survived because local populations feared Soviet military power,
and once the threat of its use eroded to the point that it was no
longer credible, the regimes fell rapidly in the face of genuine
popular revulsion. At heart, Andropov had no real understanding of
the bases of genuine normative support. No Soviet politician until
the advent as General Secretary of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 was
willing to face the challenge of public opinion, and Andropov, as
Head of the KGB, was specifically charged with thwarting any out-
bursts of spontaneous political judgment on the part of the masses.
SOVIET TACTICS
If Soviet strategy suffered from the intractable nature of the polit-
ical situation in Afghanistan, so too did Soviet combat tactics, for
‘success’ in terms of immediate tactical objectives contributed to
‘failure’ in the wider political sense. This reflected the inability of
Soviet field commanders to use their resources in a nuanced fash-
ion. If the USA found it difficult to mount a ‘hearts and minds’
campaign in Vietnam, the Soviets failed in their attempts to do so
in rural Afghanistan, largely because the nature of their field oper-
ations besmirched them in the eyes of ordinary Afghans. The fol-
lowing remarks are not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to
highlight key elements of the Soviets’ tactical approaches.
Infantry
Infantry – the classic formation of ground troops armed with 5.44
mm AK-74 rifles or similar firearms – formed the backbone of the
Soviet contingent in Afghanistan, but initially suffered from three
problems. The first was a lack of combat training: many young con-
scripts were expected to learn ‘on the job’ how to take part in mili-
tary operations (Cordesman and Wagner, 1990: 135). The second
was that illness frequently left infantry groups undermanned, to the
point where their military effectiveness was severely compromised.
The third, and most serious, was that their tactics, as Grau has
46 The Afghanistan Wars