Customer Reviews

The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For the last 4 or so years I've been looking for a book about the Soviet Afghan war and I was absolutely shocked to find here in America that there is virtually nothing. I've checked major retailers, surfed Amazon, even asked Russian history professors what they could recommend. Each time I'd get partial answers, essays or books relating to how journalists covered the Mujahideen, or military tactics involved, or a quick 20 pg reference covering the whole conflict. There was never a book covering a holistic account of the entire conflict. Even wikipedia failed as a descent start for references.

When I finally came across this book a few days ago, I had low expectations. Instead the book turned out to be everything I'd been looking for and more. The conflict is shown from multiple perspectives, first from Russian intelligence, to PDPA, to foot soldiers involved in the battles, then onto the several factions that united the country against the Soviets. It dives into the tactics and intense guerilla conflicts and shows the emotional damage that caused both sides to lose their humanity. Ultimately, these tactics plunged the soldiers involved on both sides into some of the most atrocious acts committed by mankind. In the film "Charlie Wilson's War", there is a scene where Russian fighter pilots are casually talking about relationships while gunning down civilians. This book will show a much more complicated picture which created the same stress our soldiers faced in Vietnam. In addition, we see the seeds sown for the current state of affairs. If you are a reader that is familiar with Afghanistan, you'll find that Mr. Felfer introduces a lot of these players and gives us their background, including the fate of one charismatic leader Ahmed Moassad.

Several history books can suffer from two flaws. One, the author becomes so intimately connected to his work that the information becomes second hand and he forgets how laymen approach the subject when writing. Or two, so much detail is involved that the reader can miss the overall map of what's important and happening. This book suffers from neither. It's totally accessible and Mr. Felfer knows what readers need to understand about this topic.

The only thing that bothered me is that it is marketed as saying how similar our situation is with the Russians. I think the comparison is hugely over exaggerated and there are several massive flaws with it. I won't go into them because this is a review but I should mention that the author never includes a chapter comparing our conflict with the Soviets. This is purely about the Soviets and to buy this for any other reason is faulty.

I'll just conclude this review with two other books that really helped me understand the region and helped me support Pres. Obama's decision to send more troops. They are Steve Coll's The Ghost Wars, (it'll give a brief intro to the Soviet Afghan war but really focuses on America's involvement in the region up to Sept 10, 2001) and Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos. Mr. Rashid's book is the definitive book I've read on the conflict since Sep 11, 2001.

"The Soviets had come to help the locals. Why were they hiding?" Sergeant Alexander Kalandrashvili's annoyance at finding a village empty of applauding citizens when his battalion drives through in late December, 1979, is just one example of the misunderstandings that contributed to the Soviet Union's version of a quagmire: a decade or so spent bogged down, fighting an enemy that was hard to define and even harder to locate, using tactics, weapons and strategies hopelessly out of tune with the country itself. Amazingly, by the time I had read 50 pages, I found myself deeply sympathizing with the Russian officials baffled by the Afghan leaders and their double- and triple-dealing!

This history of the Soviet Union's invasion of and quest to subdue Afghanistan during the 1980s is unbelievably timely, arriving in bookstores just as the focus of the 'war on terror' shifts from Iraq to Afghanistan and debate about building up forces in that country rages. Anyone reading this will find it hard to escape the parallels between the Russians' plight of nearly three decades ago, and that of the Americans today or the irony that the roots of American engagement today lie in our efforts to support the guerilla opposition to the Soviets back then. Above all, there is the single overwhelming fact that no invading force has ever managed to permanently subdue Afghanistan.

This is a book about fascinating events, and events that are little known and little understood, except within certain circles in the former Soviet Union. But it is not a fascinating book. There are writers who can take chronicles of war and conflict and turn them into riveting narratives that are impossible to put down. Unfortunately, Feifer didn't manage to pull off that feat. The result is a very worthwhile and significant book which should be read by anyone interested in American foreign policy, but a book that all too often feels plodding in tone and that frequently becomes bogged down in an endless litany of names, places, dates, items of military hardware, details of political infighting, etc. (The chapter titles say it all: "The Soviets Dig In"; "The Mujahideen Fight Back", "The Soviets Seek Victory", etc.) In other words, it never transcends the genre of military history.

