by Odd Arne Westad

In the winter of 1994-95, as Russian tanks and planes were pounding the Chechen capital of Groznyi into rubble, I felt a painful, almost menacing, sense of déjà vu. I had just returned from Moscow where I had been conducting interviews and collecting documents for a book on Soviet-era interventions, and I was struck by how rhetorically and structurally similar the Chechen operation was to the invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979). At the heart of all of these interventions was an inability within the Soviet (or Russian) leadership to communicate effectively and to reach settlements once a conflict had reached a certain level. In terms of personalities, all of them were directed against former "allies”: Imre Nagy, Alexander Dubcek, Hafizullah Amin, and Dzhokar Dudaiev had little in common beyond having spent most of their lives serving a Communist party. In all four cases it seems like it was the broken trust, the sense of betrayal and ingratitude, which propelled the men in the Kremlin past initial doubts and hesitations up to the moment when someone said, "Go!"

From what we know, the Kremlin processes of decision-making on foreign policy crises have stayed remarkably intact since the Bolshevik revolution. Although the degree of absolute centralization on such issues has differed from the one-man rule of Stalin, Gorbachev, and (when healthy, at least) Yeltsin to the small collectives of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras-the number of people actually involved in preparing and making essential foreign. policy decisions has remained extremely limited. As in most bureaucra

cies, the men at the second level spend most of their time trying to secondguess what their bosses really want in terms of alternatives and conclusions. Add to this the paranoia and fear bred by an authoritarian political system, and the result is a distorted, dysfunctional decision-making process, in which essential commodities like time, information, and trust are even scarcer than in the West.

The most immediate parallel to the Chechen crisis was of course the intervention in Afghanistan. In both cases, the final decision to commit troops was made by an ailing and isolated leader; reports on conversations with Boris Yeltsin from late 1994 through late 1996 sounded remarkably similar to conversations with Leonid Brezhnev during the period surrounding the decision to invade Afghanistan fifteen years earlier. Their political attention span and field of vision much reduced, both tended to view decisions in strongly personalized terms. To Brezhnev, Amin was the "dirty fellow" who usurped power by killing President Nur Mohammed Taraki just days after the president had been embraced by Brezhnev in Moscow. To Yeltsin, Dudaiev was a "scoundrel" who tried to blackmail him and challenged his manly courage. Neither could be permitted to remain if the selfimage of the ailing Kremlin leader was to stay intact.

Around the sickly heads of state, factional politics flourished, with institutional rivalries particularly strong. During both crises the heads of the military and security institutions drove events in 1979 and 1994 it was the defense ministers, Dmitri Ustinov and Pavel Grachev, who made the final push for intervention. Because of departmental jealousies, in operational terms

both interventions consisted of two separate plans-one political and one military-which, at the last moment, were merged to form one operation, more substantial and therefore more difficult to manage. Since nobody in Moscow could define exactly who the enemy was, massive force became a useful drug against the painful search for political and military precision.

1

In the fall of 1995, a group of scholars and former Soviet and American officials with special knowledge of the Afghanistan intervention and its effect on Soviet-American relations gathered for a three-day meeting in the Norwegian village of Lysebu, outside Oslo.1 Among the participants on the American side were Carter Administration veterans Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence; William Odom and Gary Sick, assistants to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski on Soviet and Near Eastern affairs, respectively; and Marshall Shulman, then Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance's main adviser on the Soviet Union. On the Russian side sat several key survivors of the Brezhnev era, led by former ambassador to the United States Anatolii F. Dobrynin and Gen. Valentin Varennikov, then Commander of Soviet ground forces. There were also some lesser known faces: Gen. Leonid Shebarshin, former head of KGB foreign intelligence (and in the late 1970s head of the KGB station in Teheran), and Karen Brutents, former Deputy Head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU).

The conference was the latest in a series of such gatherings of former Soviet and American officials to explore the reasons behind the collapse of su

perpower detente in the mid-1970s, and whether those events suggested any lessons for current and future RussianAmerican relations. They were organized as part of the "Carter-Brezhnev Project," spearheaded by Dr. James G. Blight of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Among the scholarly organizations supporting the Project's efforts to obtain fresh evidence from American, Russian, and other archives were the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute and declassified documents repository based at George Washington University; the Cold War International History Project, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington; the Norwegian Nobel Institute; and the Institute for General History, Russian Academy of Sciences.

