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Decision-Making and the Soviet War in Afghanistan from Intervention to Withdrawal

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Decision-Making and the Soviet War in Afghanistan from Intervention to Withdrawal KaDecision-Malinovsky king and the Soviet War in Afghanistan Decision-Making and the Soviet War in Afghanistan From Intervention to Withdrawal ✣ Artemy Kalinovsky Like many other Cold War conºicts in the Third World, the So- viet war in Afghanistan had reverberations that are still being felt today. Al- though the opening of some important East-bloc archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed scholars to explore why the Soviet Union decided to invade Afghanistan in December 1979, the decision-making process during the rest of the Soviet intervention has gone largely unexamined.1 What makes this period interesting is that despite signiªcant pressure within the highest organs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Soviet armed forces to limit direct Soviet involvement, policymakers in fact persisted with the Soviet military intervention. Several factors explain why. First, throughout the Soviet Union’s involvement in Afghanistan, policymaking was dominated by a narrow circle within the CPSU Politburo. These ofªcials formed a consensus among themselves, and their seniority and closeness to the CPSU General Secretary allowed them to sideline most critics of their policies. Second, senior foreign policy ofªcials as well as the General Secre- taries under whom they served shared a concern that a failure in Afghanistan would damage the Soviet Union’s position and authority as leader of the Communist movement and supporter of “national liberation” movements. 1. Analyses of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in general are limited. Two important works have appeared that draw primarily on published materials and interviews: Sarah E. Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Andrew Bennett, Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1973–1996 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Both books focus on Soviet decision-making in light of “learning theory” and tend to give more weight to “new thinking” in the evolution of Soviet decision-making than I do. Of great value is the book coauthored by United Nations (UN) mediator Diego Cordovez and journalist Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Also valuable is the account by Pakistani negotiator Riaz M. Khan, Untying the Afghan Knot: Negotiating Soviet With- drawal (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 1991). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 11, No. 4, Fall 2009, pp. 46–73 © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 46 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2009.11.4.46 by guest on 02 October 2021 Decision-Making and the Soviet War in Afghanistan Third, involvement in Afghanistan was extended by Moscow’s belief in its ability to transform Afghanistan, stabilize the government there, and achieve broad international recognition of the Communist regime in Kabul. Positive reporting from ofªcials on the ground often bolstered this belief. On numer- ous occasions the Politburo agreed to extend the presence of Soviet troops to give them a chance to succeed. Finally, the Soviet authorities were unable to coordinate the efforts of their various organizations on the ground. Competi- tion among the military, the Committee for State Security (KGB), Ministry of Foreign Affairs ofªcials, and political advisers led to a partial and often in- accurate understanding in Moscow of what was happening in Afghanistan, as well as confused and often contradictory policy implementation. The still limited archival access for this period makes an “anatomy of de- cision-making” approach difªcult. Instead, this article identiªes key trends in the decision-making mechanism from 1979 to 1989 and explores how these trends affected the conduct of the war. The article begins with a review of what is known about the decision-making that led to the intervention in 1979. The article then discusses how the pre-intervention period shaped the formation of policy on Afghanistan during the early years of the war, during Mikhail Gorbachev’s ªrst years as CPSU General Secretary (1985–1986), and during the withdrawal itself. The study of Soviet decision-making in this period is methodologically challenging. Archival access is patchy in Russia, which, unlike most other for- mer East-bloc countries, has not systematically declassiªed any documents from the 1970s and 1980s, including CPSU Politburo transcripts, protocols, and other memoranda. Scholars interested in the Soviet Union’s involvement in Afghanistan must make do with selectively declassiªed documents from ar- chives,2 memoirs, oral history, and the documentation and “notes” collected at the Gorbachev Foundation.3 Few documents on the work of the KGB or the numerous political advisers who went to Afghanistan have been declass- 2. Many of these were declassiªed by Boris Yeltsin’s administration in the early 1990s as a way to em- barrass the Soviet government. A number of relevant documents, mostly from Fonds (F.) 5 and 89 at the Russian State Archive of Modern History (RGANI) in Moscow, were collected in an edited vol- ume: Pierre Allan et al., eds., Sowjetische Geheimdokumente zum Afghanistankrieg 1978–1991 (Zurich: vdf Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH, 1995). Another selection of documents from RGANI and the Gorbachev Foundation Archives were translated for the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP). See the document collection “Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan” and the document reader for the 2002 conference “Towards an International History of the War in Afghanistan,” at the CWIHP Virtual Archive, http://www.cwihp.org/. 