SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
war in ukraine
widely believed to be an underes-
timate, the pace of casualties in
this war is clearly much higher.
“In Afghanistan, it took nine
years to wear the Soviet Union
down,” said Lieven, who is a sen-
ior research fellow at the Quincy
Institute for Responsible State-
craft. “It’s happening much quick-
er in the case of Ukraine.”
That’s one reason, Lieven said,
that he believes Putin could seek a
diplomatic off-ramp that allows
him to cut his losses.
Moscow has sent mixed signals
in recent days about its attitude
toward negotiations, and analysts
say that while an agreement is
possible, it’s a lso conceivable that
Putin opts to escalate.
That’s what Russia did in
Chechnya in the 1990 s. When ini-
tial Russian hopes of a lightning-
fast victory faded, the military
shifted to carpet bombing and
besieging cities and towns. The
result was a devastatingly costly
war for both sides that left much
of Chechnya in ruins.
In Ukraine — particularly in
the southern port city of Mariupol
— the Russian strategy has at
times seemed to mimic the play-
book in Chechnya.
When the Russian plan to seize
Kyiv failed, “there was no backup
plan,” said Thomas de Waal, a
senior fellow at Carnegie Europe,
“so they resorted to a massive,
indiscriminate bombardment in-
stead.”
Those tactics have left a d ismal
toll: The United Nations said this
week that more than 4 million
Ukrainians had fled the country
since the war began. The U.N.
human rights agency has con-
firmed the deaths of more than
1,200 civilians, although the true
count is believed to be far higher.
More than a million Afghans
are believed to have been killed
during the Soviet occupation;
some 6 million more became refu-
gees.
“When I see these pictures of
Ukrainians leaving their country,
I relate to them,” Ali Ahmad Jalali
said. “I had to leave my country,
traveling over the mountains
with my f amily.”
Jalali, who had been an Afghan
army officer, later returned to join
the rebels.
Initially, he said, “nobody
thought the mujahideen would be
able to force the Soviets out. The
mujahideen themselves didn’t
think they would be able,” said
Jalali, who became Afghanistan’s
interior minister during the U. S.
occupation and is now a professor
at National Defense University.
“They didn’t care. It was the right
thing to do.”
But as Moscow’s losses accu-
mulated, he said, “it broke the
spell of Soviet invincibility.”
Mikhail Minakov, as a young
Ukrainian, experienced that from
within. He was training in mili-
tary medicine and expected to be
deployed to treat Soviet troops in
Afghanistan. It was a scary pros-
pect: His professor brought in
veterans to speak to the class,
men who had lost eyes or legs on
the battlefield.
It is not clear how much Rus-
sians today know of the casualties
their side is taking, given extreme
controls on the media. But Minak-
ov said Russians can’t help but be
aware of the economic toll
brought on by sanctions, which
are reversing Putin’s primary
achievements: economic integra-
tion with the West and a rising
standard of living.
“Putin has destroyed the social
contract that brought him to pow-
er and kept him in power,” said
Minakov, a senior adviser at the
Kennan Institute.
That’s one reason, Minakov
said, that he believes the Russian
president — whose grip on power
had long been considered unas-
sailable — is far more vulnerable
now than before the invasion be-
gan. But Putin, he said, is still
dangerous and has shown he is
not above dangling the threat of
nuclear war.
It’s a risk, said Hudson Insti-
tute senior fellow Husain
Haqqani, that cannot be taken
lightly.
When Soviet troops were bat-
tling Afghan insurgents armed
with U. S.-financed weapons in the
1980 s, Haqqani said, both sides
were careful to avoid undue esca-
lation. The Americans stayed off
the battlefield. The Soviets resist-
ed expanding the fight into Paki-
stan. Pakistan’s leader, the mili-
tary dictator Mohammad Zia ul-
Haq, talked often of keeping the
war set to simmer, while never
allowing it to boil over.
“The rules of the game were
firmly established,” said Haqqani,
who covered the war as a journal-
ist and later became Pakistani
ambassador to the United States.
“The Soviets and Americans took
the threat of nuclear conflict seri-“In setting out to reverse his-
tory,” another CIA veteran of the
Afghanistan war, Milton Bearden,
recently wrote in Foreign Affairs,
“he may instead be repeating it.”
Of course, there are vast differ-
ences between Ukraine now and
Afghanistan then. To name a few:
Ukraine’s government is demo-
cratically elected, while Afghani-
stan already had a Soviet-backed
communist regime before the in-
vasion. Today’s war is being
fought alarmingly close to
NATO’s front lines, rather than a
battlefield seen as distant to many
in the West. Russian troops have
been in Ukraine for barely over a
month; the Soviets lingered in
Afghanistan for nearly a decade.
