Army was ‘riddled with informers’ (McMichael, 1991: 107), and
Soviet soldiers often spoke scornfully of their Afghan counterparts
as obez’iany or ‘monkeys’ (Schofield, 1993: 88). However, for
political reasons it was deemed necessary to incorporate Afghan
Army personnel in all major operations. This created understand-
able tensions: ‘If all or part of a unit planned to defect, the first
action normally taken was to shoot the Soviet adviser, if one was
present’ (McMichael, 1991: 46). Over time, the capacities of the
Army improved, but never to the point where it was an equal part-
ner with the Soviet force: the relationship was inevitably one of
superior and subordinate.
SOVIET DILEMMAS
The Soviet Union faced four major dilemmas as a result of its
commitment in Afghanistan. These dilemmas combined to create a
situation which at best required dextrous political management, of
a kind for which the regime was not noted in the later Brezhnev era,
and at worst had the potential to corrode the legitimacy of
the regime, if not at the mass level then at least in the eyes of up-
and-coming cadres.
The first dilemma arose from the domestic unpopularity of the
war in the USSR. This factor has often been overlooked. The
effectiveness of the KGB at the time of the invasion made ‘public
opinion’ seem an irrelevant constraint, and critics of the invasion
such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov were silenced, either by
internal exile (in Sakharov’s case to the ‘closed’ city of Gorkii) or
more brutal means. Furthermore, at the relevant times, gauging
mass attitudes was a far from straightforward task. However, even
in highly autocratic systems, significant public disaffection can
either constrain, or come to constrain, the options which political
leaders can exercise. Attitudes towards the war in Afghanistan
served to prompt both wider political changes, and then a recon-
sideration of the wisdom of the commitment itself. In 1984, human
rights activists in Moscow conducted a ‘poll’, reported in the
Soviet Strategy, Tactics, and Dilemmas 53