Russian vets of Afghan war pity Canada
Red Army finally abandoned fight, 'it is impossible to win there'
Sat Oct 28 2006 By Matthew Fisher
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/world/story/3751713p-4337348c.html
MOSCOW -- Senior Sgt. Sergei Kirjushin spent the most intense 18 months of his life in Afghanistan in the late 1980s with an elite Red Army airborne regiment that sometimes fought Islamic holy warriors at such close quarters he could "feel their breath."
Like a surprisingly large number of the former Soviet Union's 620,000 Afghan war vets, the burly ex-paratrooper is aware the Canadian army is now fighting some of the very same mujahideen and their progeny for control of the same unforgiving, arid landscape.
Kirjushin's convinced nothing good will come of Canada's war in Afghanistan.
"It is really impossible to win there. No positive result can be expected," Kirjushin, whose shaved head gives him a ferocious look, said during a long, often grim conversation at the Afghan War Veterans Association in the centre of the Russian capital.
"As every nation that goes to fight in Afghanistan discovers, nobody has ever conquered that place. Even children were involved. They would blow up our tanks."
Col. Alexander Khmel, who as a young artillery officer spent a year with an infantry unit in Afghanistan and still has four pieces of shrapnel embedded in his body from his time there, shared Kirjushin's dark pessimism about the task facing Canadian troops.
"Please send my personal condolences to your army and to the families of those who have already died," said Khmel, who retired from the Red Army last year.
"If your army stays there, further losses are inevitable. Lots of them. I really feel sorry for your boys."
Military analyst Alexander Golts, who covered the Afghan war for the Red Army newspaper, provided a more nuanced but equally discouraging assessment of the latest war in a distant place where Russian troops used to call the enemy "dukhi" or 'ghosts" because they would often hide their weapons and quietly mix in with the local population at the end of a losing battle only to resurface somewhere else to continue the fight.
"An American general once told me that a civilized nation can't win a guerrilla war until it stops being civilized itself," said Golts. "I think that that is true in Afghanistan.
"Any attempt to bring outside principles to Afghanistan by military force cannot work because this is a traditional society that simply does not understand principles, whether they are principles of freedom or principles of communism. They only see us as invaders."
The former Soviet Union's' Afghan misadventure lasted a decade. When it was over in 1989 about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and more than one million Afghans were dead.
A timely paper written last year for NATO by Col. Oleg Kulakov, a serving Russian army officer who spent five years in Afghanistan as a military interpreter, discussed many of the difficulties that bedeviled the Red Army there between 1979 and 1989.
More on link
Red Army finally abandoned fight, 'it is impossible to win there'
Sat Oct 28 2006 By Matthew Fisher
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/subscriber/world/story/3751713p-4337348c.html
MOSCOW -- Senior Sgt. Sergei Kirjushin spent the most intense 18 months of his life in Afghanistan in the late 1980s with an elite Red Army airborne regiment that sometimes fought Islamic holy warriors at such close quarters he could "feel their breath."
Like a surprisingly large number of the former Soviet Union's 620,000 Afghan war vets, the burly ex-paratrooper is aware the Canadian army is now fighting some of the very same mujahideen and their progeny for control of the same unforgiving, arid landscape.
Kirjushin's convinced nothing good will come of Canada's war in Afghanistan.
"It is really impossible to win there. No positive result can be expected," Kirjushin, whose shaved head gives him a ferocious look, said during a long, often grim conversation at the Afghan War Veterans Association in the centre of the Russian capital.
"As every nation that goes to fight in Afghanistan discovers, nobody has ever conquered that place. Even children were involved. They would blow up our tanks."
Col. Alexander Khmel, who as a young artillery officer spent a year with an infantry unit in Afghanistan and still has four pieces of shrapnel embedded in his body from his time there, shared Kirjushin's dark pessimism about the task facing Canadian troops.
"Please send my personal condolences to your army and to the families of those who have already died," said Khmel, who retired from the Red Army last year.
"If your army stays there, further losses are inevitable. Lots of them. I really feel sorry for your boys."
Military analyst Alexander Golts, who covered the Afghan war for the Red Army newspaper, provided a more nuanced but equally discouraging assessment of the latest war in a distant place where Russian troops used to call the enemy "dukhi" or 'ghosts" because they would often hide their weapons and quietly mix in with the local population at the end of a losing battle only to resurface somewhere else to continue the fight.
"An American general once told me that a civilized nation can't win a guerrilla war until it stops being civilized itself," said Golts. "I think that that is true in Afghanistan.
"Any attempt to bring outside principles to Afghanistan by military force cannot work because this is a traditional society that simply does not understand principles, whether they are principles of freedom or principles of communism. They only see us as invaders."
The former Soviet Union's' Afghan misadventure lasted a decade. When it was over in 1989 about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and more than one million Afghans were dead.
A timely paper written last year for NATO by Col. Oleg Kulakov, a serving Russian army officer who spent five years in Afghanistan as a military interpreter, discussed many of the difficulties that bedeviled the Red Army there between 1979 and 1989.
More on link