Yet, if anything, analysts say,
this war is going far worse for
Moscow.
When Soviet troops poured
over the Hindu Kush Mountains
and into Afghanistan on Christ-
mas Eve in 197 9, they achieved
initial success. Their goal was to
eliminate Afghan leader Hafizul-
lah Amin, whom the KGB falsely
believed to be having a dalliance
with the CIA. Soviet paramilitar-
ies did just that, gunning him
down in his Kabul palace.
The war, it appeared, had been
won.
In Ukraine, Russia analyst Ana-
tol Lieven said, Putin was appar-
ently hoping for a similarly quick
victory, o ne in which “the Russians
would march in, [Ukrainian Presi-
dent Volodymyr] Zelensky would
run away, and the Ukrainian resis-
tance would c ollapse.”
“The difference with Afghani-
stan,” said Lieven, who covered
the Afghanistan war as a journal-
ist, “is that that plan failed.”
It would ultimately fail in Af-
ghanistan, as well. But that would
take longer — just as it later did for
the United States’ own star-
crossed occupation of Afghani-
stan.
In plotting to oust Amin, the
Soviets had not counted on the
fervor or resilience of Afghan reb-
els — known as mujahideen —
who launched a David vs. Goliath
rebellion against what was then
the world’s largest conventional
army.
Nor had they anticipated the
cohesion of their international
adversaries, who banded together
to hatch a secret strategy for
bleeding the Red Army.
The Kremlin had believed that
the United States and its presi-
dent, Jimmy Carter, would be too
distracted by domestic turmoil
and by recent foreign policy flops
to seriously engage on Afghani-
stan. But within weeks of the
Soviet advance, crates of
U. S.-funded weapons were being
unloaded in the Pakistani port of
Karachi, for onward delivery to
the mujahideen.
Riedel, who was working in the
CIA’s operations center on the
night that Soviet paratroopers be-
gan landing in Afghanistan, said
U. S. policymakers had rapidly
seized on the idea that “this could
be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.”
Washington could help by supply-
ing money and arms to the rebels,
funneling that assistance through
Pakistani partners.
“The U. S. role [in Afghanistan]
was basically the quartermaster
of the war,” said Riedel, who now
directs the Brookings Intelligence
Project. “That’s the role that
Biden and company envision for
the U. S. again.”
As was true in Afghanistan,
Moscow appears to have been
caught off-guard by the backing
that Ukraine is getting from be-
yond its borders. Before the inva-
sion, NATO, the European Union
and the United States were all
wracked by internal division.
President Biden had just overseen
his own humiliating retreat from
Afghanistan and was believed to
have little appetite for confronta-
tion.
But the West has shown unex-
pected unity in sticking up for
Ukraine. And this time, the sup-
port is coming not in the shadows,
but in the wide open.
The weaponry, too, is more so-
phisticated now. Much of the ear-
ly assistance to the mujahideen
came in the form of small arms,
such as rifles, with antiaircraft
Stinger missiles arriving only af-
ter years of combat.
In the case of Ukraine, the
United States and NATO have
supplied thousands of Stingers as
well as thousands more antitank
Javelins, weaponry that has dra-
matically raised the cost in Rus-
sian blood and treasure.
A top State Department offi-
cial, Victoria Nuland, said this
week that Russia has lost more
than 10,000 troops — nearly as
many as the 15,000 dead that the
Soviets acknowledged in Afghani-
stan. While the latter figure is
AFGHANISTAN FROM A
Putin chases lost glory
but exposes weakness
kia and Hungary. If any are at-
tacked, the alliance would be
obliged to defend them.
As Putin’s options narrow, his
unpredictability may grow, said
Bearden, the former CIA officer.
Less than three years after the lastously.”
But now, he said, “Putin has
upended the rules of the game.”
Adding to the peril: Pakistan
was never a NATO member, but
four countries on Ukraine’s bor-
der are: Poland, Romania, Slova-STEVE MCCURRY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this 1979 file photo, fighters in Afghanistan inspect a Soviet tank
captured in fighting. There are many parallels to Russia’s ill-fated
campaign in Afghanistan to the mistake-riddled invasion of
Ukraine unfolding today.turn fatal: “What I see Putin try-
ing to do now is figure out, ‘How
do I not let this thing bring me
down?’ ”Robyn Dixon in Riga, Latvia,
contributed to this report.Soviet troops retreated across the
Amu Darya River, the Soviet
Union was no more. The Russian
president, Bearden said, is acute-
ly aware of that history — and will
be doing all he can to avoid allow-
ing his mistakes in Ukraine toHEIDI LEVINE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
A commander of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces walks by a
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