in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan could stand
up. When the USA left Saigon in 1975, the image of a helicopter
lifting off from the US Embassy in the besieged South Vietnamese
capital was to haunt a generation of politicians. The Soviet leader-
ship, and General Gromov, managed to avoid such imagery.
However, those who challenge the Vietnam analogy tend to point
to the lack of a decisive combat defeat for the USSR, and the re-
latively lighter character of the Soviet force commitment to
Afghanistan compared with the US commitment to Vietnam. Mark
Galeotti, for example, argues that ‘had the USSR ever deployed
the sort of forces the US had used in Vietnam, for example, where
a ratio of 7 soldiers per square kilometre was reached, compared
with Afghanistan’s 0.7, the war could have been won.’ He endorses
the view that ‘this was a war the Soviets never really tried to win’
(Galeotti, 1995: 153).
Galeotti’s argument invites three kinds of response. First, the
argument is speculative and depends upon counterfactual assump-
tions. Second, it is not clear exactly what it means to say that the
war could have been ‘won’. Would the ‘battle for the Afghan peo-
ple’, as Marshal Akhromeev put it, have been ‘won’ simply by
increasing the number of despised invaders in the country? Third,
as writers such as T. H. Rigby long ago emphasised, the defeat in
the Afghan war was a politicaldefeat (Rigby, 1989: 67). Douglas
Borer has elaborated a response to Galeotti which deserves to be
quoted at some length, as it goes to the heart of the issue:
In order to understand superpower war loss in Vietnam and
Afghanistan, the focus should not be primarily on any analysis
of the battlefield, but rather on the analysis of the politics that
ruled the battlefield... In every single major engagement, in
both wars, US and Soviet troops dominated their opponents.
However, domination of the battlefield in a strict military sense
did not produce political victory for the superpowers.
Likewise, battlefield defeat was not equivalent to political fail-
ure for those resisting the superpowers in Vietnam and
Afghanistan. We must remember that devoid of its ultimateConsequences of the Soviet–Afghan War 163