The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War/Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15: CONCLUSION
"As a nation, we believed that history repeats itself. What happened in the 19th Century to the invading British would also be the fate of the Soviet invaders. Philosophically, the Soviets believed that history is unidirectional, progressive and does not repeat itself. History did repeat itself and we did prevail."
 * General Abdul Rahim Wardak

The Mujahideen understood that guerrilla war is a contest of endurance and national will. Battlefield victory is almost irrelevant, provided that the guerrilla survives to fight the next of a thousand battles before passing the torch to his children. The Mujahideen did not necessarily expect to win this war but fought because it was the right thing to do — it was a religious and national obligation. They accepted an asymmetry of casualties which eventually, but unexpectedly, led to the Soviet withdrawal.

In many respects, the tactics of the Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839-1842, 1878-1880, 1919) still applied. Technology has added rangeand accuracy, but the terrain still dictates tactics and the Mujahideen were quite comfortable applying their time-honored tactics against a modern foe. Much more innovation was required from the Soviet forces. Two modern systems, the helicopter and the antipersonnel mine, created severe tactical problems which were outside the Mujahideen historical experience. Tactical innovation occurs only where tactical innovation is required and the Mujahideen eventually found ways to work around the problem technology. Where innovation was not required, the Mujahideen stayed with the tried and true. Thus the basic Mujahideen ambush and pursuit were little changed from last century whereas their actions against an air assault or a fortified security post were quickly developed out of necessity.

Technology can provide advantages but is not decisive in this type of war. Soviet smart bombs had a decided impact when an appropriate target set could be identified. U.S.-supplied, shoulder-fired Stinger air defense missiles, in the hands of the Mujahideen, created a great deal of consternation and led to a dramatic change in Soviet air tactics. Neither system, however, was a war winner. The Soviet equipment was designed for a different war on different terrain. It failed to function optimally in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan. The Kalashnikov assault rifle was not always better than the World War I-designed British bolt-action Enfield rifle. The Enfield shot further accurately and would penetrate flak jackets designed to stop Kalashnikov bullets. The RPG-7 antitank grenade launcher was the Mujahideen weapon of choice. It is a light-weight technology killer that destroys tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks and helicopters. The Soviets and DRA tried to stay at least 300 meters away from the Mujahideen — out of Kalashnikov and RPG-7 range. This tactical timidity led to Mujahideen acquisition of crew-served weapons. Over time, heavymachine guns, recoilless rifles, mortars and portable multiple rocketlauncher systems became an essential part of the Mujahideen arsenal which the Mujahideen used to pin their enemy in place in order to get close enough to use their Kalashnikovs and RPGs. Crew-served weapons also limited guerrilla mobility.

Soviet high performance jet fighters and bombers played a significant strategic role, but not a tactically significant one. The Soviets used their air forces to devastate the countryside and force the populace to leave in order to deny food to the Mujahideen. The Soviet air force destroyed farms, crops, animal herds, orchards and irrigation systems and forced millions of people to flee. The Mujahideen were then forced to carry their rations along with the other impedimenta of war. However, the Mujahideen seldom presented a target set that the Soviet air force or artillery could fully exploit to influence the tactical fight.

Technology did serve the Soviets as a force multiplier. Besiegedgarrisons could be maintained indefinitely by aerial resupply. Carpetbombing could stave off immediate disaster. Helicopter medical evacuation could save personnel who could later be returned to duty. Sensors could provide reconnaissance data in isolated areas.

The Mujahideen were nominally divided into seven main factions, but the disunity was much greater. There were factions within the factions. Old disputes and disagreements were not always put aside for the duration of the war. Theie were frequent armed clashes between Mujahideen of different factions. The reputation of certain factions was that they were more interested in fighting other Mujahideen than Soviets. Still, the ISI struggled to coordinate the actions of the various factions into some comprehensive plan. In some combat zones, such as Kandahar, the Mujahideen of different factions cooperated readily despite the politics of their factions.

In the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were controlled by a strict chain of command in a clear hierarchy. This was considered a strength of the communist forces and the United Statesspent a lot of effort trying to find and decapitate the central leadership. The Mujahideen structure would be difficult to fit into a line-and-block chart and there was never a central leadership that was critical to the cause. Yet this inefficient disunity may have been a strength of the Mujahideen. No matter which commanders or leaders were killed, the Mujahideen effort would continue and the Soviets would never be short of enemies.

On the tactical level, the Mujahideen were prepared for a long war. Their goal was to hit, survive and fight again. Thus, the Mujahideen could not exploit success. After a victory, they went home. Group leaders, let alone loose coalitions, could not hold a force together for long after a fight. As was earlier noted by the British fighting the hill tribes, the mountain warriors could not stay together in victory or defeat. Thus, tactical victory could not be converted into operational gain.

