December 2019 saw the passing away of former Russian Army General Makhmut Gareev, at the grand old age of 97. On the day of his death, Putin expressed his condolences and stated that Gareev was “a respectable representative” and “a true patriot.” Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu personally attended the funeral and stressed that “the young generation of Russian officers and military leadership will be studying his books and intellectual heritage for many years.” During the days of the Soviet Union, Gareev served as Deputy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR. In contemporary Russia, he was the President of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences for many years. Moreover, he was a historian and wrote several historical books about the Second World War, and additionally he wrote his memoirs. He was one of the most influential Tatars in Russian and Soviet history in the XX century, but he was a representative of “empire” and his books manifested his vision which has never been local. He always saw the world in terms of big paradigms and broad categories.
Shoigu was not lying when he stated that Gareev had made a serious contribution to Soviet and Russian military thought. Gareev wrote several theoretical books: “Tactical exercises and maneuvers” 1977 (Тактические учения и маневры); “Combined arms exercises” 1983 (Общевойсковые учения); “The Soviet Military Science” (Советская Военная Наука) 1987; “National interests and military security of Russia” 1994 (Национальные интересы и военная безопасность России); “The contours of the armed struggle of the future” 1994 (Контуры вооружённой борьбы будущего) and some other books. His books are quite difficult to find in open sources and they mostly find a readership amongst the military academies of Russia.
Today I’d like to present a book which he wrote in 1996, “My last war (Afghanistan without Soviet troops)” (Моя последняя война (Афганистан без советских войск). It is a relatively short book and to some extent a subjective and personal one. The author does not hide the fact that he is presenting his personal experience and his personal observations during his mission to Afghanistan between 1989 and 1990. In 1989 he appointed a Chief Military Adviser in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops for the country. The main task of his mission was the planning of military operations by the government forces of President Mohammad Najibullah. Gareev was promoted to the rank of General of the Army in 1990.
The very nature of the mission was at the same time both controversial and dangerous. He arrived in Afghanistan on February 7 1989 when the last Soviet soldier had (officially) already left the country. But the story of his mission starts in Moscow and in the Kremlin. In January 1989 the Soviet Minister of Defense returned from Afghanistan and summoned generals and advisers to an emergency meeting to say that the situation was desperate and that the regime of Mohammad Najibullah could not hold together for much longer alone. Najibullah had asked the Minister for a continuation of the Soviet military presence or at least to send peacekeepers to the country. Finally, the President asked for the appointment under him, as Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Afghan Armed Forces, of a military adviser with a small task force from the USSR. The latter request was easier to fulfill than the former. Gareev was appointed by the Minister as head of the mission to Afghanistan and before his departure, he met with the foreign and interior ministers, with the heads of the KGB, the GRU, the General Staff and the head of the ground and air forces of the USSR. It shows that the mission had the highest level of importance and Moscow was not ready to give up its allies and strategic interests in Afghanistan, though these were the times of Perestroika.
Interestingly, in his analysis of the Afghan Army and opposition forces, he makes the following assessment: “They were not accustomed to independent military operations, they were very loose in organizational terms, poorly controlled, little disciplined and insufficiently reliable in moral and political terms.” It would be an issue of time and training, he wrote, because “in quantitative terms, in terms of technical equipment, they looked very impressive and had a clear superiority over the armed opposition.” However, he was under no illusion that after the Soviets had withdrawn, the balance of forces was changing and would continue to change in favor of the opposition. Thus, relying fully on the military solution for the survival of the regime was impossible, he concludes. The strategic goal was to keep the country’s capital under regime control.
Gareev was a military advancer, therefore he concentrated on issues of training and organizing the defense of the capital. For this aim he spent almost a year and the advance of the Afghan Army initiated in April 1990 against the mujahideens. The operational task was to drive off the mujahideens as far as possible from the capital. Gareev describes in great detail the Pagman Operation, which was a regime success. He mentions that one specificity of the Afghan Army was that they went on the attack only with almost complete fire suppression of the enemy. Moreover, he arrives at a military theoretical conclusion that is based upon the observation of real-time battles: “The experience of hostilities once again confirmed that with a high saturation of the defense with anti-tank weapons, the successful use of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in an offensive is possible only with reliable fire suppression of enemy defenses and their swift movement to attack from one defense line to another. The effectiveness of artillery fire and airstrikes was reduced due to weak reconnaissance, as well as aviation actions from heights of 5-7 km. With a greater reduction of aircraft, they were hit by the enemy’s portable anti-aircraft missile systems, the identification and destruction of which in underground structures turned out to be a very difficult task.”
Gareev had regular meetings with the President and the General Staff. Gareev had bigger problems with representatives of the KGB and the GRU than he did with the Afghans. The KGB was controlling every move of the President, whose “independence” was not looked upon positively amongst the security services of the USSR. For instance, Gareev provides an interesting observation: “It turned out that the head of the Afghan state could not always decide whether he could make this or that trip or not inside the country. Once I got the impression that our representatives reported about such trips to Moscow every time, asking permission to do so. A little later, I learned from the persons trusted by the president that on some military issues, Najibullah, after talking with me, coordinated some of them with representatives of our KGB. In general, Najibullah, being closely associated with the KGB, was largely dependent on them. They also supervised his security and material support for his family.” His grievances were directed towards the fact that in constant war, all goals and efforts must be put into one grand aim, i.e. victory, but he saw that many important institutions were only dealing strongly within their “zone of responsibility” – “And in wartime, everything should be subordinated to the interests of the front, the goals of performing military tasks, since the fate of the state depends on this.”