Prior to the Afghanistan session, which took place in Lysebu on 17-20 September 1995, the Carter-Brezhnev Project had organized two other major oral history conferences on the events of the late 1970s: on SALT II and the growth of U.S.-Soviet distrust, held at the Musgrove Plantation, St. Simons Island, Georgia, on 6-9 May 1994; and on U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the Third World, held in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on 23-26 March 1995. For each conference, a briefing book was prepared by the National Security Archive with support from CWIHP and other Project affiliates, containing declassified U.S. documents and English translations of documents obtained from Russian (and East German) archives, including those of the Russian Foreign Ministry and the former CC CPSU.2 Many of these translations appear in this Bulletin.

In the case of the Afghanistan-related documents printed below, the translations include, for the most part, materials declassified by Russian authorities as part of Fond 89, a collection prepared for the Russian Constitutional Court trial of the CPSU in 1992

and now stored at the Center for the Storage of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD) in Moscow; translations of these documents-most of which were obtained and provided to CWIHP by Mark Kramer (Harvard Univer

sity) were commissioned by CWIHP. (CWIHP also expresses thanks to Raymond L. Garthoff and Selig Raymond L. Garthoff and Selig Harrison for providing copies of Russian documents on Afghanistan.) Other materials were gathered and translated as a result of research by the present author and for the Lysebu conference. In addition to the documents published in this issue of the Bulletin, my summary of Soviet decision-making on Afghanistan from early October to mid-December 1979 is based on the transcript of the Nobel Symposium of Afghanistan and conversations with former senior Soviet officials at that meeting.

The Lysebu meeting's aim was to retrace the final steps of Soviet decision-making on the Afghanistan intervention and to investigate the U.S. response. The method is known as critical oral history: groups of former policymakers query each other on motives, issues, and actions, prodded by groups of scholars using newly declassified documents. As in previous meetings of this kind—for instance the series of conferences held in 1987-1992 on the Cuban Missile Crisis3-more than history was up for discussion. "Lessons" and relevance for today's leaders were on everybody's mind and the conversations were filled with "presentisms." In this conference, if someone had suddenly replaced "Afghanistan" with "Chechnya" or some possible site for future Russian interventions, I do not think that the core issues of the conversation would have changed much.

In retrospect, the Afghanistan intervention stands as an avoidable tragedy, a tragedy in which the final script was ordained by perceptions, personalities, and ideology far more than "interests" and "strategies." Although substantial resistance to the invasion plans emerged within the Soviet hierarchy, the real story is how easily this opposition could be overcome by a tiny group of people at the pinnacle of power.4

The documents published in this Bulletin show how the Soviet leaders gradually increased their commitment to the Afghan Communist party (the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA) after the Communist

coup in April 1978 (the "Saur [April] Revolution"). In spite of their misgivings about the lapses and limitations of the Afghan Communist leaders, the members of the Soviet Politburo could not bring themselves to give up on the building of socialism in a neighboring country. As the political and military predicament of the Kabul regime deepened, Soviet advisers came to substitute for the "revolutionary masses" and the "Afghan Communists," keeping the regime going while the "progressive strata" had time to develop. In the process, institutional and personal links were forged between Soviets and Afghans, increasing the Kremlin's sense of commitment as well as the Kabul leadership's ability to avail themselves of Moscow's resources. 5

As seen from Moscow, the developments in Iran in the winter of 197879 suddenly increased the importance of the Afghan revolution. The rise of the Islamic radicals in Teheran took the Soviets by surprise and created political instability in the region, forcing the Kremlin to devote more attention to the situation along the USSR's southern borders. The overthrow of the Shah presented both opportunities and dangers to the Soviet leadership: Many of those reporting to the Kremlin on Iranian and Afghan affairs expected the Iranian Communists to gradually strengthen their position. But at the same time, Washington's "loss" of Iran alerted the Politburo for the first time to the possibility-however remotethat the Americans would attempt to replace their lost positions there with fresh outposts in Afghanistan.6

