[BRIEF NOTE] On not learning from others' histories

[rfmcdonald]

On Saturday, The Globe and Mail's newsboxes across Canada displayed a front page hosting an article by Steven Chase with an alarming-sounding title, "Canada takes notes from failed Soviet war".

By the time the Department of National Defence began its research project, Canadian soldiers had been fighting Taliban insurgents for nearly half a decade without subduing them, a 2007 Forces paper notes.

"Despite many successes … the insurgency against the government of Afghanistan, the U.S. troops and [North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces] persisted."

Many of the research findings are lessons that, by 2008, the Canadian Forces, NATO soldiers and Western governments had already gleaned through experience in Afghanistan and other foreign missions.

Researchers said the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is a major hindrance. The mujahedeen used the porous frontier to smuggle arms and resources into Afghanistan in the 1980s and are offering Taliban supporters the same supply route for insurgents and weapons today.

"The movement of insurgents and materiel across the Afghan-Pakistan border is a paramount strategic problem," says a 2007 memorandum by Anton Minkov and Gregory Smolynec titled 3-D Soviet Style: A Presentation on Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan.

In a separate memo that year, the same authors warn that NATO forces will never be able to stabilize Afghanistan until the country's economy is sufficiently stable and growing to allow the fledging Afghan government to cover a substantial amount of its own security and welfare bills.

"The main reasons behind the fall of the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul were not defeat on the battlefield nor military superiority of the resistance but the regime's failure to achieve economic sustainability and its overreliance on foreign aid," says a document called Economic Development in Afghanistan during the Soviet Period 1979-1989: Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan.

The paper's editors might, or might not, have been making a sly point by including in the same issue, the same section even, Paul Koring's "'It's impossible to conquer the Afghans'". Koring's various interviews with veterans of and experts on the Soviet war in Afghanistan make the expected, if still unsettling, points.

Head bowed, exhausted, the statue of a young soldier back from Afghanistan's killing fields is flanked by long, grim, lists of his dead comrades. It's a cautionary monument for Western politicians and generals who boldly boast they will succeed where the Soviets failed.

In Russia, a country chock full of heroic memorials to enormous military sacrifice, the uniquely dejected pose of the helmetless Afghan combat veteran in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg is a sobering reminder that great powers have an unhappy history of overreaching and then being driven ignominiously from Afghanistan.

"Canadians and Americans are learning the hard way. You have been there seven years and you have no prospect of early victory," said Ruslan Aushev, a highly decorated combat veteran who served two tours, totalling nearly five years with the Soviet army in Afghanistan. "We knew by 1985 that we could not win," he recalls. It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops from Afghanistan, while claiming victory on the way out. Afghanistan was plunged into civil war.

[. . .]

“Most Afghans still live in a feudal society, in villages far from the cities,” he said. “For them, there is no difference between being bombed by the Soviets and now being bombed by the Americans . . . and it won't succeed."

In the West, the bloody, decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan is viewed as the last gasping failure of a blundering Communist giant, eventually defeated by the proud and fierce Afghan mujahedeen, armed and backed by billions of dollars worth of sophisticated U.S. weaponry, and jihadists from throughout the Islamic world. Tagged as the [Soviets'] Vietnam, the Afghan quagmire helped sink the USSR. But the view from Russia – tempered by experience and the passage of two decades that allowed some lessons to sink in – suggest the West may, too, have overestimated its welcome and its capacity to rebuild Afghanistan at the point of a gun.

"We could take any village, any town and drive the mujahedeen out," Mr. Aushev said, recalling his two combat tours, first as an infantry battalion commander and later in charge of a full Soviet regiment – roughly the size of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan. "But when we handed ground over to the Afghan army or police they would lose it in a week."

[. . .]

Former sergeant Igor Grigorevich, 46, now stands watch over a tiny, seldom-visited museum, tucked away on the ground floor of a hulking building on Moscow's outskirts. Unlike the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to the Second World War, there is little about the Afghan war to remember proudly. Instead there are deep scars, both on the national psyche and among hundreds of thousands of largely ignored veterans.

"It's impossible to conquer the Afghans … Alexander the Great couldn't do it, the British couldn't do it, we couldn't do it and the Americans won't do it . . . no one can," said Mr. Grigorevich, still trim and determined not to let the war be forgotten. The museum began largely as a volunteer effort by veterans, although the government now provides some funding.

The exhibits are striking. If the Soviet army looks vaguely dated, the pictures of Afghan villagers would be instantly familiar to Canadian soldiers now serving in Afghanistan. So, too, would the lumbering four-engined military transports with honour guards solemnly carrying flag-draped coffins into the waiting holds on Kandahar air field. The Russians called those flights "Black Tulips."