MOSCOW, 16 February 2004 — Fifteen years ago, the Soviet Union ended its last war, a disastrous 10-year invasion of Afghanistan that claimed the lives of at least 15,000 soldiers and fueled the rise of radical Islamic extremists such as Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terror network.
To mark the day in Moscow, veterans were due to march through the center of the Russian capital and lay wreaths at the memorial to the unknown soldier at the Kremlin walls before a reception hosted by President Vladimir Putin.
The Afghan invasion still provokes heated debate in Russia, now bogged down in a bleeding guerrilla conflict in its mainly Muslim republic of Chechnya that has raged for much of the past decade, killing 10,000 Russian troops according to the official toll.
As veterans complain bitterly of being forgotten and neglected, both by the government and their countrymen, military pundits still argue who was to blame for the humiliating defeat.
And some charge that the invasion was a catastrophic mistake that helped speed up the crumbling of the Soviet Union and sparked the rise of Islamic extremists.
The general who led the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Boris Gromov, slammed the Afghan war for breeding violent Islamic radicalism in an interview with the Russian Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda published Friday ahead of the anniversary.
“The invasion was a big mistake that opened the hornet’s nest that is terrorism, not only in Afghanistan but in the region as a whole,” said Gromov, who was the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan on Feb. 15, 1989.
Gromov was the last commander of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, which Moscow invaded with a night-time raid by elite forces on the presidential palace in Kabul on Dec. 25, 1979, to back up the Marxist regime that had taken power in the country the year before.
The Soviet Army withdrew in a humiliating defeat in 1989, driven back by guerrillas whom the United States armed and financed, using Pakistan’s secret services as an intermediary.
The “jihad,” or holy war, against the atheist Soviets attracted volunteers from throughout the Muslim world, including the young Osama Bin Laden, making them proficient in guerrilla warfare.
But Soviet intelligence hawks such as Vadim Kirpichenko, a former deputy head of the KGB foreign intelligence arm, insists that the United States was to blame for today’s radicals.
“The US miscalculated in a major way. They set up a network of armed mujahedeen in Pakistan who fought against the Soviet Army,” he said according to excerpts of his book cited Friday in Krasnaya Zvezda.
“Washington armed them and sent them to fight against the ‘infidel’. The Americans opened the path for terrorists, who in the name of Islam spread fear and horror in many countries today.”
Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda international network is widely believed to have organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Many in Russia often compare the Soviet Afghan experience to the conflict in Chechnya, a mostly Muslim republic in the Caucasus that proclaimed independence from Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. “You study history in order not to repeat the same mistakes,” Gromov said. “The fact that such an analysis was not made led to what we had... in Chechnya.”
As in Afghanistan, Moscow was forced to withdraw its troops from Chechnya in the face of armed rebel resistance at the end of the first Russo-Chechen war in 1996.
Putin launched the second war in October 1999 as a lightning-strike operation against “terrorists,” but the conflict has bogged down into brutal guerrilla warfare that continues to claim lives on nearly a daily basis.