Another important error of the Soviet military advisers he found was that the Afghan Army was based on the foundations of the regular army, but in Afghanistan – Gareev writes – the last thing one would want to do is to create a rigid regular type army. The nature and environment of the Afghan war against the mujahideens required an adjustment of the Afghan Army to the principles of guerilla warfare. Nevertheless, he admits that a regular army was needed because it would have been impossible to exclude the possibility of a Pakistani military intervention. The mujahideens also, following years of war experience, had gained capabilities that permitted them to conduct operations close to that of a regular army. Neither had the U.S. stopped its support to the mujahideens.
Besides operational issues of his mission, Gareev discusses the issue of the very essence of the war in Afghanistan, why it had actually started, why the decision had been made. In a nutshell, he responds that it is important to understand the global, regional and finally the local picture so as to grasp the essence of any conflict, including in our case the Afghan War. He thinks that the revolutionary conditions in the country were approaching a political revolt (see the paragraph below), but global factors prevailed. He explains this in the following sentences: “The main goal of the [radical groups] was to destroy the progressive forces that were seeking to really change the life of the people for the better. Of course, this was an internal affair of Afghanistan. But for the Soviet Union, not only from the point of view of justice and solidarity, but also from the point of view of geopolitical interests, it was not indifferent which forces would win this struggle. The victory of one side meant the presence of a friendly state, calm and peace on our southern borders, while the victory of the other meant the emergence of a serious threat.” It looks that any borderland country in Eurasia has the same future, the regime change issue is a geopolitical issue. Thus, the case of Afghanistan is a typical case of Superpower competition in Eurasia.
For one question he gives an excellent answer: “Could the Soviet Union in these conditions not react in any way to what was happening in Afghanistan? For any state respecting its own interests, like the USSR, this would be unnatural and irresponsible. Even if the Soviet leadership had renounced any interference in Afghan affairs, in the end it would still not have been possible to evade the danger that was brewing in the south of the country. In any case, large measures and large additional expenditures would be required to strengthen the defense in this direction, not to mention the threat of destabilization of the internal situation in the Central Asian republics.” He saw the behavior of the USSR as logical because it was only about geopolitical imperatives: “This geopolitical position requires the achievement and consolidation of certain natural boundaries, prevention and removal of threats and ensuring the security of the state. If this is not ensured, a large, multinational state begins to lose its stability.” The same things were done by the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation, it is the law of geopolitics. For Russia he formulates its own analog of the Monroe Doctrine: “Just as the United States cannot imagine its geopolitical position without the Panama Canal and the Hawaiian Islands, so Russia, even with more modest needs, cannot exist as a full-fledged power without access to the Baltic and Black Seas. There is no doubt that the post-Soviet space was and remains a zone of vital Russian interests.” The economic regional processes are logical and irreversible, Gareev writes, and he really believes that the economic necessity will push the Eurasian countries for a new integrational unity: “Life will force the CIS countries to follow this path. And I am not talking about a revival of the empire, but a genuine voluntary community of countries interested in this.”
Gareev does not accept in this book the “humanitarian approach” which was already fashionable in the 90s. In fact, he vehemently rejects it and indicates that every state has its own national interests, that the Soviet Union conducted its policy in Afghanistan according to the national and security considerations. However, he did not exclude that war and intervention were inevitable in Afghanistan, if all actors had worked together: “it was possible to abandon maximalistic geostrategic goals and seek a balance of military-political and economic interests with them.” Gareev regrets that neither the U.S. nor the Soviet leadership was ready to give up its geopolitical ambitions. He criticizes the Soviet leadership for their blindness: “But our diplomacy did not show such a scale of actions. Our politicians also had a too univocal and maximalist view on Afghanistan.” Both sides had to make small but important concessions, he writes. Despite all anticipations, his final conclusion on Afghanistan is the following: “In particular, today it is obvious to everyone that the introduction of Soviet troops into Afghanistan in 1979 was an ill-considered, politically wrong step that caused enormous damage to the Soviet Union and the Afghan people.” But again, he corrects himself that the decision was not made in the vacuum – it took the global picture into consideration including American plans for the country.
Was the entire Soviet intervention into Afghanistan in vain? Gareev proves that it was not and the regime of Najibullah had a serious chance to survive because without Soviet intervention, radicals lost the ideological grounds to fight against the regime. The opposition forces were not able to turn the tide in their favor by military means and would eventually force them to negotiate: “Therefore, the Najibullah regime could still hold on. It fell only after it lost its previous support from the USSR, and military support for the mujahideen continued. However, from the socio-political point of view, this regime had little chance of spreading to the whole of Afghanistan.”
This book of Gareev’s is an interesting artifact of the old Soviet strategic thinking on matters which had historical meaning for the XX century and to the Cold War.
Autor
Ridvan Bari Urcosta
Senior Analyst at Strategy&Future
Strategy&Future
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