It's not fair to compare this with books like Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: a Ten-year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes, a compelling story of the region that is beautifully written, because the latter is not a military history. Nevertheless, having read books by Kremmer and others about the region, as well as military histories that do manage to convey all the critical information about campaigns and tactics within a broader narrative arc, I found myself struggling with this and all too often having to read paragraphs repeatedly (after my eyes glazed over with too much military hardware detail) or jump back and forth to be sure I could follow the detail of which army group was doing what.

I'm hopeful that someone will be able to take the bare bones of the story that is presented here -- how elite Soviet troops stumbled into a situation that they didn't understand and couldn't control -- and flesh it out with what must be a rich trove of first-hand stories from both sides of the prolonged war in a more comprehensive and livelier book. (It wouldn't matter to me if it were twice the length of this one, which covers the whole war in a mere 280 pages.) Feifer has presented some first-hand views to the American reader for the first time -- a valuable service. But the anecdotes he includes function as anecdotes alone, rather than giving the reader insight into broader issues and themes, such as the daily life of a conscript or a mujahadeen fighter.

An important book, and one that should command a large readership, but one that is hard to recommend to anyone who doesn't have a strong interest in foreign policy, military history or geopolitics.

A very interesting and well-written history of this region that gives some insight into just why it has been so much fought-over is Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. I would highly recommend reading this along with Feifer's book, as the latter skims over this important historical dimension only briefly.

I had high hopes for this book when I started out. Aside from others' comparisons to the US invasion of Iraq, which I think are a bit strained, the topic has a more direct relevance to the US because it appears at least initially that the 44th President intends to increase our presence in Afghanistan. Thus, because I think history often repeats itself, I was interested in reading a book that tells the story of the USSR's problems in Afghanistan to see what we might expect if the number of foot soldiers in the country is increased. I think that information is in the book, and I also think that the author has meticulously investigated the story he tells. But I simply cannot read his story because it jumps around too much.

After the initial tale of the upheavals that led to the Soviet invasion in 1979, the story begins to jump forwards then backwards too much for me to follow. For example, on page 106, the story begins in March 1980 for the 201st Motor Rifle Division. It then jumps to events in May in the next paragraph, then "the following month" in the next. However, on the very next page, the discussion jumps back (forward?) to February.

The story regularly proceeds in short bursts that ought to be and probably are connected, but in such a manner that I find it hard to follow. I think this format is particularly difficult for someone, like me, who has only an overview of the war in the context of the Cold War and not the actual tactical and operational events occurring during the Soviet occupation. Therefore, I have struggled through to about midway through the book, but I can't make it any further.

I think it would have been better if the story had been written strictly chronologically and followed 4-5-6 people through the events of the Afghan war. As it is, I found it too frustrating to follow and to keep up with.

Greg Feifer's "The Great Gamble" is one of only a handfew of books written in English that examines the USSR's occupation of Afghanistan from a Soviet perspective, peeling back the layers of officialdom and historical narrative to examine the real-life people and interactions that shaped that horrendous ten-year conflict. Given the dearth of previous material, Feifer relies on primary sources, primarily interviews with actual war participants, unearthing the real human tragedy of what Willam T. Sherman succintly described as 'hell." Tackling such a gripping subject is a gamble of its own, but the author is able to present the authentic thoughts and emotions of those involved without the trappings of turning bloodletting soldiers into sympathetic, order-following actors on an infernal stage. Although tremendously incisive when dwelling on its cental theme, Feifer's "The Great Gamble" repeats the all-too-common mistake of recent books on Afghanistan by straying off-topic and ultimately misrepresenting the Afghan side of the conflict in an attempt to bring cohesion, consistency, and present-day parallels to a complicated story.

