Afgantsy

PROLOGUE

The explosion of violence which erupted in Herat in March 1979 was beyond anything that had happened since the bloody Communist coup a year earlier. Resistance to the Communists was already spreading throughout the country. But this was a full-scale revolt in a provincial capital, one of Afghanistan’s most important cities, an ancient centre of Islamic learning, music, art, and poetry. Power fell entirely into the hand of the insurgents, and it was a week before Afghan government forces finally regained control after the spilling of much blood.

The Communists had promised much: ‘Our aim was no less than to give an example to all the backward countries of the world of how to jump from feudalism straight to a prosperous, just society… Our choice was not between doing things democratically or not. Unless we did them, nobody else would… [Our] very first proclamation declared that food and shelter are the basic needs and rights of a human being… Our programme was clear: land to the peasants, food for the hungry, free education for all. We knew that the mullahs in the villages would scheme against us, so we issued our decrees swiftly so that the masses could see where their real interests lay… For the first time in Afghanistan’s history women were to be given the right to education… We told them that they owned their bodies, they could marry whom they liked, they shouldn’t have to live shut up in houses like pets.’

But the Communists knew that such ideas would not be welcome to the pious and conservative people of Afghanistan, and they were not prepared to wait. They had expected resistance and acted ruthlessly to put it down: ‘[I]t was not the time to put on kid gloves. First and foremost we had to hold on to power. The alternative was to be liquidated and for Afghanistan to revert to darkness.’⁴ So they started a massive reign of terror: landowners, mullahs, dissident officers, professional people, even members of the Communist Party itself, were arrested, tortured, and shot in large numbers. When their friends in Moscow protested, they replied that what had worked for Stalin would work for them too.

There are various accounts of what triggered off the violence in Herat. Sher Ahmad Maladani was there at the time and later commanded a local band of mujahedin—Muslim fighters against the Communists and the Russians. He said that the peasants in an outlying village, incensed by a decision of the local Communists to force their daughters to school, rose up, killed the Communists, killed the girls for good measure, and marched on the city.⁵ Others said that the rising took place on orders from émigrés in Pakistan, who had planned for a countrywide rebellion. Some said that the rising was led by mutinous soldiers from the 17th Division, the local Afghan army garrison. Still others said it was stirred up by agents from Iran.

Whatever the basis for these stories, the peasants of the neighbouring villages gathered at their mosques on the morning of Thursday, 15 March, and moved towards the city carrying religious slogans and brandishing ancient rifles, knives, and other improvised weapons, destroying the symbols of Communism and the state as they marched. They were rapidly joined by the people of Herat itself. The mob flooded down the pine-tree avenues that led to the city, past the great citadel and the four ancient minarets in the north-western corner, through the Maliki Gate, and into the new suburbs to the north and east where the provincial governor’s office was situated. They stormed the prison, sacked and torched banks, post offices, newspaper offices, and government buildings, and looted the bazaars. They tore down the red flags and the portraits of the Communist leaders. They beat people not wearing traditional Muslim clothes. Party officials, including the governor himself, were hunted down and killed.⁶ So were some of the Soviet advisers who were working in the city and were unable to make their escape. By noon most of the city was in rebel hands. That evening there was dancing in the bazaars.⁷

In the months and years that followed, the story of what happened in Herat on those March days grew mightily in the telling, fanned by the reports of courageous but uncritical Western journalists who had no way of checking what they were told. The mutilated bodies of a hundred Soviet advisers, their wives and children, were said to have been paraded through the streets. It was confidently asserted that Soviet long-range bombers had pounded the city for two days. Up to twenty thousand people were said to have died in the rebellion and its aftermath.

As so often during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, facts were hard to establish, and hard to distinguish from myth-making. Most of the figures about the Herat rising have been much exaggerated. But whatever the truth of the matter, the immediate reaction of the Communist government in Kabul was to panic, and to ask Moscow to send military forces to put the rising down. The Soviet Politburo debated the question for four whole days and then came to a very sensible conclusion. They would not send troops, though they would supply the Afghan government with additional military and economic aid. As the Soviet Prime Minister, Alexei Kosygin (1904–80), told the Afghan President, Nur Mohamed Taraki (1913–79), ‘If we sent in our troops, the situation in your country would not improve. On the contrary, it would get worse. Our troops would have to struggle not only with an external aggressor, but with a part of your own people. And people do not forgive that kind of thing.’

In the event, the Afghan government was able to put down the Herat rising on its own. But a slow-burning fuse had been lit. Unrest and armed resistance continued to spread throughout the country. Infighting within the Communist Party grew increasingly bloody, until it culminated in September with Taraki’s murder by the Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin (1929–79).

For the Russians this was the last straw. Driven step by step, mostly against their will, they tried to get a grip. Their decisions were bedevilled by ignorance, ideological prejudice, muddled thinking, inadequate intelligence, divided counsel, and the sheer pressure of events. Needless to say, the experts who actually knew about Afghanistan—and there were many of them in the Soviet Union in those days—were neither consulted nor informed.

In December 1979 Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan. Soviet special forces seized key objectives in Kabul, stormed Amin’s palace, and killed him. The intentions of the Soviet government were modest: they aimed to secure the main towns and the roads, stabilise the government, train up the Afghan army and police, and withdraw within six months or a year. Instead they found themselves in a bloody war from which it took them nine years and fifty-two days to extricate themselves.

The Afgantsy, the soldiers who did the actual fighting, came from all parts of the Soviet Union: from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic States. Despite the great differences between them, most thought of themselves as Soviet citizens. That changed towards the end, as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, and men who had been comrades in arms found themselves living in different and sometimes hostile countries. Many took years to find their feet again in civilian life. Some never did.

None shook free of the memories of their common war.