A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, by Artemy M. Kalinovsky

Abstract

A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, by Artemy M. Kalinovsky. Cambridge, New York, Harvard University Press, 2011. 304 pp. $27.95 US (cloth). At 2012 Chicago summit, NATO members and their partners agreed to withdraw their combat from Afghanistan by end of 2014. As phased withdrawal of remaining 68,000 US inches forward, and as brazen suicide attacks by Taliban mount, Obama Administration anguishes over same questions that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev faced in 1987-88. Will incumbent Afghan government survive on its own? How much funding is sufficient to keep government and army afloat? It is unfortunate that Artemy Kalinovsky's book, A Long Goodbye, not published before 2001, but even if it had been, one wonders if George W. Bush or his closest advisors, who involved United States in Afghanistan (the graveyard of empires), would have read it. Readers who have experienced twenty-first century war in Afghanistan will certainly have a sense of tragic deja-vu in reading this book, as British and Soviet readers in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, would have had. Kalinovsky focuses primarily on Soviet decision-making process. He poses less common question: Why did it take leaders in Moscow so long to withdraw Soviet troops? Indeed, very soon after intervening in December 1979, Brezhnev leadership realized it had blundered. Even though no one voiced objections at June 1980 plenum, several political and military officials, as well as academics, had communicated their anxieties. Speaking at 1995 conference on Afghanistan in Lysebu, Norway sixteen years later, General Valentin Varennikov--quoting his superior, Chief of General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov--gave reasons for their reservations eerily resonant today: no one in international community would understand if Soviet Union intervened; Soviet soldiers were unfamiliar with Islamic culture, tribal relations, and local terrain; and Afghans should maintain security themselves (p. 22). By early 1981, one of four original advocates of intervention, defense minister Dmitrii Ustinov, was willing to approach other members of leadership with idea of withdrawing troops (pp. 58-59). Significant policy changes were next to impossible during interregnum of feeble General Secretaries Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, but why did it take Gorbachev so long to withdraw after his ascent to power in 1985? Kalinovsky identifies four patterns, or paradigms that shaped Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and delayed withdrawal of troops: the longstanding Soviet tradition of aid to Third World countries; belief that Soviet Union could actually change Afghanistan; lack of coordination among Soviet military and KGB working in Kabul; and US-Soviet tensions in 1980s (pp. 12-13). In first of book's seven chapters, Kalinovsky explains what is now widely known, i.e. that Brezhnev leadership intervened reluctantly. In pre-intervention period, Kalinovsky's paradigm of Soviet belief in Afghanistan's changeability does not always hold true. After all, ever since Saur Revolution in 1978 that brought to power Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin--the leaders of Peoples' Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)--Soviet leaders and advisors had urged moderation, cautioning against accelerated communist reforms, but headstrong Afghan leaders did not listen. Some Soviet Politburo members were loath even to extend initial diplomatic recognition to communist PDPA regime, according to Karen Brutents, former deputy head of Soviet Communist Party's International Department, who also participated in conference in Norway. They understood basic incompatibility of Marxism and Islam. Even after uprising in Herat in March 1979, during which some Afghan soldiers defected to side of mujahadeen and more than a dozen Soviet advisors and their families were beheaded, Soviet leaders made a conscious decision not to intervene in Afghanistan. …