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Afghan, the 15th of Feb, 1989.

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Sunday, 15th February 2009

  GREETING FROM THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF AFGHANISTAN !
  
  'