#5453
[Second Issue of the Day]
#5
Wall Street Journal
September 20, 2001
[for personal use only]
Soviet Survivors of Afghanistan War Advise: Don't Even
Think About It
By JEANNE WHALEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MOSCOW -- Don't do it, they say. If the mountains don't swallow you, the
scorching deserts and infectious diseases will do you in. Their fierce
warriors are armed with modern weaponry and a fervent readiness to die for
Allah. Fighting them ruined a generation of our men, and it will ruin you,
too.
In cramped veterans-aid offices throughout Moscow, survivors of the Soviet
Union's nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan have one piece of advice for
Washington: Don't even think of sending in large numbers of ground troops.
Stop, think, and find a different way.
They understand America's desire to avenge last week's terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But having witnessed the horrors of
one of the Earth's cruelest war zones, they say a ground campaign would bring
little but heartache.
"First the English couldn't do it, then the Russians left. We couldn't
handle
the task there," says Yuri Shamanov, a retired lieutenant colonel who runs
a
charity for families of deceased soldiers. "If you could see how they live
in
the mountains there -- ooooh, it's antiquity. And so they go into war on this
same level."
See full coverage of the aftermath of the attack.
His words aren't falling on deaf ears. Heeding stories like this, Pentagon
planners say they won't be marching battalions of American troops through the
Khyber Pass. What they are actually considering, according to reports
swirling around Washington, is sending in special-operations forces, such as
the Rangers and Delta Force.
Mr. Shamanov knows what kind of reception they are likely to find. When he
first touched down in Kabul on a sunny day in 1984, things seemed calm.
Traveling with a raft of Soviet generals, he was met with smiles and an armed
guard detail and whisked off to a soiree at the president's home.
But as darkness fell, reality closed in. Officers at the reception
"caught
hell" as Afghan resistance fighters began to shoot down at them from the
mountains. "It was night, the lights went out, and they began to
howl," Mr.
Shamanov recalls. "They would fire through a cannon mounted on a small car,
drive another 50 meters and fire again." Where the shots came from, no one
could ever tell. "That we needed to leave, that we had no business there --
I
knew that from the first day," he says.
The resistance fighters, or mujahadeen, had reason to loathe their opponents.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 under the pretext of
lending a brotherly hand to a fledgling socialist regime. Nearly a decade and
15,000 body bags later, Soviet troops withdrew. The war killed some one
million resistance fighters and other Afghanis, and left the rest to suffer
—
often with lost arms and legs — through many more years of civil war. The
ruling Taliban came to power in 1996 but continues to battle in the north a
small but stubborn resistance movement, led until his recent death by
charismatic leader Ahmed Shah Massoud.
Disdain and Admiration
One after another, Soviet veterans describe the frustration of attacking an
amorphous enemy: Fire on a mud cave certain to be filled with fighters, the
vets say, and you'd find they had tunneled to another cave 100 meters away.
Turn your back on an Afghan ally, and you'd feel a knife plunged into it.
Mixed with the vets' disdain is a suppressed admiration. Afghan fighters
"have never bowed to any force," says Andrei Lagunov, 41, a soldier
there
from 1980 to 1981.
Long before the Soviets, after all, the British thrice sought to conquer
Afghanistan and failed. Rudyard Kipling summed things up this way: The Afghan
tribesmen, he wrote, "being blessed with perfect sight, pick off our
messmates left and right."
Mr. Lagunov knows that feeling. "They are mobile, and they know their
country
without maps," he says. "They know where the sources of water are,
where the
caves are. They drink water where animals drink water, and it's fine for
them." Thousands of Soviet soldiers, meanwhile, were stricken with
hepatitis
and other diseases.
In a shabby office up a dark stairwell in central Moscow, Mr. Lagunov runs an
aid group that assists handicapped veterans and the families of deceased
soldiers. There are at least 30 such groups in Moscow alone. For every
soldier killed in combat, another has died over the past decade from
injuries, disease and psychological trauma, he says.
His overriding memory from the war is an utter sense of helplessness. Driving
over the border in tank columns, he and his comrades would constantly fall
into the same trouble: Fighters in the hills would shoot out the first and
last tanks. "So you couldn't go forward, and you couldn't go back," he
says.
"These were narrow roads. On one side there was a mountain, on the other, a
cliff. We were stuck."
Sitting across from Mr. Lagunov is Alexander, a former officer in the war who
will give only his first name and declines to give his last military rank.
"For Russia, 10 years was enough," he says. "It might have been
possible to
kill those people with vodka, but they didn't drink. Islam is stronger."
The American Paradox
Not everyone in Moscow has bitter memories of Afghanistan. Nikolai Golovin, a
journalist who speaks four languages and worked as a translator during the
war, says he feels no "Afghan syndrome."
"I love that country. It is perfect," Mr. Golovin says. Before the
war,
European hippies flocked to Kabul for the sunshine and the chance to live on
$10 (10.80 euros) a day, he says: "It was a paradise. But from paradise it
turned to hell." He blames arrogant Soviet officers who tried to force
European rules of warfare on a tribal system. He also blames their American
foes, who funded and armed the opposition and treated Afghanistan like a
cheap laboratory for anti-Soviet warfare.
Those Cold-War experiments left a cruel legacy. After 22 years of fighting,
the population is battle-hardened and awash in weapons. "It's an
interesting
paradox," says Mr. Lagunov. "The Americans will be fighting against
their own
arms and against the people they taught themselves." Among other things,
the
U.S. supplied the mujahadeen with plenty of Stinger missiles,
shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft weapons so effective that the Soviets promised
top military honors to the first soldier to capture one.
The Americans, knowing what they do about ground warfare in Afghanistan,
surely can't be planning a long land battle, Russian veterans say. Perhaps
some limited special operations are in the works, aimed at capturing Osama
bin Laden. If armed with extremely good intelligence on his whereabouts,
American forces could possibly meet success, Mr. Golovin says. Still, he
adds, "there are hundreds of places where bin Laden will be able to find
shelter and food."
On the wall of Mr. Shamanov's veterans-aid office on the outskirts of Moscow
hang dozens of black-and-white photos of young Russian men with 1970s
haircuts who died in Afghanistan. For their sacrifice, each was awarded a
Soviet medal that read: "to an internationalist soldier, from a grateful
Afghan people" -- an allusion to Soviet claims that they were merely
supporting a local Afghan army.
The retired lieutenant colonel says he was always "against the war in my
soul." The Soviets should have pulled out earlier, he says -- or not gone
in
at all.
"We could have avoided big losses," he says. "We ourselves were guilty."
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