This insightful work begins by diving into the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. It examines the Politburo power brokers participant to that decision, including in the discussion their various backgrounds, prejudices, and motivations that contributed to one of the greatest tactical blunders in the history of Communism. Rather than being the result of a thoughtful, expansionist military decision based on history and facts, it is revealted that Brehznev practically stepped backwards into the conflict, clearly not anticipating or even truly understanding in what the Soviets were getting involved. From there, the book relays the stories of combatants who were involved in the actual execution of the war plan. This is the truly fascinating component of the book, as all the miscommunication, blunders, and battlefield triumphs and failures are revealed from the perspective of those on the ground. To take as a example, the drama of Hafizullah Amin's disposition by his Soviet patrons is particularly eye-opening, from the failed attempt at poisoning to Russian doctors who were unaware of their country's intentions and mistakenly tried to save Amin's life only to give up their own in the ensuing chaotic firefight that happened at Taj-Bej palace. Stories like this expose how doomed the Soviet invasion was from the start, regardless of the resources or brutality utilized to quiet the unrest. Also revealed through such candid recollections is how incogruent and ultimately unachievable Soviet goals were on the ground. Soldiers imbued with a sense of duty to prop up a Communist system meant to improve the lives of everyday Afghans were also responsible for some of the most reprehensible and cruel acts known to humanity, utterly destroying a people and country in the process. Seen from this vantage, "The Great Gamble" uncovers hidden wisdom and meaning that paints the potrait of a doomed Soviet misadventure.


The book itself fails when it attempts to describe events, people, and comparisons less well-researched. The author spends disproportion time on Soviet incursions into the Panjshir valley, which has enjoyed much notereity in the years after the war but enjoyed no special tactical importance at the time of the occupation. Much is made of the Ahmad Shah Massoud and his defense of the valley without doing what the author does best, which is revealing hidden truths about that portion of the conflict from Soviet sources. There are in fact are multiple Russian accounts of Massoud's questionable loyalty to the greater Afghan struggle as witnessed through well-documented side treaties he had with Russian forces throughout the course of the war, and this important, given the post-conflict legend of Massoud, yet overlooked fact of the conflct is glossed over in one sentence. Much of the commander's heroism is supplied to the book by his own supporters, and the discerning eye of the author fails to catch mistakes that contribute to the cult of Massoud: a defense of the town of Sarawbi in the direction of the eastern city of Jalalabad is attributed to Panjshiri rebels, as well as the fall of Kandahar in 1992 being attributed to Massoud's forces who played no role in either event. This emphasis on one particular person ultimately deprives the unnamed Afghan villagers, freedom fighters who gave their lives in defense of their country, from their rightful positions as heros of the conflict. In his epilogue, and most relevant to the current situation, the author misses to compare Soviet relationships with their Afghan counterparts, which he portrays in-depth, with American relationships in the country today. The obvious lesson gleaned from the book, and any study of occupation, is that regardless of the force involved, losing the people will lose the conflict. However, there is no discussion of the lessons to be learned from the Soviet interaction with Afghan leaders at the time, and how the decisions made on who to support and not support have almost as much influence in the endgame as do any particular battle or military strategy. These lessons have become increasingly important today as dubious decision-making in terms of which locals to support has created an impervious cadre of drugdealers and warlords who counted on outside support to establish themselves internally.

Despite its peripherial shortcomings, Gregory Feifer's work shines when focused on the relatively unknown element of the conflict, actions on the ground seen through the Soviet soldier perspective.

Finally a book on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The reader may draw his own conclusions about todays war effort in Afghanistans - this book merely offers a tremendous heap of primary material from which to draw inferences.
It sets of with a brief description of the background of the Afghan adventure and then jumps right into the middle of things, describing the war froma mostly Soviet perspective and as such from mostly a lower ranking soldiers perspective.
This makes for a gripping narrative which probably would also hold true for other Soviet military adventures.
What the book nevertheless lacks is a clear narrative. Sometimes one can be to close to the ground to see the larger picture. All changes in Soviet military approach are explained only fleetingly. Yes, the numerous new approaches not only remind us of current multitude of solutions which are being tried in Afghanistan and also highlight a possible reason for the ultimate defeat of the Soviet Union in this country, namely the lack of a consistently persued policy and military strategy.
Therefore this book resembles more a quarry. There are wonderful gems to be found and it is of huge utility, but it is unchartered and everyone has to do the search for himslef in this mountainscape of a book.