When the introduction of Soviet troops was first discussed in March 1979, after a rebellion had broken out against the Communist regime in Western Afghanistan (and particularly in the major city of Herat), the Kremlin leaders hesitantly concluded that "in no case will we go forward with a deployment of troops in Afghanistan." Politburo members Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin and CC Secretary Andrei Kirilenko, who until the end opposed a Soviet invasion, argued that the Afghan Communists themselves were to blame for the rebellion. "We gave [them] ev

erything," Kirilenko told the Politburo. "And what has come of it? Nothing of any value. After all, it was they who executed innocent people for no reason and told us that we also executed people in Lenin's time. You see what kind of Marxists we have found." "7

It was President Taraki's murder by his second-in-command Hafizullah Amin in October 1979-shortly after he had stopped off in Moscow for a cordial meeting with Brezhnev on his way back from a non-aligned summit meeting in Havana—which set the Soviets on the course to intervention. In light of past Soviet support for Taraki, the KGB suspected Amin of planning what Shebarshin called "doing a Sadat on us": a wholesale defection from the Soviet camp and an alignment with the United States-as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had done earlier in the 1970s-which would allow the Americans to place "their control and intelligence centers close to our most sensitive borders." The KGB closely monitored Amin's meetings with U.S. officials in Kabul in late October, believing that Washington was eying a replacement for its lost electronic intelligence collection posts in northern Iran.8

Although no political orders had yet been issued concerning a possible intervention, the military chiefs of staff in late October 1979 began preparations and some training for such a mission. These orders reflected the increased concern of Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov over the Afghan issue, and his sense that proposing an intervention might soon become politically acceptable to his colleagues. In the not-toosubtle game of who would succeed Brezhnev-which by late 1979 was in full swing in the Politburo-a premium was being placed on both caution and enterprise: "Recklessness" or "being a Napoleon" were potentially deadly epithets to hurl at a politically ambitious Defense Minister, while "forcefulness" and "looking after our interests" could be used as arguments in his favor.

Ustinov's colleague, collaborator, and sometime rival, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, also started leaning toward military intervention in late 1979. The KGB had overseen several Soviet bids

since the summer to remove Amin from the Afghan leadership, including two assassination attempts. None of these efforts had succeeded, a fact which cannot have pleased the ambitious Andropov and may have weakened his political position. In late November, after Amin had demanded the replacement of Soviet ambassador to Kabul A.M. Puzanov, Andropov and Ustinov decided that the only way to resolve the Afghan issue was the combination of a Soviet military intervention and the physical elimination of Hafizullah Amin. Amin's persistent calls for increased USSR military aid, including Soviet troops, enboldened them and made it easier for them to present their suggestions to the Politburo.

The increasing strains in East-West relations-including in the essential field of arms control-over the last months of 1979 may also have influenced Andropov and Ustinov's decision, and certainly made it easier for sion, and certainly made it easier for them to convince some of their colleagues. The long-awaited CarterBrezhnev summit in Vienna in June 1979 had, despite the signing of a SALT II treaty, failed to generate much momentum toward an improvement in ties between Washington and Moscow. Moreover, the NATO decision that fall to deploy a new class of medium range nuclear missiles in Europe and the increasing reluctance of the US Senate to ratify the SALT II pact removed the concerns of some Politburo-members over the effects a Soviet intervention might have on detente. As one of the Soviet conference participants put it in Oslo, "by winter of 1979 detente was, for most purposes, already dead." The bleak outlooks on the diplomatic front helped carry the day with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who at the best of times was a somewhat pusillanimous participant in Soviet high politics, opposing intervention in March only after being sure which way the wind was blowing in the Politburo discussions.

The KGB and Defense Ministry heads had two remaining obstacles to overcome in their determination to send Soviet troops to Afghanistan. First, they had to narrow the field of participants in the decision-making process to an

absolute minimum, to make sure that the decision was not delayed by the formal submission of reports from various departments and ministries to the Politburo. In this effort, they were assisted by ideology chief Mikhail Suslov and Brezhnev's chief adviser on foreign policy, Andrei Aleksandrov-Agentov. Brutents, the deputy head of the CPSU CC International Department, told the Lysebu meeting that in early December 1979, as he was preparing a report on the issue of a potential Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, he got a telephone call from AlexandrovAgentov. "First, he asked me what I was doing. When I told him, he asked, 'And what exactly are you writing there?' When I told him that I was going to write a negative opinion, he said: 'So, do you suggest that we should give Afghanistan to the Americans?' And he immediately ended the conversation." Brutents' report was not in the materials prepared for the Politburo members at the climactic meetings.

