In rapid succession, Christmas Eve 1979 transport machines with Soviet emblems landed at Kabul Airport. They brought soldiers ready for action, along with vehicles, weapons and ammunition. The Red Army men took a position nearby. At the same time, 400 kilometers north of armored columns crossed the border of the Uzbek Soviet Republic with neighboring Afghanistan and rolled on the trunk road towards Kabul.
On December 27, Soviet commandos stormed the capital, blew up the telegraph office, and occupied the radio building. The operation was apparently on schedule. But even in those hours, US security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski announced to his president Jimmy Carter: Now Americans "have the opportunity to give Vietnam their Vietnam".
Historically, land on the Hindu Kush mountains was hardly under control. The British had already tried this in the so-called Great Game in the 19th century: they wanted to secure the connection to their crown colony India in front of rival Russia, who was also interested in Afghanistan, but lost several battles against the Pashtun people, who were influential in the region.
"The war is an exciting experience for them and a change from monotonous gainful employment", wrote Friedrich Engels in 1857 about the ready-to-fight Afghans. India was independent 120 years later and England was out of the game. Moscow, however, worried the renaissance of Islam in Iran and the revival of religion in the Asian Soviet republics. "With a socialist regime in Afghanistan," analyzed Slawist Henning Sietz, "a wedge could be driven into the front of the Islamic states along the southern border of the Soviet Union."
The lie of "fraternal help"
Moscow had already supported the neighboring country in the south in the 1950s and 1960s. The Russians granted loans to Afghanistan, built roads and schools; they sent technicians and consultants. Soviet specialists trained the army.
What some Afghans welcomed as the modernization of society meant the destruction of others. In addition to the traditional ethnic contrasts, there were ideological ones: Mullahs who refused to deny Allah and the Koran were killed in prisons around Kabul. In the hinterland, however, people risked their lives if they wanted to spread communist ideas.
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Invasion of Afghanistan 1979: God warriors against godless communistsIn the spring of 1979, Afghanistan was practically in the civil war. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev believed he could create order within six months. Moscow would establish a regime loyal to the Soviet Union and then withdraw. Like the pro-Moscow communists in Czechoslovakia a decade earlier, Babrak Karmal, the new head of government in Kabul, asked the Soviet Union for "fraternal help". This was intended to legalize the invasion of Afghanistan afterwards. A miscalculation. The foreign policy consequences were devastating for the Soviet Union.
The United States gave arms to the mujahideen
On January 18, 1980, the UN General Assembly called for "immediate, unconditional and complete withdrawal" from Afghanistan with 104 to 18 votes. Two weeks later, the Islamic Conference (OIC) joined the UN vote. In July 1980, the Western countries boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics. In February 1981, the non-aligned foreign ministers condemned the invasion with 92 out of 95 votes and demanded that troops be withdrawn. Moscow had never seen itself so isolated.
Initially, the superpower's technical superiority seemed to guarantee success in Afghanistan. In February 1980, 85,000 Soviet soldiers controlled the main cities, passports and transportation hubs. But what the British had experienced soon set in: Afghanistan's disputed ethnic groups agreed to fight the enemy from outside.
Mullahs now organized the rebellion against the "godless". And the United States rushed to the aid of the "Mujahideen", the warriors of God. The Americans cut $ 2 billion worth of wheat deliveries they had already promised to the Soviets, cut air traffic to Moscow, and stopped exporting oil production technology.
The Mujahideen, equipped with ancient shotguns, received direct help from Pakistan. In a CIA secret operation, $ 6 billion went to Afghanistan's eastern neighbor - Pakistan became the logistical base for the war against the Soviets. In the camps of the over three million Afghans who fled there, agents trained fighters on modern weapons. Mujahideen received materials from binoculars to high-tech weapons such as Stinger missiles. Over the uncontrollable border, the Afghans flooded back to their country, where they acted like fish in the water in the fight against the Russians.
Returning home in zinc coffins
"We got under enemy fire several times a day," Soviet Afghanistan veteran Alexei Tukalkin told SPIEGEL. "Machine guns, grenade launchers, missiles. Shelling from nowhere." In battles, they "almost never saw the enemy. But when shopping". Because in this "godforsaken, poor and dusty country there was everything we only knew as a 'deficit' at home: wristwatches from the west, cassette players from Korea, video players from Japan", said Tukalkin. "Once I bumped into a bearded man on the threshold of one of these shops, a cartridge belt around my shoulder, the Kalashnikov in hand. We greeted each other politely and then went our separate ways."
Otherwise, encounters between the opponents of the war were fatal. Both sides tortured and often mutilated corpses. The number of fallen Red Army soldiers rose dramatically after the Soviets lost air sovereignty due to the Stinger missiles. Airplanes now brought more and more dead people home in welded-up zinc coffins - people called fallen soldiers "zinc boys".
The topic was taboo for the party and the government. "The war in Afghanistan lasted twice as long as the Second World War, but we only know about it as much as we were supposed to be told (...) so that we would not be alarmed," complained Svetlana Alexievich in 1991. The later Nobel Prize winner for literature collected shocking statements from soldiers, civil servants and nurses, from mothers and widows from the fallen for her book "Zinkjunge".
The "bleeding wound" was closed
Like the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan realized that this war could not be won. In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev called the engagement in Afghanistan a "bleeding wound" that had to be closed. The new party leader of the CPSU initiated the withdrawal.
On February 15, 1989, General Boris Gromow, as the last soldier of the invasion army, crossed the "Friendship Bridge" between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Moscow had spent around $ 85 billion on the lost war. Officially, 15,000 Soviet soldiers had died. Moscow's attempt to lead a feudal country into socialism cost one million lives, more than 1,000 villages were destroyed, and five million Afghans fled to neighboring countries.
After the withdrawal, the warriors pampered as freedom fighters formed several militias that fought against each other. "Mujahideen don't exchange the Kalashnikovs for a shovel," people said. Many welcomed the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, a radical Islamic movement that ensured law and order in many places.
But soon the radicals that emerged from Koran schools turned out to be rulers of terror. The Taliban introduced Sharia law in their domain and mercilessly persecuted everyone who wanted to build secular state structures - Afghans and their western helpers. "You cannot win in Afghanistan," said the Russian veteran Tukalkin, "The Americans and the Germans will have to see that too. You can only withdraw, seal off the borders and hope that the Afghans come to their senses."