No Miracles

The Failure of Soviet Decision-Making in the Afghan War

Michael R. Fenzel

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780804798181
• eBook ISBN: 9780804799102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Soviet experience in Afghanistan provides a compelling perspective on the far-reaching hazards of military intervention. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev decided that a withdrawal from Afghanistan should occur as soon as possible. The Soviet Union's senior leadership had become aware that their strategy was unraveling, their operational and tactical methods were not working, and the sacrifices they were demanding from the Soviet people and military were unlikely to produce the forecasted results. Despite this state of affairs, operations in Afghanistan persisted and four more years passed before the Soviets finally withdrew their military forces.

In No Miracles, Michael Fenzel explains why and how that happened, as viewed from the center of the Soviet state. From that perspective, three sources of failure stand out: poor civil-military relations, repeated and rapid turnover of Soviet leadership, and the perception that Soviet global prestige and influence were inexorably tied to the success of the Afghan mission. Fenzel enumerates the series of misperceptions and misjudgments that led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, tracing the hazards of their military intervention and occupation. Ultimately, he offers a cautionary tale to nation states and policymakers considering military intervention and the use of force.

1

Introduction

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to settle a quarrel among competing factions within the recently installed communist government and to suppress the anticommunist resistance that the Afghan government’s ideology and conduct had inspired among the population. This book examines the Soviet decisions that led to the invasion, governed the conduct of the war, and contributed to its ultimate strategic failure. I focus on the politics of the Politburo before and during the Afghan War (1978–89), and on the way that political decision-making at the highest levels of the Soviet state shaped the war’s origins, conduct, and outcome.

Like most wars, the outcome of the Soviet-Afghan War appears overdetermined in retrospect. There is no claim here that the Soviet defeat can be attributed to their having missed some readily apparent path to victory, nor a claim that the Afghan War would have been won but for mistakes made in Moscow. Yet it remains true that the senior leadership of the Soviet Union quickly became aware that their war plan/strategy was unraveling, that their operational and tactical methods were not working, and that the sacrifices they were demanding from the Soviet people and military were unlikely to produce the strategic results they hoped for. They persisted nonetheless. I seek to explain why and how that happened.

Among the many reasons for the failure of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, three stand out at the center of the Soviet state: poor civil-military relations; repeated and often rapid turnover at the very summit of Soviet leadership; and the perception among Politburo members that Soviet global prestige and influence were inexorably tied to the success of the Afghan mission, which caused them to persist in their pursuit of a policy long after it was clearly unobtainable. It is worthwhile, by way of introducing the chapters to come, to say a few words about each of these.

Civil-Military Relations

Since its inception, military power was always a source of legitimacy for the Soviet Union. The Revolution had been near extinction at the hands of its White Army opponents and their foreign allies. It was only through Leon Trotsky’s Red Army between October 1917 and October 1922 that the Revolution was able to succeed. First Lenin and then Stalin endeavored to logically define the parameters of Soviet military power in a political system where the military profession was of secondary importance. The Great Patriotic War (1941–45) had catapulted the USSR into the first rank of world powers, while simultaneously displaying regime resilience and advertising the alleged superiority of communist ideology. Finally, the Cold War requirement to retain a world-class military with global reach as a condition of the USSR’s Great Power status justified the many sacrifices that the Kremlin required of Soviet citizens. At the same time, the urgency of the Cold War masked the inefficiencies and corruption of the system behind an impenetrable wall of militarized patriotism. But if the Red Army was a source of regime strength, it was also a cause of political anxiety, lest the dictatorship of the proletariat be converted into a dictatorship of a more familiar stripe.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had historically exercised close control over the nation’s armed forces, most brutally through the purges of lingering and fateful memory enacted by Stalin from 1937, and more routinely through the insertion of civilian political commissars into the ranks of the uniformed military. The result was civilian supremacy and control of the military, no doubt, but purchased at the price of much suspicion and mutual recrimination among civilian and military leaders. As general secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 until his death in 1982, Leonid Brezhnev sought to change this environment by substantially increasing military influence over national security decision-making—in fact, the first decade of his tenure has been called the golden age of Soviet civil-military relations.¹ But this change did not last, as by mid-1970s the military’s influence on policy began to diminish and, by 1979 as the situation in Afghanistan seemed to be spinning out of control, it was insignificant. Understanding how and why this happened is integral to understanding the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent conduct of the war. Broadly speaking, the senior officer corps of the Soviet Union carried little weight in strategic decision-making during this Soviet-Afghan War. It is worth considering what difference it might have made if the military voice had been more seriously considered.

