strategic culture and the Soviet threat treats the members of the Politburo as master strategists – almost to the point of admiration – much like today’s hawks when they describe Putin. Pipes makes a number of claims that we now know to be false: that the Soviet leadership did not accept mutual deterrence, never believed that nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed warfare, and thought they could survive and prevail in a nuclear exchange with the United States. Pipes insisted that any Soviet leaders’ comments to the opposite effect were merely “a commodity for export.” In fact, Pipes got it backward: The Soviets’ bullish statements were the real commodity for export. He insisted that Soviet nuclear doctrine relied on the tenet of pre-emption, or first strike. We now know that in 1975, the Soviet general staff had been instructed never to use nuclear weapons first.
All this is to say that détente was becoming unpopular in the United States in no small part because of the growing efforts of hawkish American thinkers who propagated profound misinterpretations of the Kremlin’s military strategy and view of the world. And on the day after Christmas 1979, with a president in office that hawks viewed as provocatively weak, the Soviet Union intervened in a war-torn country to support a client regime.
Into the Hindu Kush: “Under No Circumstances May We Lose Afghanistan”
Since the April Revolution of 1978, in which the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) took power, the country had been slowly unraveling in the face of swelling rebellion by religious fundamentalists, conservative farmers, and disaffected soldiers. The PDPA’s ascension had caught Moscow totally by surprise. The Soviets dutifully embraced their Afghan communist brethren when they took power, but limited their involvement to providing military equipment, grain, fuel, and hundreds of Soviet advisers scattered throughout the Afghan government and military. In March 1979, the city of Herat in western Afghanistan erupted in revolt. The rebels, supported by Afghan Army units in mutiny, took the city. Nur Mohammed Taraki, then the leader of Afghanistan and the PDPA, asked Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin to send in troops. Taraki said, “I suggest that you place Afghan markings on your tanks and aircraft and no one will be any the wiser.” When Kosygin refused, Taraki pushed for tanks manned by Soviet Tajik soldiers in Afghan Army uniform. Kosygin said this was not possible, but promised more military aid.
After a week, Herat was retaken by an Afghan Army operation that left somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 people dead, but the urban assault sparked a rural uprising. The crisis left the Politburo highly unsettled. The day after Kosygin and Taraki spoke, the Central Committee convened in Moscow. Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko insisted, “Under no circumstances may we lose Afghanistan. … [I]f we lose Afghanistan now and it turns against the Soviet Union, this will result in a sharp setback to our foreign policy.” In Moscow’s view, the rebels were religious fanatics being supported and trained by outside powers, especially Iran and Pakistan. Central Committee members were also anxious about what the United States and China might do if given a chance to weaken the Soviet Union in Central Asia. They agreed to increase aid to the PDPA, but came down against intervening directly, despite the increasingly desperate entreaties from Taraki along with his rival and deputy Hafizullah Amin.
Boris Ponomarev, the head of the Central Committee’s International Department, stated, “Above all, it will be necessary to accomplish everything that is necessary with the forces of the Afghan army, and only later, if and when the necessity truly arises, to deploy our own forces.” KGB head Yuri Andropov, for his part, argued firmly against direct Soviet intervention. Gromyko endorsed Andropov’s view, and his remarks are worth quoting at length:
The army there is unreliable. Thus our army, when it arrives in Afghanistan, will be the aggressor. Against whom will it fight? Against the Afghan people first of all, and it will have to shoot at them. Comrade Andropov correctly noted that indeed the situation in Afghanistan is not ripe for a [communist] revolution. And all that we have done in recent years with such effort in terms of detente, arms reduction, and much more – all that would be thrown back. China, of course, would be given a nice present. All the nonaligned countries will be against us. In a word, serious consequences are to be expected from such an action. … One must ask, and what would we gain? Afghanistan with its present government, with a backward economy, with inconsequential weight in international affairs. On the other side, we must keep in mind that from a legal point of view too we would not be justified in sending troops. According to the UN Charter a country can appeal for assistance, and we could send troops, in case it is subject to external aggression. Afghanistan has not been subject to any aggression. This is its internal affair, a revolutionary internal conflict, a battle of one group of the population against another.
