When Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov was knowledgeable of the Kremlin’s determination to invade Afghanistan simply two weeks earlier than his forces had been as a result of launch the offensive, Ogarkov objected. There was no means even a superpower might stabilise a rustic so massive with simply 85,000 troops, the chief of the Soviet basic employees insisted.
“He was flatly instructed he had no alternative and to just accept the directive,” historian Elisabeth Leake recounts in her new research of the Soviet occupation.
It’s tough to learn such accounts in Leake’s exhaustive Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Fashionable Afghanistan and never consider the parallels with the Kremlin’s newer invasion — and wonder if Vladimir Putin thought of the decade-long battle that led to Soviet ignominy earlier than launching his personal Ukrainian misadventure.
Like Putin, Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev consulted solely a small circle of Kremlin yes-men earlier than greenlighting the Afghan offensive; Alexei Kosygin, Brezhnev’s prime minister, who opposed the invasion, was deliberately minimize out of essential conferences in late 1979 the place plans had been agreed.
And far as Putin might have been lulled right into a false sense of triumphalism in recent times by comparatively profitable Russian interventions in Georgia, Belarus and Crimea, Leake notes that Soviet suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring, in addition to the successes of Soviet proxies in Angola and Ethiopia — to not point out US withdrawal from Vietnam — satisfied Brezhnev and his aides that they had been on a successful streak.
“The previous decade had given Soviet leaders a (maybe false) sense of energy of their Third World dealings,” she writes. “Sending troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 adopted the identical rationale, of supporting an area vanguard social gathering that appeared able to main the nation’s socialist transformation.”
Essentially the most important distinction between Kremlin decision-making circa 1979 and its newer variant is that the Russians had a pro-Soviet authorities to work with in Afghanistan, even when it had come to energy in a coup a 12 months earlier. Leake goes into exhaustive element about how ineffectual the Individuals’s Democratic Occasion of Afghanistan was in implementing its socialist agenda. However at the least Moscow had a proxy in Kabul; it has nothing of the type in Kyiv.
Afghan Crucible was accomplished nicely earlier than the battle in Ukraine, after all, and in contrast to earlier research of the Soviet invasion — significantly Steve Coll’s magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars (2004) — it focuses much less on the Kremlin’s army failings and extra on its incapacity to execute what overseas coverage professionals invariably label “nation-building”.
In that respect, it’s a cautionary story not just for the present occupants of the Kremlin. Gone unspoken by Leake is that one other superpower tried its personal hand at nation-building in Afghanistan much more not too long ago, with not dissimilar outcomes.
Certainly, Leake’s account is replete with vignettes — lots of of technocrats despatched to Kabul to shore up Afghan companies, the failure of the central authorities to develop its affect past a handful of city centres, infinite desertions from the Afghan armed forces — that learn like a Pentagon after-action report in 2022.
Even after spending 20 years in Afghanistan — twice so long as the Soviets — Washington failed to understand the fragility of the federal government they had been propping up in Kabul till the very finish, when it collapsed nearly in a single day. A minimum of Mohammed Najibullah, put in by Mikhail Gorbachev shortly after he took the Kremlin helm in 1985, managed to cling on to energy in Kabul for 3 years after the Soviets withdrew.
The American failure is the background music to a different groundbreaking ebook on the star-crossed fashionable historical past of Afghanistan by Nelly Lahoud, a scholar of Islamism, which attracts on 96,000 information captured by US Navy Seals in Might 2011 once they killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in northeastern Pakistan.
Lahoud’s tome, The Bin Laden Papers: How the Abbottabad Raid Revealed the Fact about al-Qaeda, its Chief and his Household, is an ostensibly heroic story of People and their work within the area. Given her reliance on a now-declassified trove captured by the US army, it’s maybe not shocking that she opens with fulsome reward for the “brave efforts” of American particular operations forces.
