The Soviet-Afghan War

By Anthony Tucker-Jones

This photographic history of the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 gives a fascinating insight into a grim conflict that prefigured the American-led campaign in that country. In an unequal struggle, the mujahedeen resisted for ten years, then triumphed over Moscow. For the Soviet Union, the futile intervention has been compared to the similar humiliation suffered by the United States in Vietnam. For the Afghans the victory was just one episode in the long history of their efforts to free their territory from the interference of foreign powers. By focusing on the Soviet use of heavy weaponry, Anthony Tucker-Jones shows the imbalance at the heart of a conflict in which the mechanized, industrial might of a super power was set against lightly armed partisans who became experts in infiltration tactics and ambushes. His work is a visual record of the tactics and the equipment the Soviets used to counter the resistance and protect vulnerable convoys.It also shows what this grueling conflict was like for the Soviet soldiers, the guerrilla fighters and the Afghan population, and it puts the present war in Afghanistan in a thought-provoking historical perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783830466

Anthony Tucker-Jones

Anthony Tucker-Jones, a former intelligence officer, is a highly prolific writer and military historian with well over 50 books to his name. His work has also been published in an array of magazines and online. He regularly appears on television and radio commenting on current and historical military matters.

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Chapter One

Cold War Stand Off

Now a decade old, Operation Enduring Freedom, designed to oust the Taliban from power, is an echo of a much bloodier war that was fought in Afghanistan over thirty years ago.Those who recall how grim Kabul was in the late 1970s will know that it became even grimmer after the arrival of Soviet tanks, jets and helicopters. Once more, geography, as in the earlier Korean and Vietnam wars, was to preclude the effective use of armour in Afghanistan. It was as if the Russians never bothered to heed any of the lessons of these previous conflicts and proceeded to learn the hard way – from scratch.

The Soviet Union was at the height of its military power by the late 1970s. It was a vast monolith whose military resources were only rivalled by the world’s other Superpower – the United States of America. Every year during Moscow’s Red Square military parades the Soviet armed forces put on displays of equipment bristling with firepower, designed to impress the population and cow its enemies. These parades also served to tip off Western intelligence of the existence of new equipment.The Soviets could not resist showing off.

For the previous two decades the Warsaw Pact and NATO had been at military loggerheads, facing off against each other in armed confrontation across central Europe in what was known as the Cold War. It was largely the threat of mutually assured destruction, should conflict break out and escalate to a nuclear war, that kept the two sides from coming to blows.

In fact the Cold War was anything but cold, with both the Soviet Union and US fighting a series of long and bloody proxy wars around the world. Ever since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 they had been constantly testing each other’s resolve on foreign battlefields.The Soviet Union also had a track record of intervening with its neighbours – it stamped out pro-democracy movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968 respectively, and on both occasions NATO had done nothing.

The Soviet intervention in Hungary was dubbed Operation Whirlwind. In response to calls for Soviet troops to leave the country, elements of two Soviet motor rifle divisions supported by tanks had rolled into Budapest and a further 75,000 troops streamed into the country. The Hungarian Army melted away and the revolutionaries were overwhelmed. In the fighting that followed, 3,000 Hungarians were killed. In total this invasion involved up to twelve divisions with 3,000 tanks.This was a conventional operation in which the Soviets employed the same tactics they had used during the Second World War.

In the case of Czechoslovakia, as part of Operation Danube, the 103rd Guards Air Assault Division (GAAD) arrived to seize Prague, followed by two motor rifle divisions. At the time the number of Warsaw Pact forces – including Bulgarian, East German, Hungarian and Polish units – committed to the invasion of Czechoslovakia was believed to be 250,000 troops and 2,000 tanks. This operation ran smoothly, mainly because of the minimal resistance offered by the surprised Czechs. The Soviets lost about 150 men, most as a result of accidents.

In the winter of 1979 Moscow was confident that a swift intervention in neighbouring Afghanistan to prop up the Marxist government would be a short-lived mission and probably go largely unnoticed. After all, Afghanistan was in the Soviets’ backyard and they were keen to aviod Islamic militancy spilling over into the neighbouring Soviet central Asian