The last obstacle on the path to intervention was winning over, or at least neutralizing, those Politburo members, such as Kosygin and Kirilenko, who throughout the crisis had vocally opposed the idea of sending in Soviet troops. Ustinov and Andropov realized that the only way to ensure that a proposal for intervention would carry the day in the Politburo was to convince Brezhnev of the need to strike fast. The party head by nature cautious and circumspect on international issues-was persuaded by arguments closely tied to his personal status on the world stage. Gen. Aleksandr Liakhovskii told the Lysebu meeting that after Amin's coup, "Brezhnev's attitude to the entire issue had changed. He could not forgive Amin, because Brezhnev had personally assured Taraki that he would be able to help him. And then they disregarded Brezhnev completely and murdered Taraki. Brezhnev used to say, 'how should the world be able to believe what Brezhnev says, if his words do not count in Afghanistan?""

Andropov's remarkable personal and handwritten letter to Brezhnev in early December-read aloud by Dobrynin to the Lysebu conference

from notes he had taken in the Russian Presidential Archives-summed up the case for intervention. According to the KGB chief, Amin was conducting "behind-the-scenes activities which may mean his political reorientation to the West." In addition, Andropov told the chronically ill and enfeebled leader, Amin "attacks Soviet policy and the activities of our specialists." But Andropov dangled before Brezhnev a possible remedy for his Afghan troubles: A group of anti-Amin Afghan Communists, mostly belonging to the minority Parcham faction, who had been living under KGB tutelage in exile, had, “without changing their plans for an uprising, appealed to us for assistance, including military assistance if needed." Although Andropov evidently still felt unwilling to ask Brezhnev directly and explicitly to support sending in Soviet troops, his letter made the case for such an intervention, the framework of which was already being discussed between the KGB head and the defense minister.

Although agreeing with Andropov concerning the political purpose of the use of Soviet troops, Defense Minister Ustinov was not willing to accept a limited operation along the lines recommended by the KGB head. Varennikov, who headed operational planning in the General Staff, told the Lysebu meeting that Ustinov wanted 75,000 troops for the operation for two main reasons: First, he wanted to make sure that the toppling of Amin's regime could be carried out smoothly, even if some of the Afghan army groups in Kabul decided to resist. Second, he believed that Soviet forces should be used to guard Afghanistan's borders with Pakistan and Iran, thereby preventing outside support for the Afghan Islamic guerrillas. On December 6, Andropov accepted Ustinov's plan.

Around noon on December 8, the two met with Brezhnev and Gromyko in the general secretary's office in the Kremlin. In addition to the concerns Andropov had raised with Brezhnev earlier, he and Ustinov now added the strategic situation. Meeting two days after West Germany had given its vital support for NATO's two-track missile

deployment decision, states one indeployment decision, states one informed Russian account, “Ustinov and Andropov cited dangers to the southern borders of the Soviet Union and a possibility of American short-range possibility of American short-range missiles being deployed in Afghanistan and aimed at strategic objects in Kazakhstan, Siberia, and elsewhere.”9 Brezhnev accepted the outlined plan for an intervention which the heads of the military and the KGB presented to him.

Right after seeing Brezhnev, Ustinov and Andropov met with the Ustinov and Andropov met with the head of the General Staff, Marshal N.V. Ogarkov, in the Walnut Room, a small meeting room adjacent to the hall where the Politburo usually sat. The two informed Ogarkov of their conversation with Brezhnev. Ogarkov-who together with his deputies Gen. Varennikov and Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev had earlier warned Ustinov against an intervention-once again listed his reasons why Soviet troops should not be sent in. Ustinov overruled him, and in the evening called a meeting of the senior staff of the Defense Ministry and told them to implefense Ministry and told them to implement preparations for the intervention. The decision to send in troops was certain to come, Ustinov said.