Anyone who has followed the historians' perspective on the Bush-Obama war in Afghanistan knows the mountainous country has been considered a graveyard for outsiders. Before the Americans, the Soviets became engulfed in a nine-year war there that many say was a much greater factor to the collapse of the Soviet Union than Reagan's build-up; as it exposed the weaknesses of the rag-tag nature of the Red Army. Using predominantly interviews with Soviet veterans and translations of released Russian information, Gregory Feifer provides an intriguing look at why the Russians' felt they lost and believe likewise the Americans will too. In some ways the anecdotal glimpse of the war is overwhelming as there is so much material from so many vets. Yet ironically this deep look from mostly the perspective of Russian war veterans lacks two critical interrelated elements in light of today's debate over whether the United States can win in Afghanistan. First why the Soviets felt they could win a protracted war when they issued rations stamped 1942 and second why did the Afghanistan resistance believe they could defeat one of the world's two superpowers. Still this is an interesting account of the Soviet war in Afghanistan worth reading over several weeks.

Harriet Klausner

Gregory Feifer's book about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is the best I have read to date. Its most interesting aspect is not the overall historical narrative, which any good journalist can recount, but the personal interviews, where actual combatants relate their own experiences on the front lines, and their frustrations at having to prosecute a war that was unnecessary, poorly planned, and even more poorly supported. Particularly striking are the accounts of the petty cruelties inflicted by Soviet soldiers on each other. Small wonder that most draft-age Soviets tried every trick they could to avoid serving in Afghanistan, or the Soviet Army as a whole, if possible. What passed for hazing in the American Army in the Vietnam era is small beer compared to the tortures that average Soviet recruits had to bear.

One of my favorite parts of Feifer's book is the story related by Valeriy Vostrotin, of "Devyataya Rota" fame, of the Spetsnaz assault on the Tajbeg Palace in December, 1979. The object of the assault was to kill Afghanistan's murderous ruler Hafizullah Amin, who, like Rasputin, had proved impervious to poison while all around him dropped like flies. I also found Aleksandr Rutskoi's fanciful account of his 1988 shootdown to be enormously interesting, if not exactly believable. Rutskoi, who was later to become Russia's Vice President and Yeltsin's principal opponent in the struggle for power in October 1993, says, apparently with a straight face, that he was shot down over Pakistan by F-16's, taken prisoner, and then traded for an American CIA agent in the Soviet Embassy in Islamabad. He got the "shot down and taken prisoner" part right, but if his antique MiG-23 had actually been downed by Pakistani F-16's, he would have never have seen them coming and would not have survived the encounter. Also, his tale about being swapped for a CIA agent at the Soviet Embassy in Islamabad begs the question of how the CIA agent would have come to be held in the Soviet Embassy in the first place. Nevertheless, it makes for an amusing, if not entirely plausible, Cold War tale.

I served in Afghanistan during the last six months of the Soviet occupation, and met a few of the people mentioned in Feifer's story. His account of them seems pretty accurate to me. I would not exactly call Feifer's book a definitive history of the war, but it is instructive for those who today would seek to solve the problems of the Afghans for them. The task looks easy at first, but things quickly turn bad and then you are stuck. We Americans might have better luck than the Soviets did, and will certainly do better than the poor British did in the First Afghan War (they were wiped out), but getting anywhere in Afghanistan will take more time than the decade the Soviets put in. Perhaps more importantly, it will cost us many casualties and billions in treasure. Things have a way of getting out of hand in that part of the world, as we are about to learn -- again.

A very vivid account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Obviously they knew very little of this poor and primitive country prior to sending their troops in. Afghanistan was and is still today a collection of tribal warlords vying for control of their territory.

What is surprising is how ill-fed and badly clothed the Soviet troops were. They would raid and steal food and clothing from the Afghans. They were also insufficiently paid. They would even sell their own munitions to the Afghans. It is unclear to this day how many Soviet troops were killed in Afghanistan.

It also exposes the canard that U.S. aid was instrumental in the Soviet collapse. It was the Mujahideen warrior, followed by thousands of Arab jihadis in the mid-eighties who were doing the fighting. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia gave far more direct aid than the U.S.

There are obviously many parallels with the U.S. invasion of Iraq - particularly deceit and an inability to end a war, and more importantly an inability to spread democracy or communism to a country ill-suited to the modern world.

When the Soviets pulled out, Afghanistan was left with very little - most of its basic infrastructure was shattered - roads, schools, farms... The warlords started fighting each other. The Afghan war imploded in New York on September 11,2001.

