Review: The Hidden War

I just read The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan by Artyom Borovik.

The Bush administration should have read this as it worked through the Afghan policy. The Russians thought that they could keep a friendly government in power in Kabul, and could develop the country. Everyone that arrived in country thought it just needed more time, more troops, etc. Borovik points out that a lot of the people fighting the Russians and the government troops were not "insurgents" of the organized opposition but simply tribal people who wanted to be left to run their own affairs and would fight anyone who sought to interfere in those affairs.

It appears that no one really knows what happened when the Russians went to war in Afghanistan, nor why it seemed a good idea to Russian leadership at the time.

Certainly one can feel for the Russian soldiers who were trying to do their duty to their country in difficult circumstances. Most of them had no idea of what they would be in for when they first went to Afghanistan. The book exposes the corruption that was rampant in the Russian military in the 1980s, and the cover up of atrocities committed by the worst of the troops.

Borovik writes with telling detail about life of the Russian soldier in the Afghanistan campaign, and selects the most telling from what must have been huge numbers of interviews. Of course, the selection process itself, while necessary to any author, introduces a selection bias that interferes with the reader's understanding of the war.

This book does not tell the macrohistory of the war -- its causes, battles, casualties, and impact. It focuses on the microhistory -- life in the APCs and advanced observation posts. The two views are complementary.

I suspect that the American soldiers in Afghanistan now would have related more easily to their Russian counterparts than to the Afghans that both thought they were protecting and helping. That was not a conclusion I was expecting.