3. These are compiled handwritten notes, not a formal transcript. However, where I have been able to cross-reference them with records available in state archives, they have been fairly consistent. Some of these were recently compiled (at times in abridged form) in A. Chernyaev ed., V Politbyuro TsK KPSS: Po zapisyam Anatoliya Chernyaeva, Vadima Medvedeva, Georgiya Shakhnazarova (Moscow: Al’pina Biznes-Buks, 2006). See also Chernyaev’s recently published diary, Anatolii Chernyaev, Sovestnyi iskhod: Dnevnik dvukh epokh (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008). 47 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2009.11.4.46 by guest on 02 October 2021 Kalinovsky iªed. Nevertheless, the materials that are now available, when carefully as- sessed, do allow us to gain signiªcant insights into Soviet decision-making re- garding Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. In an earlier article, I explored the intersection between the improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations in 1987–1988 and the culmination of the United Na- tions (UN)–sponsored “Geneva talks” that led to the start of the Soviet troop withdrawal.4 The present article examines how decisions on Afghanistan were made from the initial intervention in 1979 to the withdrawal of troops in 1989. Decision-Making and the Invasion The general outline of how the decision to invade Afghanistan was reached began to appear in the years after the Soviet withdrawal was completed in 1989, in part reºecting an ofªcial policy to investigate the origins of the war and to cast it as a failure.5 Documents declassiªed in the early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union sparked new revelations as well as the appearance of several key works in both Russian and English.6 This research permits sev- eral general observations regarding the mechanics of decision-making on Af- ghanistan from the Saur revolution in April 1978, which brought the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) to power, through the start of the Soviet intervention in December 1979. First, the invasion was the result of a decision reached by several key for- eign policy decision-makers within the Politburo, not the Politburo as a whole. This was characteristic of decision-making during the late Brezhnev era. With Brezhnev himself ailing, foreign policy was dominated by four peo- ple: Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Defense Minister Dmitrii Ustinov, KGB Chairman Yurii Andropov, and long-time Politburo member Mikhail Suslov (who, however, did not usually play a salient role on Afghanistan).7 At 4. Artemy Kalinovsky, “Old Politics, New Diplomacy, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan: From the Washington Summit to the Geneva Accords,” Cold War History, Vol. 8, No. 3 (August 2008), pp. 381–404. 5. This included a “parliamentary commission” launched in February 1989 as well as a number of arti- cles in the Soviet press claiming early opposition to the war. See, for example, Oleg Bogomolov’s arti- cle “Kto zhe oshibalsya,” Literaturnaya gazeta, No. 7 (16 February 1988), p. 10. The ªrst attempt at a comprehensive account, still very useful, is David Gai and Vladimir Snegirev, Vtorzhenie: Neizvestnie stranitsyi neobiavlennoi voiny’’ (Moscow: IKPA, 1991). 6. A key Russian source is Aleksandr Lyakhovskii, Tragediya i doblest’ Afgana (Moscow: Nord, 2004). Lyakhovskii includes numerous documents, including excerpts of Soviet Politburo transcripts kept at the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (APRF) in Moscow, many of which are not ac- cessible to most researchers. 7. The three leaders took several measures to make sure that the decision had the appearance of una- 48 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2009.11.4.46 by guest on 02 October 2021 Decision-Making and the Soviet War in Afghanistan the same time, other advisers to the General Secretary, such as Brezhnev’s for- eign policy aide Andrei Aleksandrov-Agentov, at times exerted considerable inºuence on decisions.8 At the request of the Communist government of Afghanistan, the Soviet Politburo ªrst considered sending in troops in March 1979, after an uprising in the eastern city of Herat unnerved PDPA leaders in Kabul. Ustinov, Gromyko, and Andropov originally supported armed intervention at a Polit- buro meeting on 17 March, believing that the risks of engaging Soviet troops outweighed those of losing Afghanistan.
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