Rapid Succession of Soviet Leadership

During the first six years of the Afghan War, the office of general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union changed hands four times. This persistent instability at the very top of the Soviet state reinforced the perhaps natural reluctance of the Politburo to contemplate withdrawal (and the attending requirement to admit policy failure), despite obvious signs that the war was not going well. Each of Brezhnev’s successors needed time to secure his personal hold on power, and while doing so none were prepared immediately to abandon the war, including Gorbachev, general secretary from 1985 to 1991, who had personally opposed it from the start. Whether greater stability at the top of the Soviet hierarchy would have made it easier to reach a decision to withdraw is impossible to say. But instability at the top of the Soviet hierarchy did mean that no leader felt secure enough to reverse an obviously failing policy.

Soviet Prestige and Reputational Risk

By declaring that the continued success and stability of communist states abroad was a high enough policy priority that it warranted military action, the Brezhnev Doctrine reaffirmed the international nature of the communist revolution in no uncertain terms. The situation in Afghanistan fell into this category, so that as a consequence, the Afghan War’s success became a matter of preserving the international prestige of the Soviet Union. As the war dragged on inconclusively, the Politburo became increasingly concerned that if the USSR simply withdrew from Afghanistan and allowed its client government to fail, other communist nations would view Moscow as an undependable ally. In this way the Afghan War acquired a symbolic significance that overshadowed the more direct (but limited) interests the Soviets had in maintaining good order and friendly leadership in a neighboring state. It was only after the reputational risk of persisting in Afghanistan came to be seen as more hazardous than withdrawal, that disengagement became politically feasible.

This book analyzes the decisions made by the Soviet Politburo that contributed to the failure of the Afghan mission in light of these three general issues. The focus is not on the bureaucratic character of the decision-making process itself, but rather on its results: the concrete decisions that defined the USSR’s Afghan policy and strategy throughout the conflict. My review of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan does not focus on poor Soviet tactics, the involvement of the United States in support of the insurgents, the general strength of the Afghan resistance, and the institutional and ideological fragility of the Kremlin’s Afghan client state, as the basic causes for Soviet failure. While those aspects of the Soviet war are important, they are not the only reasons why the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan. Utilizing the minutes of Politburo meetings from the period in question (1978–89) as a basis for evaluating the interaction between key members of the Politburo over the issue of Afghanistan provides a critical perspective on how the Soviet-Afghan War began, how it was fought, and how and why it was ultimately lost. Analyzing the war by focusing on the interrelated issues of Soviet civil-military relations, leadership instability, and concerns about prestige sheds new light on how the Soviet Union failed.

2

The Soviet Failure in Afghanistan

Many scholars see the Soviet failure in Afghanistan as the inevitable result of any foray by a major power into this “graveyard of empires.”¹ Whatever difficulties waging war in Afghanistan might pose—and they are significant—the view that failure is inevitable is nevertheless a vast oversimplification. The primary responsibility for Soviet failure begins at the center of power in Moscow. While a number of conditions in Afghanistan contributed to Soviet defeat, it is essential to take account of the decisions made by Soviet political leaders before and during the war. They had to deal with the weaknesses of the Afghan government and its military, which had existed for decades before the war and persisted through every stage of the conflict. Most in need of explanation is why Moscow persevered in a losing war for nearly ten years. The decision to remain in Afghanistan after achieving the initial objective of regime change in 1979 was made not by Soviet military leaders or diplomats but by Leonid Brezhnev. Continued occupation was reaffirmed by subsequent general secretaries until Mikhail Gorbachev finally ordered a withdrawal in February 1989. There is no current explanation for this dimension of the Soviet failure. Instead, the focus has been on specific stages of the war, from initial intervention through the occupation and withdrawal. This book makes the argument that Soviet failure at the political level was attributable to a civil-military divide, the rapid succession of leadership, and a persistent fear of damaging the USSR’s international reputation.

Of the three current and most common general explanations of Soviet defeat—Soviet military failure, Soviet diplomatic failure, and Afghan incapacity—the most common conclusion is that the Soviet military’s failure weighed the most heavily, because much of the available information is about military operations.² There are those who suggest that Soviet intervention was doomed from the start because of “the cost of supporting such a huge and seemingly useless army.”³ In fact, one quotation of an American diplomat who proclaims “We Won” in a cable from Islamabad and mentions that the CIA director hosted a champagne party to celebrate the “victory” makes this point emphatically.⁴ Then CIA director Robert Gates also trumpeted the effort of the international clandestine coalition led by the United States as “a great victory.”⁵ Much of this reflects a U.S. view that Afghanistan was payback for Soviet support of the communists in Vietnam operating against the U.S.-sponsored government of the Republic of Vietnam between 1965 and 1975. But the truth about who brought about the Soviet defeat is much different. Although some U.S. officials might like to present the Soviet defeat as Washington’s doing, international support for the Afghan resistance by itself does not explain the Soviet defeat.

