FORUM: Illtyd harrington: ‘As I Please’

Published: 28 April, 2011

A British diplomat’s take on the Red Army and Afghanistan 

I am an old party pooper but if north London turns into a orgiastic bacchanal on Friday I will applaud. And the fruits of the vine, and grains of barley and wheat can be benefited from by all of us.

But it might be worthwhile to recall that a week later is the 66th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in which more Russians died in the battle for Berlin than the entire loss of British life civil and military throughout the war.

At first I assumed that Rodric Braithwaite might be a pious character from a Catherine Cookson novel. The author of Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-1989, lived and listened in an even more symbolic world when he was the British ambassador to Moscow from 1988 to 1992. This was a man who did not sit around at receptions in that elegant embassy opposite the Kremlin dispensing gilt-wrapped chocolate balls.

He has written a penetrating history of the Red Army during its occupation of Afghanistan and set it against the inept behaviour of Jimmy Carter’s Neutron Bomb and Reagan’s Star Wars.

His account of the Russian military and political establishment in the whirlpool of Afghanistan is as clear as a whistle.

Surprisingly, he puts a case for the Russian government. His superb command of Russian and secure sources and opinions are beyond challenge.

Why oh why did a country economically weak and overstretched go into what has been called “the most incoherent state in the world”? It was a shambles. Seven political parties in exile; a communist party of 1,500 members mainly in Kabul. A handful of languages married to an unbending majority with loyalty to Islam.

It is compulsive to read the discussions that took place at the heart of the Russian establishment in April 1978.

For four and a half days they flushed it out and their conversation is repeated verbatim.

Eventually they went to see Leonid Brezhnev who was in a sclerotic state. Reluctantly he agreed to the invasion, but stressed that it ought to include a programme of reform.

The whole thing was undertaken against a background of caution and reluctance. Brezhnev insisted that there must be a programme for social and educational reform, including votes for women. Hardly a dictatorial rant from that most forbidding of all men.

So, on Christmas Day 1978, the 40th Red Army entered that beautiful mountain fortress of Afghanistan. They engaged with the Taliban, probably the only ones who had a sense of national identity.

On the other hand the Mujahideen were very friendly towards those who had come to help. And there was the rump of Al Qaeda.

Many welcomed the Red Army with its accompanying teachers, doctors and engineers. And, yes, the young idealistic communists, many of them like our aid workers, were as keen as mustard.

A great number of them were in fact Muslims from the Soviet socialist republics in the east.

Soviet aid over four years from 1988 to 1992 was a healthy $5 billion, spent on a range of improvements from irrigation to what you will be glad to know is the most modern jam factory in the world.

The empathy of Braithwaite with young Russians is remarkable. And poetry and music is an essential part of what they wrote and felt in their everyday life. 

One wrote: “I am broken in my soul.”

The ambassador went on to become John Major’s foreign office adviser so he was no red in the droshky.

He sweeps aside the received wisdom that all of this brought about the fall of Soviet communism, although at the peace talks in Geneva it was claimed it had cost the Russians $60 billion.

Another old chestnut that he sees off is that they were trying to follow in the steps of Peter the Great. In fact they had prepared a plan for leaving which was based on reconstruction and readjustment.

For the hundreds of thousands of Russians who went there over the period, there was no heroes’ welcome at Moscow Central station. No laurel leaves or Marxist paeons of praise. For the Soviet Union was about to implode.

From 1988 to 1992 Mikhail Gorbachev brought to an end 70 years of the communist state. His glasnost and perestroika forced Russia’s disintegration.

His successor, Boris Yeltsin, held the pen in trembling hands, while his daughter guided it, signing away the vast natural wealth to the warring oligarchs and incipient mafia.

The returning soldiers were disillusioned at the indifference shown towards them. Post traumatic stress disorder was common and took a long time to be recognised. They were bitter and Russia had become a capitalist state.

It is an amazing rare testimony from a British career diplomat to come to the conclusions that he has.

More than 9,200 Russians died between 1979 and 1989. 

This has now raged for 30 years and, as I write, Captain Lisa Head is the 320th needless British death.

The toxic air of corruption hangs over Kabul as Hamid Karzai’s government prepares to take over six areas of the country.

Here we are beaten about the head over our deficit. But Nato is spending $27 billion on training Karzai’s new army.

The US is spending $120 billion a year.

It’s hard to get British figures but we are probably at about £5billion a year.

None of this can hide the reality of the fractured and factioned land with its volatile population.

I commend to you ex-foreign secretary David Miliband who spent the weekend away from his two jobs in Harvard University. He said we must not let Afghan be the forgotten war. He ought to have read a minute sent to the foreign office on November 28 1979. The author was a leading member of our diplomatic corps. 

It reads: “Would we be better off with a socialist regime rather than a recactionary Islamic type which is giving us such problems elsewhere?” 

Current thinking in Barack Obama’s state department is placing strong emphasis on the gender issue: play it down, is the advice as they prepare to exit in 2014. Why don’t they be honest and say bring back the burqa and be satisfied?

Ironic that the accursed Brezhnev insisted on the opposite in 1978. Free women from this burden. And so that’s that. Up the reds!