Not more than 15% of the Mujahideen tactical leaders were professional military officers. However, the Afghan military officer corps played a major role in stalemating or defeating the Soviet invasion. The most important role of the Afghan military officers who stayed in uniform was their lack of cooperation with the government and their subversion directed against the communist regime and its Soviet backers. In 1978 and 1979, Afghan military officers staged numerous, spontaneous uprisings against the regime in Herat,Paktia, Asmar, Bala-hessar (in Kabul) and many others sites. Many Afghan military officers passed information to the Mujahideen. In the mid-1980s, the entire leadership of the Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, including the head of the directorate (General Khalil — who was later executed by the regime), was arrested for its secret collaboration with the Mujahideen. Most of the serving Afghan officers refused communist party membership. Many of those who were forced to join the party were not loyal to the regime. Many of them secretly carried membership cards in one of the Mujahideen factions. Such lack of cooperation foiled all efforts by the Soviet Union to create a viable, indigenous military power in Afghanistan. Consequently the Soviet Union was forced to use mostly its own soldiers to carry the fight to the Mujahideen.

Afghan military officers who openly joined the Mujahideen faced many obstacles in integrating fully into the resistance hierarchy, based in Pakistan. Some faction leaders saw these former military officers as a challenge to their leadership and their factional interests and tried to sideline the professionals. Factions with a fundamentalist Islamic orientation were generally more opposed to accepting those military officers who had trained in and served under the old regimes. Therefore, many well-trained military officers who could bring effective leadership and organization to the ranks of the resistance forces, were sidelined by the factional politics of the jihad. Nevertheless, the former officers proved to be the most effectivetactical and operational leaders that the Mujahideen had during the long years of war with the Soviet forces.

Initially, the Mujahideen lived in the villages they defended and the villagers provided their food and shelter. Ammunition, weapons and other material came from the local bazaar or from Iran or Pakistan. The Soviets decided to break this link between the populace and the guerrilla by driving the populace out of the countryside. Soviet air and artillery attacked villages, standing crops, orchards,animal herds, granaries, water mills and irrigation systems. Eventually the populace was driven out of many rural areas and the Mujahideen could no longer readily subsist in these areas. With the agricultural system destroyed, the Mujahideen had to transport their own food and forage. The Mujahideen factions responded to this crisis by establishing fixed supply bases within Afghanistan. The larger supply bases were located in the mountains near the Pakistan border. Smaller supply bases were caches hidden outside the townsand villages. The Soviets then concentrated on finding and destroying the large and small supply bases. The Mujahideen dependence on the large fixed supply bases meant that they had to defend them. This provided a viable target set for Soviet air and artillery.

Although weapons and material were furnished free to th eMujahideen in the essential safe haven of Pakistan, there were significant costs to the Mujahideen in getting it to where it was needed. Often, the issued material was not what the commander needed in his area. So the material had to be traded or sold for what he needed. Then, the material had to be transported. Transportation was usually by commercial teamsters using donkeys, mules, camels or pickuptrucks. Commanders and faction leaders who established their own transportation systems discovered that it was cheaper and easier to stay with the established teamsters and muleteers. Once the materials were loaded and in transit, there were still taxes and fees to be paid. Every time the supplies crossed into a different tribe or faction area, there was a tax or tariff — often 10% of the goods. Mujahideen groups located well within Afghanistan were at the end of the pipeline and found that perhaps 40% of their material had gone to other Mujahideen groups between issue and final receipt. Western nations preferred to distribute aid in goods. Mujahideen leaders, particularly in the interior, preferred cash. They could always buy the needed mines, ammunition, food and material in the local bazaar. Saudi Arabia usually provided cash as aid. Often, the Mujahideen needed more material than they were receiving through the factions and raised their own funds to buy it. Gem stones and narcotics, two traditional exports, provided some of these funds. As the Mujahideen acquired more crew-served weapons, the ammunition tonnages required rose dramatically. At the same time, Soviet airstrikes on animal herds and their widespread use of scatterable mines along trails and mountain passes killed many of the transport animals. There was more demand for transport and fewer animals to transport the goods. The United States tried to solve the 'mule-gap" by providing Missouri mules. Unfortunately these required more food, carried less and died more quickly than thelocal variety.

Medical care and medical evacuation was a Mujahideen weakness. There were few Mujahideen doctors, although established Afghan doctors frequently treated Mujahideen casualties at great personal risk. Some Mujahideen groups had a medic who had graduated froma eight-month to a year course in Pakistan or other countries. Most groups were lucky to have a graduate of a six-week first aid course. Some French doctors worked inside Afghanistan while many other western doctors worked in the border areas of Pakistan. If the wounded Mujahideen managed to survive the harrowing trip to Pakistan, he probably survived. However, a seriously wounded Mujahideen inside Afghanistan usually died.

