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Monday, January 12, 2009 - 2:55 PM
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Thirty years after
Soviet tanks rumbled through Afghanistan, many of them are still strewn
— wrecked and rusted — along the country's mountainsides, a reminder of
a war the Russians withdrew from in humiliation.The year was
1979. Communists had taken over the central government in Afghanistan
and were aggressively modernizing the country — and taking land and
killing landowners. Meanwhile, at the Kremlin, Leonid Brezhnev,
the head of the Communist Party, was quite ill. His aides were giving
him very limited information about the unrest in Afghanistan. Instead,
they talked of the need to intervene to spread a socialist revolution. Gregory Feifer, NPR's Moscow correspondent, has written a new history of that war, The Great Gamble. "The
common view of the war was that it was a Soviet territorial grab. But
the truth was much more confused," Feifer tells Renee Montagne. Feifer
says the Soviets actually spent about a year turning down requests from
the Afghan communist government to bring in troops. Eventually, the
Soviets decided to take action — by getting rid of the Afghan leader.
After two bungled attempts to poison him, Moscow decided to send in
troops — a kind of "inertia," Feifer says, surrounding these failed
assassination attempts. "There was no one decision to launch an invasion," he says. A
brutal and scarring experience for both Russian soldiers and the local
population, the Soviet war in Afghanistan provides many lessons
applicable to the current coalition war there. "We have to do,
essentially, the opposite of what the Soviets did," Feifer says. "We
have to be incredibly sensitive to the needs of the local population.
And our mission is to rebuild the society so that the government can be
sustainable. "It's an incredibly difficult task, but it's vital
that we understand what happened in Afghanistan if we have any chance
of succeeding now," he says. Excerpt: 'The Great Gamble'by Gregory Feifer NPR.org, January 7, 2009 · According to at least one Soviet general staff officer, no one ever
actually ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. Instead, between December
10 and 30, various units were given some thirty various directives to
prepare for action. Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov's lack of combat
experience helps explain the absence of centralized implementation. A
career spent building the military-industrial complex gave him scant
knowledge of how to command the invasion of a sovereign state. Since it
was beneath the marshal to ask subordinates for advice, staff activity
remained largely uncoordinated. On December 13, 1979, one of
Afghan President Hafizullah Amin's Soviet cooks slipped KGB-provided
poison into a lunch prepared for the new president and his nephew. The
chemicals were estimated to start working after six hours. The Soviets
hunkered down to wait for signs of panic at the presidential palace,
after which a signal would be given to take over Kabul's key military
and communications installations. When nothing happened after the
allotted time had passed, the KGB station called Moscow to request
further orders. It was decided to cable Amin from Moscow, providing a
way to ascertain the president's health by delivering the message to
the palace. After a personal communique was sent around eleven p.m., a
military intelligence officer and an interpreter set out to deliver it
to Amin. The Soviets had extra trouble passing the palace guard because
of a nighttime curfew. But when they were finally admitted, Amin and
his nephew Asadullah were there. Amin looked pale but showed no other
signs of sickness. He listened while the interpreter read the telegram,
thanked his visitors, and asked them to send his compliments to
Brezhnev, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, and the rest of the Soviet
leadership. Amin's poison had been dissolved in a glass of his
favorite drink, Coca-Cola. Its bubbles rendered the concoction almost
harmless. Amin's nephew Asadullah was less lucky. He became seriously
ill by the following day, but survived after his evacuation to Moscow
for treatment. When the vexing news was relayed to Moscow, an order was
given to proceed with the ground-force operation anyway. Another
paratroop battalion flew to Bagram to take part in storming the palace.
The units obeyed a command to prepare until a second order came to
stand down. http://34819louis0j0sheehan0esquire.wordpress.com There would be no coup d'etat attempt that day. The
top Soviet officials in Kabul later cabled Moscow that a successful
operation would require more troops. That document was the main genesis
of outright military invasion. After the failed assassination attempts,
the operation grew into a full-scale assault as if on its own — thanks
first to postponement, then inertia. http://34819louis0j0sheehan0esquire.wordpress.comIncredible as it may seem, no
further Politburo meetings took place after December 12. Either the
final decision was given orally or the directive was destroyed
(together with many other single-copy documents) on Andropov's later
orders. In any case, December 27 was picked as the day for "Storm-333":
a new operation to kill Amin. Excerpted from The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan,
by Gregory Feifer, published in January 2009 by HarperCollins
Publishers. Copyright: Russ Intellectual Properties, 2009, all rights
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