The aging Politburo member Andrei Kirilenko explained that Herat revealed the gap between the people and the government. He stated, “we are all adhering to the position that there is no basis whatsoever for the deployment of forces.” They agreed to an uptick in aid and political support to Kabul, but nothing more. The next day, the ailing Leonid Brezhnev endorsed their plan. “The time is not right,” he said, “for us to become entangled in that war.” A month later, the Soviets refused an Afghan request for Soviet-manned helicopters to fight rebels.
On May 24, the Central Committee refused another request from Kabul for direct Soviet military intervention in the form of Soviet-crewed helicopters and a commitment to land Soviet paratroopers in Kabul in case of an emergency. They agreed, however, to once again provide more military supplies, ammunition, and weaponry. The Soviet leaders reiterated that they were “deeply convinced” that a direct intervention was “fraught with great complexities not only in the domestic political, but also in the foreign policy sphere.”
The situation in Afghanistan worsened through the summer as rebellion spread, but the Central Committee did not relent to frantic requests from Kabul for a Soviet intervention. Mutinies became more common throughout the Afghan army. In August, an armored column of mutinous army personnel launched an unsuccessful coup attempt. In September, Amin overthrew and murdered Taraki and enacted more repressive measures against the mujahideen and, especially, rivals in his own party, much to Moscow’s distaste. Tens of thousands of Afghans were already dead in this brewing civil war.
By late November, the Soviets had come to totally distrust Amin. They worried he was testing the waters for friendlier relations with the United States. These concerns were, in part, fueled by the fact that Amin had studied at in New York two decades before. According to a Soviet report, “Amin’s conduct in the area of relations with the USSR ever more distinctly exposes his insincerity and duplicity.” He claimed to take Soviet advice and direction to heart, but in reality ignored everything Moscow said on how to fight the rebellion and unify his party. Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov, and Ponomarev advised Brezhnev to restrict military aid to just small arms, spare parts, and ammunition. In a separate memo to Brezhnev, Andropov bemoaned Amin’s repressions, which — he claimed — had “essentially destroyed” the PDPA, the Afghan Army, and the government. He repeated the concern that Amin might tip Afghanistan into the American camp, or at least into neutrality, which would be disastrous for Moscow. Andropov was claiming that a state Moscow had not expected to have in its sphere just a year and a half before had suddenly become critical to the Soviet Union’s sense of security.
There was a possible solution to Moscow’s problems. Andropov informed Brezhnev of a conspiracy of Afghan communists led by Babrak Karmal who were willing to overthrow Amin, but who demanded Soviet military assistance to do so. Andropov wrote:
We have two battalions stationed in Kabul [originally deployed to protect air units at Bagram air base] and there is the capability of rendering such assistance. It appears that this is entirely sufficient for a successful operation. But, as a precautionary measure in the event of unforeseen complications, it would be wise to have a military group close to the border … The implementation of the given operation would allow us to decide the question of defending the gains of the April revolution, establishing Leninist principals in the party and state leadership of Afghanistan, and securing our positions in this country.
