Niels Annen: Echoes of the Soviet Surge
[Niels Annen is a nonresident fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is a former member of the German Bundestag's Foreign Affairs Committee.]
The war in Afghanistan is not going well. A young president wants to pull out, but is boxed in by his generals. In Kabul, a corrupt, nominally democratic leader is losing his grip on power. A surge of ground troops has begun. The year is 1985.
It was 25 years ago that the Soviet Union experienced the bloodiest year of its occupation of Afghanistan, as the West is today. It was also the moment that Soviet forces there grew to a record 118,000 men -- a number ominously close to the 97,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today. The strategy then was, as it is now, to produce a "surge" that could establish the conditions for withdrawal. Afghanistan's early spring of 1985 offers a striking parallel with its current season of discontent, and as the U.S. government pushes ahead with its strategy, it would be wise to study how the Soviets failed in fighting and ending their war.
In 1985, Moscow's mission was less an imperial adventure than an attempt to preserve some measure of dignity before exiting Afghanistan for good. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev swept into office in March 1985 as an agent for change, a politician who claimed he could get the Soviet Union back on track after the serious missteps of his predecessors. Minimizing his country's involvement in Afghanistan topped his to-do list. Gorbachev had become increasingly impatient with the counterinsurgency against the stubborn U.S.- and Pakistan-backed mujahideen, which was costing the nearly bankrupt Soviet Union an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion a year. He was prepared to finally and decisively change course.
In front of the 27th congress of the Soviet Union's Communist Party in February 1986, Gorbachev owned up to the dire nature of the struggle, referring to Afghanistan as "our bleeding wound." The delegates authorized him to seek a political solution for the conflict and eventually to end the Soviet presence in the country. But rather than chart an immediate withdrawal, Gorbachev conceived an effort to bolster the pro-Soviet Afghan government by military means....
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The war in Afghanistan is not going well. A young president wants to pull out, but is boxed in by his generals. In Kabul, a corrupt, nominally democratic leader is losing his grip on power. A surge of ground troops has begun. The year is 1985.
It was 25 years ago that the Soviet Union experienced the bloodiest year of its occupation of Afghanistan, as the West is today. It was also the moment that Soviet forces there grew to a record 118,000 men -- a number ominously close to the 97,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today. The strategy then was, as it is now, to produce a "surge" that could establish the conditions for withdrawal. Afghanistan's early spring of 1985 offers a striking parallel with its current season of discontent, and as the U.S. government pushes ahead with its strategy, it would be wise to study how the Soviets failed in fighting and ending their war.
In 1985, Moscow's mission was less an imperial adventure than an attempt to preserve some measure of dignity before exiting Afghanistan for good. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev swept into office in March 1985 as an agent for change, a politician who claimed he could get the Soviet Union back on track after the serious missteps of his predecessors. Minimizing his country's involvement in Afghanistan topped his to-do list. Gorbachev had become increasingly impatient with the counterinsurgency against the stubborn U.S.- and Pakistan-backed mujahideen, which was costing the nearly bankrupt Soviet Union an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion a year. He was prepared to finally and decisively change course.
In front of the 27th congress of the Soviet Union's Communist Party in February 1986, Gorbachev owned up to the dire nature of the struggle, referring to Afghanistan as "our bleeding wound." The delegates authorized him to seek a political solution for the conflict and eventually to end the Soviet presence in the country. But rather than chart an immediate withdrawal, Gorbachev conceived an effort to bolster the pro-Soviet Afghan government by military means....