A Slow Reckoning: The USSR, the Afghan Communists, and Islam by Vassily Klimentov (review)

This book serves as a poignant reassessment of the failed attempts made by the Soviet Union between 1979 and 1989 to turn Afghanistan into a society led along socialist lines. Vassily Klimentov suggests that finding reasons for the USSR’s failure in Afghanistan should be linked to the debate about the competition between ideology and real-politik in driving decision-making during the Cold War in which the Moscow and Washington rivalry articulated alternative views of modernity and of the future economic, social, and political development of humanity.

Klimentov lists and explains the core factors behind why the attempts to modernize a tribal society along “the Soviet model” as the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) encountered considerable challenges. The author identifies a number of those factors.

To begin with, hasty and ill-matched measures were introduced “to remodel Afghanistan using the Marxist-Leninist playbook” (P. 29) following the April 27, 1978, communist coup by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The PDPA remained divided between two fractious and divisive groups, Khalq (People) and Parcham (Banner). Years later a KGB general stated that failing to choose a side between the two PDPA factions “has been the KGB’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan” as no reconciliation between the two proved possible (P. 29).

After intervening in Afghanistan in December 1979, the Soviets put Babrak Karmal in place as the Afghan president between 1979 and 1986. Thousands of advisers were sent from Moscow to keep the Afghan government under supervision and to administer the country. Those assigned with the task of Sovietizing Afghanistan misread the host society’s adherence to their core values. Their assessment of the cultural, tribal, and ethnic dynamics of Afghan society proved to be insufficient and inadequate. Fikrat Tabeev, the Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan between 1979 and 1986, a Tatar Muslim acting as one of the USSR’s biggest dogmatists embodied the paradox of the Soviet engagement there. Tabeev “expected Marxism-Leninism to find fertile ground and came to help advisors implement CPSU methods” (Pp. 56–57). He told the departing Soviet military “that the DRA was on its way to join the Warsaw Pact” (P. 58). There were many people like Tabeev who acted as if Afghanistan was already the “16th Soviet Republic” (P. 66). One Soviet adviser later summed up the mood admitting: “We were obssessed with our messianic vision and blinded by arrogance. How could we have possibly hoped to teach the Afghans anything when we ourselves never learned to manage our own economy?” (P. 53).

There was much misplaced confidence on the part of the Soviet advisers in understanding the psyche, culture, customs, and core values of the society they were trying to change. “In Afghanistan, the Soviets had allowed the PDPA to do whatever it needed to retain power” (P. 216). Many DRA officials often reported the country’s situation in terms that they thought would please Moscow. Such confusing practies resulted in frustrating the USSR’s attempts to see the PDPA stabilize and strenghten their control, which in turn displayed an inability to adapt and adjust its policies to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan massess. The relationship between the Soviets and their PDPA clients remained repleted with “endless disputes” that “plagued the Soviet transformative project” (P. 65).

The severe and sustained reaction to the coercive policies pursued by those aspiring to forcibly change Afghan society proved widespread and exceeded all expectations. The author cites reports about how confusing solutions proposed to the decision-makers in Moscow advocated crushing the popular resistance by conducting large-scale operations. Such military campaigns were conducted in 1984–1985, about which the chief military adviser, General Valentin Varennikov later unleashed harsh criticism on Karmal, who, as an Afghan “should have perfectly known the people, the traditions, the social, and moral rules, the unwritten laws, the views on various societal events.” He went on to add that as a leader operating on the national level, Karmal “should have and would have conducted a policy considering these specifities. But everything was done the other way around” (P. 98).

Klimentov notes that in Afghanistan, the United States strikingly “encountered the...