Moscow thereby found itself on the cusp of intervention. The Soviets deployed a regular infantry battalion to Bagram. A week later, there was a high-level meeting in Brezhnev’s office. Forgetting their earlier analysis on the perils of intervention, Andropov and Ustinov argued forcefully for the introduction of Soviet force to displace Amin. In making their case, they cited their belief that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was planning to carve a “new Great Ottoman Empire” out of the southern Muslim Soviet republics and Afghanistan. The Soviet Union would be vulnerable to this, they said, if the United States was able to place missiles in Afghanistan, taking advantage of the fact that the Soviets lacked a suitable air defense system on their southern flank. Pakistan and Iraq, they continued, could use uranium pulled out of Afghan mines to build nuclear weapons of their own. It is difficult to know if Andropov and Ustinov really believed all this. It could be that, having come to favor intervention, they sought to marshal every argument possible—even fantastical ones—in support of their position. It is also possible that other events inflamed fears that would not have seemed plausible had they been analyzed in isolation. For example, we know fromBrezhnev’s letter to President Carter after the intervention kicked off that the Soviets also felt menaced by “the massive concentration of [U.S.] naval forces in the Persian Gulf.” Seeking to explain the Soviet decision to intervene, Lawrence Freedman writes:
Force on a major scale was seen [by the Soviets] as a “last resort,” but when force is kept as a last resort it is much more likely that it will be on a massive scale. This is the point, by definition, at which all other remedies have failed. As the United States had found in Vietnam in 1965, the very act of intervention, on behalf of a failing government when supposedly loyal forces are feeble and demoralized, further narrows the political base and requires taking full responsibility for the fight. When the last resort comes, there is no incremental option.
Brezhnev and his closest advisers agreed that Amin must be replaced by Karmal. To do this, they would deploy Soviet troops to Afghanistan to see that the deed was done, on top of the approximately 5,000 that were now in Afghanistan, between military advisers and units deployed to Bagram and around Kabul. On Dec. 10, Ustinov called in Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov and told him to make ready 70,000 troops. Ogarkov saw intervention as “reckless,” an assessment shared by the members of the Central Committee just months before, and believed 70,000 troops too few to ensure victory in any case. It seems he alone understood at this point what a consequential undertaking this would be. He made his case forcefully to Brezhnev and the others, warning, “We will reestablish the entire eastern Islamic system against us, and we will lose politically in the entire world.”
Andropov responded, “Stick to military affairs! We, the Party, and Leonid Il’ich [Brezhnev] will handle policy!” Two days later, the Central Committee approved the intervention. The Soviet Union was going to war in Afghanistan, but its leaders had no idea how costly and lengthy this war would end up being. They thought they would be able to oust Amin, get the Afghan Army back on the offensive, and be able to withdraw in short order. On Dec. 25th, the Soviet paratroopers Amin had asked for months ago landed in Kabul, but, much to his surprise, they arrived to end his rule – which they had done by the morning of the 28th.
One might be forgiven for thinking that one of Russia’s state-owned media organs recently took over Forbes. Last month, the venerable business news magazine featured President Vladimir Putin as the world’s most powerful person. U.S. President Barack Obama placed third, after German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And one gets the sense that his is a distant third. Forbes characterizes Obama’s influence as “shrinking” and reports that “he’s outshined by Angela Merkel in Europe, and outmaneuvered by Putin in the Middle East.” This assessment is not an outlier. It follows prolonged rending of clothing over Russian military operations in Ukraine and Syria. The Obama administration’s critics in Washington have viewed Russia’s intervention in Syria in particular as evidence of a weak foreign policy pursued by a feckless president enabled by feeble advisers. These critics’ underlying assumption is that Russia has acted from a position of strength and re-inserted itself into the Middle East as a power to be reckoned with. Obama’s insistence that Putin acted in Syria from a position of weakness was widely derided, especially by Republicans.
The United States often overreacts to foreign interventions by adversaries, attributing aggressive, expansive designs when, on further inspection, we discover motivations rooted in insecurity, fear, and defensiveness.
How can we better balance our understanding of these interventions? Will historians look back on this period and argue that Putin’s engagement in Syria was not only a decision made out of weakness, but one that was a grand-strategic mistake? Or will they interpret it as many of Obama’s critics do today? It is, of course, far too early to know for sure. Events are still ongoing. Developments such as the recent Turkish shootdown of a Russian tactical bomber and jihadist attacks in Paris have the potential to change the game (although they have not yet). And we do not have the kind of documentary access that future historians will hopefully enjoy. There is, however, a striking historical parallel—another episode when many Americans thought Russia had outsmarted and outmaneuvered a U.S. commander-in-chief similarly accused of being weak and feckless.
