#11
New York Times
October 22, 2001
Veterans of Soviets' Old War Warn of Betrayal and
Brutality
By C. J. CHIVERS
SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Oct. 21 — One by one the men pulled out black-and-white photographs with edges worn soft from repeated handling.
One showed noncommissioned officers hugging after finishing training. Another was of a young man having a medal pinned on him. A third showed muscular troops, topless and lounging on grass during a lull in the fighting, looking as much like a high- school sports team as an infantry squad.
There were dozens in all. The Uzbek men who have saved the pictures, combat veterans of Soviet intelligence and special forces units when Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union, invariably smiled as they produced the first few. "This one is of my sergeant from Ukraine," they said, or, "That was taken on a day when we left for a vacation."
And then their tone changed, as the scrapbooks summoned darker memories — and a warning — of brutality and betrayal at the hands of Afghan guerrillas they once thought were their allies.
"You cannot trust them," said Egamberdi Sultonov, 50, a former K.G.B. officer, displaying a photograph of an Afghan fighter. "They are always your friend in the daytime and your enemy in the night."
As coalition special forces began the ground war in Afghanistan, Uzbek veterans of the last foreign incursion into the same nation gathered during the weekend and shared their mementos with an intensity they said they have not felt since their war ended in 1989. Their former adversaries — the Americans and the Afghan guerrillas — were beginning to meet on their former battlefields, and as they watched news broadcasts and traded impressions they spoke of an affinity for the Americans, and of the stomach-tightening feeling of admiration mixed with dread.
Their admiration was rooted in their belief that the United States and the coalition it is leading are just in their cause, and that the tacticians who are commanding the operation have not, in the beginning at least, repeated the Soviet Union's military mistakes.
"It does seem like America studied what we did wrong," said Talat Muradov, a former Soviet intelligence captain and president of Uzbekistan's largest veterans' group, recalling the winding columns of Soviet convoys, slow and impotent targets in mountain terrain, that were ambushed by bands of mujahedeen.
Most predicted that the American campaign would eventually prevail. But as these men flipped through journals and envelopes of old war photographs, they also expressed powerful misgivings. They worried over the extent of civilian casualties. And they said the American Special Forces had now started on missions that could lead to unimaginably bad endings for the combatants. They are working with Afghan guerrillas, the veterans said, and 10 years of experience taught the veterans that soldiers who work with Afghan guerrillas were often betrayed.
More than 65,000 Uzbeks served in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and 1,522 died, according to the Association of Warrior-Veterans Internationalist Uzbekistan, the organization Mr. Muradov leads.
Most the Uzbeks were conscripts, men who received scant training at the start of brief and bewildering enlistments in which they spent a year in the combat zone followed by a discharge home. A few were career soldiers or members of intelligence or special forces units. These men drew on extensive training and used superior equipment, and over the weekend they spoke with authority on Afghan tactics and terrain, and with a sophisticated understanding of campaigning in Central Asia.
They outlined significant differences between the current campaign and the Soviet incursion in 1979. They said, for instance, that career American officers and soldiers, with longer enlistments and experience from places like Iraq and Kosovo, were more prepared for war than the Soviets were. The veterans also spoke approvingly of the coalition's equipment, especially the precision weapons that Soviet commanders did not have. And they insisted that there were important differences between the situations on the ground.
"When we were there fighting, Afghanistan's borders were open, and people from other countries were able to go in and help the mujahedeen," said Mr. Muradov. "Now the borders are closed; no one helps the Taliban. It will be easier."
Another former officer, Khakim Tilaev, a special forces lieutenant in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1987, also said the United States had more information about its foe than it lets on, both from new regional allies, like Uzbekistan, and longstanding sources. "They have some of their connections there from when we had the cold war and they were helping the Afghan fighters," Mr. Tilaev said. "There is an old network."
But for all the differences between the Soviet and American campaigns, some things will be unchanged, the veterans said. The coalition will not be able to win through firepower alone. As Special Forces deploy on the ground, they will necessarily be working with and against a people who, through ruthlessness and guile, have never relented against a modern foe.
The men offered up their battlefield memorabilia and told tales of deceit, savagery and betrayal, with each anecdote making a point about how the rebels bound physical and psychological war to undo the invader's will, and reduced opportunities to win over the civilian population.
The problems were there from the outset, they said, when the Soviets tried to establish relationships with Afghan villagers, as they were ordered to do. Early in 1981, Mr. Sultonov said, three officers befriended a group of Afghan men near Kandahar. After a few days of exchanging goods and gasoline, the villagers invited the officers to their home. Five men went, Mr. Sultonov said, the officers and two armed soldiers. Inside, the Afghans and the Soviets drank tea and sat for a meal.
As food was served, the Afghans attacked. Mr. Sultonov put down a cigarette and shared the reconstruction made by Soviet intelligence.
"The local guys took our men's guns away, and brought them to the yard and beat them and cut their faces, ears, hands and legs, and then they cut them into pieces and put them into pots of boiling water," he said. "The next day our soldiers went there and destroyed the village, but they never found the murderers."
Mr. Tilaev, who is now the chairman of the Samarkand chapter of the veterans' association, said the guerillas were just as unrestrained in their dealings with their own people. To prevent the Soviets from enlisting local support, he said, they were willing to kill or maim suspected informants and those who publicly accepted the occupying army's presence.
"I saw a women in the Bagram province with her hands and legs cut off and her eyes put out, because her two sons had helped the Soviets," he said. "They killed the rest of her family. But they left her alive to suffer, and so all of the other people could see what could happen to anyone who worked with us."
Years of war also made Afghan warriors patient, Mr. Tilaev said. He showed a picture of his special forces unit with a captured guerilla. He said the man, hunched over with his wrists bound as the Soviets smiled around him, had lived in a tunnel that was accessible only through a village drinking well. By this time, in the mid-1980's, he said, some rebels had lived like that for two years.
"This is the mentality American soldiers will meet when they work on the ground," Mr. Tilaev said. "There is barbarism, betrayals and endurance. This mentality will not have changed."
Aleksandr Korshikov, 43, who was a special forces sergeant, said the Americans now faced the same quandary that his unit faced. To be effective in unfamiliar terrain and to reach out to local people, the American Special Forces typically befriend and work with local guides. But the Soviet special forces, when they tried that approach, found that even some of the Afghan guides who would not attack you themselves would sometimes send their sponsors into ambushes, or deceive them with bad intelligence and directions.
"It was very often the case," he said. "Afghanistan is a place where you needed help, but you could never know if the man who was helping you was not really your enemy. Always, when we were there, it was hard to know what to do. That is how many of our men died."
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