Assessing Relevant Lessons from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan

Former highly classified documents and records chronicling the internal communications and discourse of the Soviet Politburo reveal important insights into how senior leaders in the Soviet Union assessed the evolving situation in Afghanistan from events leading up to the 1979 invasion and its protracted occupation, through the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989, and for the nearly three additional years of support to the Soviet installed Afghan government left behind. We use structured, focused comparison methodology to systematically extract relevant findings and lessons from this archive that can inform policy makers dealing with comparable issues and challenges. This methodology draws on organization theory and incorporates discourse analysis techniques to compensate for potential limitations of this primary source archive. Our analysis of this largely unexploited repository of data provides a number of important conclusions and lessons learned as expressed by the Soviet leaders themselves. Highlights of these include: 1) The failure to gain popular support and establish control in rural areas where the majority of the population resided made any military gains virtually inconsequential; 2) cross border support for the insurgency from Pakistan significantly challenged the Soviet’s ability to achieve its objectives in Afghanistan; 3) the lofty ideological goals and objectives Soviet leaders initially maintained for Afghanistan gradually digressed to mere regime survival over the course of ten years of fighting; 4) a stable Afghan government was believed to be possible but only if based on traditional Afghan authority structures that included significant regional autonomy - not a foreign system of government; 5) Soviet strategic planning, preparations and massive aid sustained the Afghan government and its security forces beyond the withdrawal of troops and even past the dissolution of the USSR; 6) the USSR’s collapse ended the aid and greatly weakened the Afghan state, but it was the intra-governmental strife and unreliable deals with insurgents that ultimately led to the failure of the Afghan government following the departure of Soviet troops. Many stark contrasts and important distinctions exist between the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and that of the US led coalition that invaded thirty years later. However, important insights and lessons gleaned from this structured analysis of how Soviet leaders interpreted their challenges in Afghanistan are relevant to the current situation faced by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) as well as the fledgling Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) and can help inform policy going forward