This intervention began in December 1979, nearly 2,000 miles east of Damascus, in Kabul. When we revisit Russia’s path to that war and the American interpretations of it, we find many of the same debates we are seeing today about strength and weakness in the Kremlin and the White House. The lesson is simple: Perceived weakness and strength—and especially perceptions of one’s own weaknesses—are often powerful drivers of world events and they are often incorrect. Further, actors tend to conflate a perception of strength in an opponent with good strategy and weakness with bad strategy when, in fact, these are distinct attributes. An adversary can be acting out of weakness and have a good strategy just as he can be acting from strength and executing a bad strategy.
The dominant narrative of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to this day still holds that President Jimmy Carter’s anemic approach to foreign policy was responsible; that the Soviets moved because America had left a power vacuum. We now know from archival evidence that this was not the case. The Soviets acted, in large part, due to fears of American strength and the potential consequences of losing a client state. With arms negotiations ongoing, Moscow wanted to preserve what was left of détente. The Politburo was averse to a military intervention until the 11thhour. Even then, the decision to intervene was strongly resisted by the chief of the general staff, who was literally shouted down in the Central Committee. We also now know that the Soviet Union’s strategy in Afghanistan was a poor one and that the rocks upon which Moscow’s campaign would founder were foreseen by members of the Politburo’s Central Committee.
Setting the Scene: Détente on the Rocks
American and Soviet weaknesses and strengths were then measured in the context ofdétente, under which the superpowers would respect the status quo in the interest of relaxing tensions between them. At its center were arms control negotiations—the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT)—but détente was meant to encompass and limit a wide range of activities that could bring the United States and Soviet Union into conflict. President Richard Nixon, the key architect of détente along with Henry Kissinger, wanted to reduce the risk of nuclear war, limit nuclear weapons, end America’s war in Vietnam, and improve trade. Détente reached its peak with the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975 during the Ford administration. For General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, the key appeal of détente was found in its tacit promise that the United States would not seek to become overly involved in the internal affairs of communist regimes.
In the latter half of the 1970s, a series of crises left détente on the rocks and the two superpowers watched each other warily. In Washington especially, détente was losing support. When facing pressure on his political right flank from Ronald Reagan, President Gerald Ford forbade members of his administration from even using the word “détente,” and sought to distance himself from Kissinger, his secretary of state, who was most associated with the policy. The hawks pressing for a more assertive foreign policy claimed that the Soviet Union had used détente as cover to meddle in the third world and to achieve a usable superiority in terms of their nuclear arsenal. If so, détente was a losing deal and should be abandoned.
In Washington, this was perhaps the most heated strategic debate of that period. The hawks organized themselves under the umbrella of groups like the Committee on the Present Danger and wrote broadsides in Commentary. The Committee on the Present Danger was a vehicle for confidants and supporters of the hawkish Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson such as Eugene Rostow, Paul Nitze, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Richard Pipes, and Norman Podhoretz.
During Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, Zbigniew Brzezinski—who would become Carter’s national security adviser—wrote a note to the candidate in which he described détente as“desirable,” but not “reciprocal” enough. He added that détente “cannot be the basis for coping with global problems.” Carter, although never as activist as Brzezinski wanted him to be, came to embrace this position, but he would continue to try to have it both ways. He sought to appeal to hardliners by being tough on the Soviets on human rights issues, while also seeking to continue the SALT process to appease liberals. This Goldilocks approach to national security (which also suffuses the current presidential administration) left no one satisfied. In most respects, Carter’s foreign policy was a less skillfully executed continuation of those enacted by the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Not long after Carter entered the Oval Office, he received a report from the National Intelligence Council claiming that the “Soviets still see basic trends in the world as positive for themselves and negative for the United States.” While there was some truth to this—indeed, Moscow did see détente as a net gain and eyed the West, wracked by two oil crises in the 1970s, with some confidence—it elided the Politburo’s deeply ingrained paranoia and sense of insecurity.