The contention that the war in Afghanistan was somehow “Charlie Wilson’s War,”⁶ and that Soviet failure was brought about by American support for the Afghan resistance, is incorrect. While U.S. support of Afghan rebels that included equipment such as Stinger missiles was tactically important, it did not directly impact the Soviet decision to withdraw. The fact that U.S. support for the resistance was barely discussed in Politburo meetings suggests that it had little impact on Soviet decision-making. Furthermore, withdrawal from Afghanistan as a policy option was discussed in the Politburo at least one year before U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles appeared in Afghanistan. Although American support for the rebellion was significant in that it increased the reputational risk for the Soviets, it was not a direct cause of the failure of Moscow’s Afghan policy. While many who have recounted tales of Soviet failure have tended to emphasize the importance of a growing international jihad against the USSR and the impact of Stinger missiles in check-mating the Soviet military in Afghanistan, the importance of these factors is exaggerated. At any point after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, they might simply have withdrawn and in so doing avoided the international opprobrium they later encountered. But the Politburo failed to act, and the consequences of this grew with each passing year. The general secretaries and Politburo members expected the military leaders in Afghanistan to deliver a tactical and operational victory in a strategic vacuum, and when it was not forthcoming they became confounded and frustrated, while making little effort to understand the political and military realities on the ground.

The flawed Politburo reaction of merely telling its military to “try harder” simply increased the brutality of the campaign, which only made strategic success more elusive. Indeed, Soviet claims that their military never lost a battle in Afghanistan rang as hollow as similar assertions made by U.S. Army officer Colonel Harry Summers about the U.S. military in Vietnam two decades earlier. On 13 November 1986, the chief of the general staff of Soviet armed forces, Marshal Sergey Akhromeev, told the Politburo that ground seized by Soviet and Afghan troops simply could not be held because troop numbers were insufficient, precisely because the Politburo limited the number of Soviet troops to 108,000.⁷ The problem, in my view, was not a failure of Soviet troops to perform. Instead, international support for the Afghan resistance provided them with means to continue the fight, after which point a disconnect emerged in understanding that although the Politburo had ordered the military to destroy the resistance, it had provided too few troops to do so.

The second common theme that persists is that the war was a Soviet diplomatic failure. Some proponents of this explanation rely upon their own experience with the UN diplomatic process to end the Soviet-Afghan War. Others point to evidence that indicates the United States and its allies (Pakistan, Egypt, and China) were unwilling to allow any diplomatic resolution to develop. The latter argument suggests that the United States used the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as an opportunity to mire the Soviet Union in a protracted conflict that would damage the country in domestic and international terms.⁸ Diego Cordovez was the appointed mediator from the United Nations who began the diplomatic journey to end the war in 1982 and continued the struggle through Gorbachev’s unilateral decision to withdraw troops. Cordovez said that “as early as 1983 there were serious probes for a way out that were rejected by an American leadership bent on exploiting Soviet discomfiture.”⁹

Still others offer a more detached view of Soviet state behavior, but still blame the collapse in Afghanistan on the diplomatic interaction between the Soviet Union and the United States.¹⁰ They see the war as an extension of the Cold War and the result as failure on the part of the two countries to engage each other effectively over Afghanistan or other pressing diplomatic issues at the time (such as the Soviet shoot-down of a Korean airliner, the Politburo’s mistaken belief in 1983 that the United States planned to attack the Soviet Union, and the Reagan administration’s planned Star Wars missile defense program). Such accounts suggest that what occurred on the ground was much less important than the engagement between these superpowers, an engagement that inevitably led to a drawn-out conflict that was primarily ideological rather than military in nature. One particular account brings Pakistan into the picture: “The Americans liked (Pakistan president) Zia’s ‘no compromise’ stance against the Soviets and the Kabul government, and he became their main bulwark against Soviet expansion in southern Asia.”¹¹ These accounts also draw their conclusions from a deductive approach to deciphering Soviet behavior. Politburo documents confirm that Soviet leaders did not give diplomacy serious consideration until after Gorbachev had been in power long enough to consolidate his political base.

Afghan historian Barnett Rubin levels as much blame for Soviet failure on their inability to understand and deal diplomatically with the postinvasion Afghan government as he does credit for the U.S. support of the Afghan resistance. Rubin attributes Soviet failure to the limits of Soviet cultural understanding (and concern) that led to a lack of political leverage. He explains that “Soviet penetration of the Afghan state apparatus did not enable Moscow simply to issue orders that would be followed.”¹² The Afghan government proved hapless and more willing to allow Soviet advisers to guide the functions of the state than interested in taking the lead. Soviet penetration simply had not given them the leverage they anticipated.

The third explanation for Soviet failure is general weakness on the part of their Afghan partners. One finds this expla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Soviet Failure in Afghanistan
• 3. Setting the Stage: Evolution of Party-military Relations
• 4. Getting In: Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Decision to Invade Afghanistan
• 5. No Retreat . . . No Miracles: Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko in Afghanistan (1980–85)
• 6. Gorbachev’s Quest for “Reluctant, Silent Agreement” to Withdraw from Afghanistan (1985)
• 7. Getting Out: Gorbachev and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (1986–89)
• 8. Losing Afghanistan
• Appendix: Soviet Stakeholder Agencies
• Notes
• References
• Index