On December 12, the Politburo met and formally ratified the proposal to intervene. Gromyko chaired the meeting, after having co-signed the proposal together with Ustinov and Andropov. together with Ustinov and Andropov. Konstantin Chernenko wrote out, by hand, a short protocol accepting the proposal-entitled "Concerning the Situation in 'A""-and had all Politburo members present sign their names diagonally across the text. Kosygin, who almost certainly would have opposed an intervention, was not present. Kirilenko signed after some hesitation. Brezhnev, who entered the room after the brief discussion was finished, added his name, in quivering handwriting, at the bottom of the page.

10

Two days later, the General Staff operative team, headed by Marshal Akhromeyev, was in place in Termez, Uzbekistan (USSR), near the Afghan border. A group from the operational team arrived at Bagram airforce base outside Kabul on December 18.

The main operation started at 3 pm

sharp on Christmas Day: airborne

troops from the 103rd and 105th air divisions landed in Kabul and in Shindand in western Afghanistan, and units from the 5th and 108th motorized rifle divisions crossed the border at Kushka and at Termez. Just before nightfall on December 27, Soviet paratroopers, assisted by two KGB special units, attacked Amin's residence at Duraleman Palace, and, after overcoming stiff resistance from the Palace Guards, summarily executed the president and several of his closest aides. It was-we were told in Lysebu by the men who devised it—a well-organized and successful operation, in which all the "strategic objectives" were reached on time.

The intervention in Afghanistan was the start of a war of almost unlimited destruction, leaving more than one million Afghans dead or wounded and almost four million driven into exile. For the Soviets the war became a deathknell, signalling Moscow's international isolation, its leadership's inconstancy and fragmentation, and its public's growing disbelief in the purpose and direction of Soviet rule. By the time its forces left in early 1989, the Soviet regime was crumbling; two years later it was gone. The Afghan War was not only the first war which the Soviet Union lost: It was the last war it fought.

The post-December 1979 documents included in the Bulletin show the slow and painful road which the Soviet leaders travelled toward realizing the failure of their Afghan venture. Already after Andropov's visit to Kabul in late January 1980, the Politburo understood that the troops would have to stay in Afghanistan for the indefinite future. Almost immediately, Moscow started to seek a political settlement as an alternative to war. Gromyko and Andropov seem to have been at the forefront in this cautious and awkward examination of the possibilities for getting the Soviet troops out.

As the documents show, the Politburo members just could not make up their minds as to what constituted Soviet minimum demands for a troop withdrawal. Brezhnev's letter to Fidel Castro on Afghanistan in March 1980 demonstrates that Soviet expectations

as to what kind of political deal was possible became increasingly unrealistic as Western attitudes hardened and the Red Army failed to quell the Afghan Islamic rebellion. In his address to a Central Committee plenum in June 1980, Brezhnev put the Afghanistan conflict into a standard Cold War context, implying that a settlement would not be possible before the overall Western approach to the Soviet Union changed.

In spite of his growing impatience with the Afghan leaders, Andropov, after taking over as General Secretary following Brezhnev's death in November 1982, changed little of his predecessor's basic approach. Indeed, the former KGB chief knew well that his standing within the party was connected to the validity of the December 1979 decision, in which he had been a 11 prime mover. Like Brezhnev, Andropov sought a way out of Afghanistan, and was willing to accept a UN role in international mediation of the conflict. His message to the Politburo, however, was that the USSR must negotiate from a position of strength: "We are fighting against American imperialism which well understands that in this part of international politics it has lost its positions. That is why we cannot back off."12

The Soviet approach to peacemaking in Afghanistan found no takers. among the Afghan Islamic guerrillas, the military rulers of Pakistan, or in the Reagan Administration in Washington. Instead, starting in early 1984, American military supplies to the Afghan resistance through Pakistan increased dramatically. Reagan told the CIA in a Presidential Directive that the aim of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan had changed from increasing the costs to the USSR to trying to push the Soviets out. Moscow's hapless handling of its Afghan problem had led Reagan to aim for victory, 13

Mikhail Gorbachev, who took over leadership of the CPSU in March 1985, at first had a dual approach to the Afghan war. On the one hand, he understood that the Politburo had to make a political decision to bring the troops. home and that any negotiated settlement connected to the withdrawal would have

to be reached quickly. On the other hand, Gorbachev believed that stepping up military pressure on the resistance and their Pakistani backers was the way to achieve a deal within the timeframe set by Moscow for a withdrawal. The years 1985 and 1986 were therefore the worst years of the war, with massive Soviet attacks against the civilian population in areas held by the resistance.