Part of this Soviet feeling of insecurity was ideological, but much of it was pragmatic. As one Soviet general later put it, “By the seventies we had concluded that there was no chance in hell that we would survive” in the event of a nuclear war. The Soviets felt, in the words of historian Gordon S. Barrass, “at a considerable disadvantage in the psychology of deterrence.” They did not have faith in their ability to retaliate due to problems with their ability to detect a nuclear attack early enough and, once an attack had started, to maintain sufficient command and control for nuclear retaliation. Consequently, the Kremlin sought to project a sense of bullish confidence about its ability to prevail in a war, nuclear or conventional, with the unintended consequence of feeding the hawkish narrative in Washington. Soviet leaders would sometimes say that a nuclear war was unwinnable, but at other times insist that if one broke out, they would undoubtedly win. At the same time, the Soviets made heavier investments in their conventional and strategic forces (as well as an elaborate network of bunkers) that many Soviet leaders correctly viewed as unsustainable. In 1977, Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy head of the Central Committee’s International Department, wrote in his diary, “If we do not undertake a real change in our military policy, the arms race aimed at our economic exhaustion will continue.” This was, crucially, when U.S.–Chinese ties were beginning to flourish, much to the Soviet Union’s chagrin.
The Americans were also highly anxious over their ability to survive a nuclear attack and retaliate.In an influential article in Commentary in July 1977, Richard Pipes accepted as a given that “the Soviet leadership thinks it possible to fight and win a nuclear war,” not understanding the insecurity that pervaded the Politburo. Pipes had led the Team-B exercise the prior year that inflated Soviet capabilities and intentions in an effort to pressure the Ford administration to adopt a more aggressive posture.
Pipes’ derisive disquisition on American strategic culture and the Soviet threat treats the members of the Politburo as master strategists – almost to the point of admiration – much like today’s hawks when they describe Putin. Pipes makes a number of claims that we now know to be false: that the Soviet leadership did not accept mutual deterrence, never believed that nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed warfare, and thought they could survive and prevail in a nuclear exchange with the United States. Pipes insisted that any Soviet leaders’ comments to the opposite effect were merely “a commodity for export.” In fact, Pipes got it backward: The Soviets’ bullish statements were the real commodity for export. He insisted that Soviet nuclear doctrine relied on the tenet of pre-emption, or first strike. We now know that in 1975, the Soviet general staff had been instructed never to use nuclear weapons first.
All this is to say that détente was becoming unpopular in the United States in no small part because of the growing efforts of hawkish American thinkers who propagated profound misinterpretations of the Kremlin’s military strategy and view of the world. And on the day after Christmas 1979, with a president in office that hawks viewed as provocatively weak, the Soviet Union intervened in a war-torn country to support a client regime.
Into the Hindu Kush: “Under No Circumstances May We Lose Afghanistan”
Since the April Revolution of 1978, in which the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) took power, the country had been slowly unraveling in the face of swelling rebellion by religious fundamentalists, conservative farmers, and disaffected soldiers. The PDPA’s ascension had caught Moscow totally by surprise. The Soviets dutifully embraced their Afghan communist brethren when they took power, but limited their involvement to providing military equipment, grain, fuel, and hundreds of Soviet advisers scattered throughout the Afghan government and military. In March 1979, the city of Herat in western Afghanistan erupted in revolt. The rebels, supported by Afghan Army units in mutiny, took the city. Nur Mohammed Taraki, then the leader of Afghanistan and the PDPA, asked Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin to send in troops. Taraki said, “I suggest that you place Afghan markings on your tanks and aircraft and no one will be any the wiser.” When Kosygin refused, Taraki pushed for tanks manned by Soviet Tajik soldiers in Afghan Army uniform. Kosygin said this was not possible, but promised more military aid.
