1992; Lepingwell, 1992). In part this may have reflected a height-
ened constitutional consciousness within the military, or a reluc-
tance to follow the Bonapartist path on which Iazov had
embarked, but it undoubtedly involved a breakdown in an
hierarchical chain of command, with the commander of the
Airborne Forces, General Pavel Grachev, taking a stand against
the coup, as did significant groups of troops in the Moscow area.
The Afghanistan debacle may have contributed to the willingness
of key officers to think for themselves, rather than tell themselves
that orders were orders.
TWO LESSONS OF THE WAR
In conclusion, there were two lessons of the Soviet–Afghan war
which stand as awful warnings to major powers contemplating
interventions on the territory of smaller neighbours. The first lesson
was that wars cannot be fought to successful conclusions with unre-
alistic objectives. In the Afghan case, the Soviet Union was trapped
in a double bind: the more it supported the PDPA regime with
armed force, the more it compromised the legitimacy of the benefi-
ciary of its actions. This was a product both of the nature of Afghan
society, the nature of the Soviet system, and the nature of the
Soviets’ clients. At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
the bulk of Afghan society was notin crisis. Perverse as it may
have seemed to detribalised Marxists in Kabul, rural dwellers for
the most part felt that they had a lifestyle worth defending against
external threats, and powerful norms of reciprocity ordained soli-
darity in the face of external attack. Furthermore, the Soviet Union
was the very kind of external agent that would most effectively
activate such norms. The explicit atheism of the Soviet order, based
on the Marxist doctrine of dialectical materialism, was notorious in
Afghan circles, and positive memories of Soviet–Afghan coopera-
tion in the 1950s were nowhere near strong enough to cleanse the
Soviets’ reputation at the mass level. Finally, the People’s
Democratic Party of Afghanistan was an unworthy beneficiary of
166 The Afghanistan Wars