Considering the cards he had been dealt, Gorbachev did well in the Afghan endgame. He got the troops out on time in spite of fierce opposition from his own ranks and the constant political maneuvering of the Reagan Administration. The bickering among opposition groups, the change of regime in Pakistan (after the death of Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in a June 1988 plane crash), and the massive Soviet supplies sent in in 1988 and early 1989, even gave the Najibullah regime in Kabul a real chance of survival, making the Soviet withdrawal seem less of a sell-out than it really was. In fact, the mistakes Najibullah made after the Soviets bailed out in February 1989 probably had so much to do with his eventual downfall that Gorbachev's attempts to wash his hands over the fate of his one-time ally have some basis in truth.

Boris Yeltsin's thinking on his Chechen imbroglio still seems far from the 1986 mark, in terms of a comparison with Afghanistan. In spite of the differences between the two conflicts, the only way out for the Russian government was the path which Gorbachev followed from 1986 to 1989, and which Gen. Aleksandr Lebed undertook (with Yeltsin's grudging acquiescence) in the summer of 1996: a negotiated withdrawal of Russian troops.

1

The transcript of the Nobel Symposium at Lysebu will be published together with the transcripts of other Carter-Brezhnev Project conferences. A preliminary version, David Welch and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Intervention in Afghanistan: Record of an Oral History Conference (Nobel Symposium 95), is available from the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Drammensvn. 19, 0255 Oslo, Norway, fax: (+47) 22 43 01 68.

2 Researchers interested in examining the photocopied documents obtained by the CarterBrezhnev Project should contact the National Security Archive, where they are kept on file; the Archive can be reached at (202) 994-7000 (telephone) or (202) 994-7005 (fax) and is located on

the 7th floor of the Gelman Library, 2130 H St. NW, Washington, DC 20037.

3 See James G. Blight and David Welch, On the

Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd. ed. (New York: Noonday, 1990); and Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (New York: Pantheon, 1993).

The best surveys of the Soviet intervention to appear in print so far are Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: AmericanSoviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1994), 977-1075; and Aleksandr Liakhovskii, Tragediia i doblest' afgana [Afghan Tragedy and Valour] (Moscow: Iskona, 1995); see also Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Fall of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Carter Years (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997).

See Odd Arne Westad, "Prelude to Invasion: The Soviet Union and the Afghan Communists, 1978-1979," International History Review 16:1 (February 1994), 49-69, and "Nakanune vvoda sovetskikh voisk v Afganistan," Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 2 (1994), 19-35.

6 KGB Gen. Leonid Shebarshin, author's interview, Moscow, 7 October 1993. Shebarshin was the KGB rezident in Teheran in 1979. See also Shebarshin's comments in Welch and Westad, eds., The Intervention in Afghanistan.

7 See transcript of CPSU Politburo meeting, 18

March 1979, in this issue of the CWIHP Bulletin.

8

9

10

[Ed. note: These stations were particularly important because they were used to monitor Soviet missile tests and other military activities in the USSR. According to various sources, rather than seeking replacements in Afghanistan the U.S. instead moved to replace the lost electronic spy posts in northern Iran by coming to an intelligence sharing arrangement with the People's Republic of China, allowing Washington to continue monitoring Soviet missile tests from new electronic intelligence joint U.S.-PRC stations in western China, with the Chinese also getting the data.] Liakhovskii, Tragediia i doblest afgana, 109. For an English translation and facsimile of this document, see CWIHP Bulletin 4 (Fall 1994), 76. 11 Cordovez and Harrison find that Andropov's "objective was to minimize casualties and to scale down operations while seeking a negotiated settlement." (Out of Afghanistan, p. 147.) While there is little evidence for a scaling-down of military operations in Afghanistan during Andropov's short time in power (November 1982-February 1984), at least he did not authorize the same sharp increase in military activities which took place under his successor Konstantin Chernenko (February 1984-March 1985) and during Gorbachev's first year as CPSU general secretary (March 1985March 1986).