After a week, Herat was retaken by an Afghan Army operation that left somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 people dead, but the urban assault sparked a rural uprising. The crisis left the Politburo highly unsettled. The day after Kosygin and Taraki spoke, the Central Committee convened in Moscow. Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko insisted, “Under no circumstances may we lose Afghanistan. … [I]f we lose Afghanistan now and it turns against the Soviet Union, this will result in a sharp setback to our foreign policy.” In Moscow’s view, the rebels were religious fanatics being supported and trained by outside powers, especially Iran and Pakistan. Central Committee members were also anxious about what the United States and China might do if given a chance to weaken the Soviet Union in Central Asia. They agreed to increase aid to the PDPA, but came down against intervening directly, despite the increasingly desperate entreaties from Taraki along with his rival and deputy Hafizullah Amin.
Boris Ponomarev, the head of the Central Committee’s International Department, stated, “Above all, it will be necessary to accomplish everything that is necessary with the forces of the Afghan army, and only later, if and when the necessity truly arises, to deploy our own forces.” KGB head Yuri Andropov, for his part, argued firmly against direct Soviet intervention. Gromyko endorsed Andropov’s view, and his remarks are worth quoting at length:
The army there is unreliable. Thus our army, when it arrives in Afghanistan, will be the aggressor. Against whom will it fight? Against the Afghan people first of all, and it will have to shoot at them. Comrade Andropov correctly noted that indeed the situation in Afghanistan is not ripe for a [communist] revolution. And all that we have done in recent years with such effort in terms of detente, arms reduction, and much more – all that would be thrown back. China, of course, would be given a nice present. All the nonaligned countries will be against us. In a word, serious consequences are to be expected from such an action. … One must ask, and what would we gain? Afghanistan with its present government, with a backward economy, with inconsequential weight in international affairs. On the other side, we must keep in mind that from a legal point of view too we would not be justified in sending troops. According to the UN Charter a country can appeal for assistance, and we could send troops, in case it is subject to external aggression. Afghanistan has not been subject to any aggression. This is its internal affair, a revolutionary internal conflict, a battle of one group of the population against another.
The aging Politburo member Andrei Kirilenko explained that Herat revealed the gap between the people and the government. He stated, “we are all adhering to the position that there is no basis whatsoever for the deployment of forces.” They agreed to an uptick in aid and political support to Kabul, but nothing more. The next day, the ailing Leonid Brezhnev endorsed their plan. “The time is not right,” he said, “for us to become entangled in that war.” A month later, the Soviets refused an Afghan request for Soviet-manned helicopters to fight rebels.
On May 24, the Central Committee refused another request from Kabul for direct Soviet military intervention in the form of Soviet-crewed helicopters and a commitment to land Soviet paratroopers in Kabul in case of an emergency. They agreed, however, to once again provide more military supplies, ammunition, and weaponry. The Soviet leaders reiterated that they were “deeply convinced” that a direct intervention was “fraught with great complexities not only in the domestic political, but also in the foreign policy sphere.”
The situation in Afghanistan worsened through the summer as rebellion spread, but the Central Committee did not relent to frantic requests from Kabul for a Soviet intervention. Mutinies became more common throughout the Afghan army. In August, an armored column of mutinous army personnel launched an unsuccessful coup attempt. In September, Amin overthrew and murdered Taraki and enacted more repressive measures against the mujahideen and, especially, rivals in his own party, much to Moscow’s distaste. Tens of thousands of Afghans were already dead in this brewing civil war.
By late November, the Soviets had come to totally distrust Amin. They worried he was testing the waters for friendlier relations with the United States. These concerns were, in part, fueled by the fact that Amin had studied at in New York two decades before. According to a Soviet report, “Amin’s conduct in the area of relations with the USSR ever more distinctly exposes his insincerity and duplicity.” He claimed to take Soviet advice and direction to heart, but in reality ignored everything Moscow said on how to fight the rebellion and unify his party. Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov, and Ponomarev advised Brezhnev to restrict military aid to just small arms, spare parts, and ammunition. In a separate memo to Brezhnev, Andropov bemoaned Amin’s repressions, which — he claimed — had “essentially destroyed” the PDPA, the Afghan Army, and the government. He repeated the concern that Amin might tip Afghanistan into the American camp, or at least into neutrality, which would be disastrous for Moscow. Andropov was claiming that a state Moscow had not expected to have in its sphere just a year and a half before had suddenly become critical to the Soviet Union’s sense of security.
