Soviets' Afghan war informs surge debate

The future of the war in Afghanistan was on the line as Gen. Stanley McChrystal met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a secret rendezvous at a Belgian airbase in August. Gen. McChrystal, the top Western commander in Afghanistan, pushed for more U.S. troops to roll back the spreading Taliban-led insurgency. Mr. Gates, officials say, was skeptical.
A quarter-century ago, he was a top Central Intelligence Agency officer aiding the anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan, and he remembered how a 1985 decision by the Soviet Union to widen that earlier war had failed to turn the tide.
In a speech to the nation Tuesday from West Point, President Barack Obama will announce his decision on a request by Gen. McChrystal for 40,000 more U.S. troops, to join some 100,000 Western soldiers already here. Washington is also prodding reluctant allies to send as many as 10,000 additional soldiers.
Debate inside the Obama administration on the troop increase has been intense, with Vice President Joe Biden cold to Gen. McChrystal's request and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan warning that such a surge would lessen pressure on the Kabul government to take over its own security. Mr. Gates's stance became a crucial factor in these deliberations. After initially challenging Gen. McChrystal to persuade him the result wouldn't mirror the Soviets' experience, the defense secretary is now backing a compromise of some 30,000 to 35,000 additional U.S. troops, close to the number likely to be endorsed by Mr. Obama.
Few American officials know the Soviets' bitter Afghan predicament better than Mr. Gates. In the 1980s, he was the deputy director of the CIA, overseeing a massive U.S. effort to fund, train and equip the Islamic insurgents, called mujahedeen, who fought the Soviet army to a standstill.
Now some of the most prominent of these insurgents, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, are allied against America with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Almost daily their men are killing Western troops, who often operate from former Soviet bases and use Soviet-drawn military maps with faint Cyrillic markings.
"It's an eerie sense of deja vu," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution scholar who headed the Obama administration's Afghan policy review in the spring and who in the 1980s worked under Mr. Gates as a CIA officer in the region. "America," he said, "is in the rare position of fighting the same war twice in one generation, from opposite sides. And it's easier to be the insurgents."
Comparing the Tolls
There are major differences between the two conflicts. For one, unlike the isolated Soviet Union, America operates in Afghanistan under a United Nations mandate, part of a coalition of 42 allies. Allied dead, currently 1,528, are barely one-ninth the Soviet toll. Afghan civilian deaths are a small fraction of the estimated one million killed in the 1980s.
Afghans who compare the two campaigns acknowledge the differences, yet argue that these aren't always in America's favor. An examination of this debate over the Soviet experience offers an insight into what American troops are up against -- and the issues President Obama must weigh as he decides the course of an unpopular and costly war he didn't start.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also faced a troop-increase request during his first year, for a war he had inherited. Soviet generals in 1985 asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to bolster their 100,000-strong contingent, roughly the same size as the current Western force in Afghanistan.
Mr. Gates, discussing that period in his 1996 memoir "From the Shadows," wrote: "The Soviets had to either reinforce or lose. Because they clearly were not winning." Gen. McChrystal used similar language in his recent warning about possible American "failure" in Afghanistan unless adequate resources are committed. Mr. Gorbachev ended up authorizing a small troop surge; 18 months later, he announced plans for a withdrawal.
The U.S. Army, in a 1989 secret "lessons learned" study of the Soviets' campaign, said they simply didn't have enough boots on the ground. "Insufficient forces were available to expand appreciably the area of physical control, or to identify and attack many insurgent targets at the same time," said the study, now partially declassified. "When major operations were conducted in one part of the country, forces had to be drawn from other areas."