Several of the other reviews are accurate in informing the prospective reader of the book's content, so I will confine my remarks to several additional points. This is not the definitive work, but is almost the first book to come out based on recent Soviet archival material release (& personal inverviews) to give Western readers an appreciation of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and the reasons why they went into the country. No doubt other works will appear in the coming years to flesh out the story in a very scholarly fashion, but this one will do for now.

Communist doctrine was a poor fit in Afghanistan due to a missing element -- there was and still is essentially no proletariat (e.g. no workers.) That immediately brings in the question as to how Mao was successful in China (or Stalin in the Soviet Union) for that fact, but neither had to contend with a very strong religious presence which governed the lives of the people. Simply put, Communism was unable to supplant the Islam and Islamic Law. It now remains to be seen if the United States will do any better with its attempt to impose a nationwide secular democracy. The forces against the U.S. are the same as were against the Soviets.

The Soviets attempted to modernize Afghanistan and liberate its people from medieval institutions yet were unable to comprehend that the people preferred to live as they wished rather than to have civilization, progressivism, and modernization forced on them, particularly by outsiders. Gee, that sounds exactly like what the U.S. is attempting to do. Although the author and some reviewers decry tribalism, one must remember that it is a peoples' right to live as they wish -- under tribalism if that is their choice. Although the religion and culture are different, the Muslim Afghans have much in common with the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish in America. All government is an abridgement on personal freedom, and in all matters not subject to Islamic Law, the Afghans demanded freedom under local (tribal and family) control. For whatever reason, much of the American citizenry has forgotten (if it ever knew) that our Founding Fathers recognized much the same problem (excepting the substitution of Christian culture and the 10 Commandments for Islam) and our current Federal Government now sees such concepts as backward and obstacles to progressivism.

I, for one, was swept up by the author's narrative to a point of sympathy for the Soviet soldier and officer on the ground, trying his best but not comprehending the reasons for or the futility of the struggle. They were often unable to understand Afghan culture and failed to see that liberating women from their subservient status was hardly a winning strategy (some male Americans might now agree after seeing American women voting for Obama en masse due to his sexual attraction.) Money poured into buildings, roads, medical facilities and all the trappings of a modern society was simply wasted. Gee, are we now doing the same thing?

Ultimately, the power politics that drew the Soviets reluctantly into Afghanistan to control Central Asia for their own strategic purposes helped doom the Soviet Union. This should be a lesson for all, even though the U.S. went into Afghanistan to punish a regime that harbored and trained terrorists who were/are at war with the U.S. OK, so if bin Laden is killed or captured, will we leave Afghanistan? And if not, why not? What are/will be the reasons for staying? Are those reasons the same as those for the Soviets? As this book points out, the Soviets finally realized that withdrawing from Afghanistan would not fatally damage their position in the world (although it encouraged the Chechens) and staying served no useful purpose. Frankly, it is time for Obama to read this book, particularly since he has no military experience and can hardly be expected to understand the difficulties facing American and Soviet soldiers and commanders in Afghanistan.

In short, this is a valuable book in which one learns that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was fought to the best of the Red Army's ability, and even today Soviet veterans have much the same feelings of being let down by their government as American veterans of Vietnam have.

Although some say that Afghanistan was devastated by the Soviets, I note that the Afghan census recorded 13 million in 1979 while the current population estimate (2009) is over 28 million. Obviously all this warfare has not impeded a astounding fecundity in the Afghan people.

This is an important work and I recommend it to all. There are some errors, notably in geography and narrative continuity, but please read past these problems. There is much to learn here, not only for the individual American citizen but also for the Federal Government. Sooner or later people desire the ability to control their own lives rather than being told by a government what is good for them. The desire for freedom will trump progressivism in the end when the central government over-reaches into the private lives of the citizens. The alien Soviets did that almost simply by their presence in Afghanistan -- our increasingly remote and elitist Federal Government and its ruling bureaucracy may well be fast approaching the same point.

Gives a solid and detailed explanartion to the war in Afghanistan by the Soviets. Gives detailed account of the logistical and manning issue to the war. A whole chapter to the Panjshir region/valley. Great read to get a history of the war.