Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,119

was the massive scale of the two conflicts—endless wars of attrition fought against guerrillas. Then there were all the other, smaller similarities. Young Soviet conscripts were destroying themselves with drugs. They smoked hashish the way young American conscripts had used LSD, heroin, and marijuana during the Vietnam War. Indiscriminant massacres were committed because it was impossible to tell civilians from guerrillas. During the Vietnam War, unspeakable tragedies had unfolded in villages the Americans regarded as Vietcong strongholds—everyone in these villages was slaughtered, from infants to the elderly; even domestic animals were shot; and naturally the women were raped—and now, in the same manner, villages the Soviets regarded as mujahideen strongholds were completely wiped out. Everyone in these villages was slaughtered, from infants to the elderly, even domestic animals were shot, and naturally the women were raped, gang-raped. Limited use was made of chemical weapons, albeit in secret. In the Vietnam War, the American army had done the same thing, in secret.

The Soviets were confronted with the fact that the Afghan War was “our Vietnam.”

And there was Gorbachev. There was Gorbachev, singing his slogan: Perestroika! Perestroika! He initiated a completely new foreign policy. Relations with the West would now be aimed at fostering dialogue, guided by the notion of “new thinking” diplomacy. Gorbachev was trying to change the direction of the Soviet-American arms race. The Soviet economy was stagnating. It had been subsiding into stagnation for some time, but Gorbachev was the first to acknowledge this. In fact, the USSR was on the verge of bankruptcy. He admitted it. And their enormous military expenditures were putting the most pressure on the treasury. One aim of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” diplomacy was to make it possible to cut the military budget. He pushed ahead with negotiations concerning nuclear non-proliferation, and finally he was able to improve relations not only with America, Britain, and France, but even with China. Red China—the third player in the Cold War. The whole shift was described by the term détente.

Something was changing.

Something was speeding up.

And then Gorbachev made the announcement: “Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is also perestroika.”

The United Nations had gotten involved in peace negotiations relating to the Afghanistan problem in 1982 but had failed to make any progress. In April 1988, with this statement by Gorbachev, everything happened in a flash: a peace accord was signed. Now it was settled. The Soviet army would withdraw from Afghanistan.

The withdrawal began officially in May 1988 and was completed in February 1989.

On February 25. But did the Afghan War really end on that day? No, it did not. Because the Afghan government was still communist, and it was still friendly with the USSR, and it was still at odds with the mujahideen. And to make matters worse, the mujahideen organizations were at odds with each other as well, divided by all sorts of factors: were they composed largely of Pashtuns or non-Pashtuns, were they Sunni or Shi’a, and so on. Obviously the country was bound to descend into civil war. The USSR decided, first of all, that it would be unprofitable to allow Kabul’s pro-Soviet communist government to collapse; second, that since the Soviet Union shared a twelve-hundred-mile border with Afghanistan, any exacerbation of the situation within Afghanistan would pose a threat to the safety of the border regions; and third, that if the current government were to fall and be replaced by an Islamic government, the ensuing confusion was bound to spread to the Central Asian members of the USSR, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the other Islamic autonomous republics.

So the USSR continued to supply the communist, pro-Soviet Afghan government with vast quantities of aid, both financial and in the form of weapons.

And then something else happened.

This was just before the last of the one hundred thousand occupying soldiers withdrew.

On January 24, 1989, a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ratified a top-secret report that gave permission to the KGB Border Guards, then stationed in the north of Afghanistan, to carry out a certain strategic mission.

Needless to say, this was in violation of the peace accord.

The USSR’s quagmire, the Afghan War, wasn’t over yet. The Soviet Union itself refused to let it end. It kept going until the end of the year. But only in secret. The KGB took control, and only units that knew how to keep their activities secret were involved. Once again “S” was called in. Its fighters were special operations professionals, and they would keep quiet