Guerrilla warfare demands quantities of quality light infantry on both sides. The Soviets never fielded enough. The Mujahideen wer enatural light infantry They were hardy, tough, courageous and local. They had high morale, the warrior spirit and excellent tactical intelligence. They were naturals at the ambush and pursuit. They were raised from childhood with weapons, but they lacked unit training and discipline. Training varied from valley to valley and force to force. The Pakistani ISI provided some training courses and the former military officers from the Afghan Army who joined the Mujahideen tried to train the Mujahideen to a standard. Still, the Mujahideen were not trained to a standard and the quality of the individual groups was a function of their leadership.

The Mujahideen had warrior spirit and their focus was on battle, not easy LOC targets. They wanted noise, excitement, personal glory and the spoils of war. The Pakistani ISI cajoled and threatened, but it was difficult to persuade the Mujahideen to attack the lucrative and easy oil pipelines when security outposts were available. The Mujahideen had some distinct tactical faults. If they were in their own area, they tended to ignore local security and could be surprised. They were very predictable in their selection of ambush sites and shelling sites. The Soviets, however, seemed unaware of this predictability. The Mujahideen would habitually reuse the same sites, but there is little evidence of the Soviets exploiting this pattern with aggressive footpatrols, site raids, mining or plotting artillery fire on these sites.

The overall Mujahideen air defense posture was weak. The introduction of the Stinger shoulder-fired air defense missile toward the end of the war helped, but the Soviets countered the new system with a change in tactics. The tactical threat to Mujahideen were Su-25 close air support aircraft, helicopter gunships and helicopter liftships carrying air assault forces. The Mujahideen developed the airdefense ambush as an answer to the threat of these aircraft. There are several variations of the ambush, but basically the Mujahideen would position air defense weapons in optimum firing positions and then bait the ambush to draw aircraft into the kill zone. The most popular firing positions were caves dug into canyon walls where heavy machine guns could fire horizontally across the narrow canyon. The bait would lure the aircraft into the canyon where multiple machine guns would open up on its flight path. Other aircraft would be unable to engage these machine guns since they could not get an approach shot at the caves. The Mujahideen also learned to identify likely helicopter landing zones and mine them. They would position machine guns and RPG-7 gunners around the landing zone. As the helicopter landed, massed RPG and machine gun fire would tear into the aircraft. The Mujahideen also liked to hit aircraft parked on airfields and would stage shelling attacks for the purpose of killing aircraft on the ground. A large percentage of total Mujahideen aircraft kills was from mortar and multiple rocket launcher attackson airfields.

Antipersonnel mines were a major problem for the Mujahideen. The Soviets employed millions of mines in Afghanistan. They surrounded installations, garrisons, security posts and government facilities with minefields. They mined the road banks along critical stretches of road. They dispersed scatterable mines over trails, mountain passes, cropland and grazing pasture. Most of the mines' components were nonmetallic and hard to detect. These antipersonnel mines were designed to maim, not kill. Thus, the mine would rip off a Mujahideen's leg and the Mujahideen's comrades would then have to transport the crippled combatant back to Pakistan. Should he survive the slow, painful trip, he would probably never fight again,but the trip back would involve six or eight Mujahideen who could have been fighting. Mine detectors were in short supply and not too effective against plastic mines. Mujahideen would breach minefields with captured vehicles, flocks of sheep, by firing consecutive recoilless rifles rounds to create a path, or by hurling large rocks across the minefield to create a path. None of these methods were too effective.

Although disinclined to dig in the hard, rocky soil of Afghanistan,the Mujahideen soon learned the value of field fortifications against Soviet artillery, armored vehicles and airstrikes. Field fortifications came to play a dominant role in the war as the Mujahideen learned to build sturdy, redundant, camouflaged bunkers and fighting positions which ensured their survivability. Finally, the Mujahideen were a tactical force with a tactical focus,but, when the occasion demanded, they were capable of operational-level actions. Such actions as operation Gashay, Zhawar II and the defense against Operation Magistral demonstrated this capability. Such actions were usually under the planning or leadership of former officers of the Afghan Army. What the Mujahideen were not capable of was transitioning quickly into a conventional force. After the Soviets withdrew, the Mujahideen tried and failed to take Jalalabad and Kabul by a conventional attack. These efforts ended in disorganized chaos as the DRA found heart and battled on successfully. It would be years before the DRA collapsed and the Mujahideen tried to unite to rebuild Afghanistan.