However as she items collectively a outstanding insider account of al-Qaeda’s historical past, primarily based on the writings of bin Laden and his interior circle, her overarching conclusion is one thing a lot much less flattering — that American intelligence saved getting it unsuitable, regardless of its intense give attention to al-Qaeda and its chief in the course of the decade between September 11 2001 and bin Laden’s demise.
Virtually from the second that US forces arrived in Afghanistan, Lahoud finds, Washington overestimated al-Qaeda’s potential to reconstitute and organise new assaults on the US or allied targets. The US intelligence neighborhood, in essence, satisfied itself that it was going through an indomitable big — whereas in actuality, bin Laden and his followers spent their final decade on the run, scrambling to search out succesful operatives after most of their veteran troopers had been picked off, one after the other, by American drones armed with Hellfire missiles.
“The American response to the 9/11 assaults was colossal, means past our expectations,” one bin Laden lieutenant wrote in a captured letter, translated by Lahoud. “We additionally didn’t think about that the Taliban Emirate would collapse so quickly. The rationale after all is because of the thrust of the shock, and the ugliness of the bombing and its destruction.”
The captured paperwork additionally clarify that the varied al-Qaeda offshoots that sprung up after bin Laden’s exit from Afghanistan — significantly al-Qaeda in Iraq, headed by infamous Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but in addition al-Qaeda within the Islamic Maghreb, and al-Qaeda within the Arabian Peninsula — weren’t offshoots in any respect, however slightly Islamist freelancers who tried to bolster their very own picture by appropriating the al-Qaeda “model”.
Al-Zarqawi at the least had the nice manners to hunt bin Laden’s approval earlier than altering the identify of his more and more highly effective terrorist group, which grew to become the preoccupation of US forces in Iraq till he was killed by an air strike in 2006.
“We don’t know if [al-Zarqawi] knew the extent to which al-Qaeda had been shattered when he sought a merger, however his enthusiasm to be a part of the model is palpable within the voice messages that reached Usama in transcribed format,” Lahoud writes.
Bin Laden quickly got here to remorse the alliance after a collection of “indiscriminate” assaults by al-Zarqawi inside Iraq that killed fellow Muslims. Different so-called offshoots adopted the al-Qaeda moniker with out even bothering to seek the advice of the “father”, inflicting bin Laden infinite complications.
“By 2009, he was starting to expertise what we would describe as Brothers-fatigue,” Lahoud writes. “Al-Qaeda had change into cautious of its identify being related to teams that thought they might punch above their weight.”
Lahoud notes that even after 2011, when the US intelligence neighborhood had translated and digested the paperwork captured within the bin Laden raid, Washington continued to oversell al-Qaeda’s capabilities.
In one of many ebook’s most outstanding revelations, Lahoud particulars bin Laden’s mounting anger with Tehran after discovering that a few of his closest kin, together with his son Hamza, had been held captive by the Iranian regime for six years, after fleeing westwards on the outset of the Afghan battle. And but, months after reviewing the Abbottabad paperwork, main US intelligence officers had been nonetheless telling Congress that al-Qaeda had a “marriage of comfort” with Tehran — both an entire misreading of the intelligence, Lahoud suggests, or a malicious lie.
Though neither Lahoud or Leake say it explicitly, the findings of each books make robust instances for superpower humility. Even probably the most muscular superpower, deploying extremely succesful militaries backed by the world’s main intelligence companies, has struggled to impose its will overseas. Each Washington and Moscow learnt the lesson the laborious means in Afghanistan. Vladimir Putin seems to be studying it but once more in Ukraine.
Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Fashionable Afghanistan by Elisabeth Leake, Oxford College Press £25, 365 pages
The Bin Laden Papers: How the Abbottabad Raid Revealed the Fact about al-Qaeda, its Chief and his Household by Nelly Lahoud, Yale College Press £18.99, 368 pages
Peter Spiegel is the FT’s US managing editor
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