There was a possible solution to Moscow’s problems. Andropov informed Brezhnev of a conspiracy of Afghan communists led by Babrak Karmal who were willing to overthrow Amin, but who demanded Soviet military assistance to do so. Andropov wrote:
We have two battalions stationed in Kabul [originally deployed to protect air units at Bagram air base] and there is the capability of rendering such assistance. It appears that this is entirely sufficient for a successful operation. But, as a precautionary measure in the event of unforeseen complications, it would be wise to have a military group close to the border … The implementation of the given operation would allow us to decide the question of defending the gains of the April revolution, establishing Leninist principals in the party and state leadership of Afghanistan, and securing our positions in this country.
Moscow thereby found itself on the cusp of intervention. The Soviets deployed a regular infantry battalion to Bagram. A week later, there was a high-level meeting in Brezhnev’s office. Forgetting their earlier analysis on the perils of intervention, Andropov and Ustinov argued forcefully for the introduction of Soviet force to displace Amin. In making their case, they cited their belief that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was planning to carve a “new Great Ottoman Empire” out of the southern Muslim Soviet republics and Afghanistan. The Soviet Union would be vulnerable to this, they said, if the United States was able to place missiles in Afghanistan, taking advantage of the fact that the Soviets lacked a suitable air defense system on their southern flank. Pakistan and Iraq, they continued, could use uranium pulled out of Afghan mines to build nuclear weapons of their own. It is difficult to know if Andropov and Ustinov really believed all this. It could be that, having come to favor intervention, they sought to marshal every argument possible—even fantastical ones—in support of their position. It is also possible that other events inflamed fears that would not have seemed plausible had they been analyzed in isolation. For example, we know fromBrezhnev’s letter to President Carter after the intervention kicked off that the Soviets also felt menaced by “the massive concentration of [U.S.] naval forces in the Persian Gulf.” Seeking to explain the Soviet decision to intervene, Lawrence Freedman writes:
Force on a major scale was seen [by the Soviets] as a “last resort,” but when force is kept as a last resort it is much more likely that it will be on a massive scale. This is the point, by definition, at which all other remedies have failed. As the United States had found in Vietnam in 1965, the very act of intervention, on behalf of a failing government when supposedly loyal forces are feeble and demoralized, further narrows the political base and requires taking full responsibility for the fight. When the last resort comes, there is no incremental option.
Brezhnev and his closest advisers agreed that Amin must be replaced by Karmal. To do this, they would deploy Soviet troops to Afghanistan to see that the deed was done, on top of the approximately 5,000 that were now in Afghanistan, between military advisers and units deployed to Bagram and around Kabul. On Dec. 10, Ustinov called in Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov and told him to make ready 70,000 troops. Ogarkov saw intervention as “reckless,” an assessment shared by the members of the Central Committee just months before, and believed 70,000 troops too few to ensure victory in any case. It seems he alone understood at this point what a consequential undertaking this would be. He made his case forcefully to Brezhnev and the others, warning, “We will reestablish the entire eastern Islamic system against us, and we will lose politically in the entire world.”
Andropov responded, “Stick to military affairs! We, the Party, and Leonid Il’ich [Brezhnev] will handle policy!” Two days later, the Central Committee approved the intervention. The Soviet Union was going to war in Afghanistan, but its leaders had no idea how costly and lengthy this war would end up being. They thought they would be able to oust Amin, get the Afghan Army back on the offensive, and be able to withdraw in short order. On Dec. 25th, the Soviet paratroopers Amin had asked for months ago landed in Kabul, but, much to his surprise, they arrived to end his rule – which they had done by the morning of the 28th.
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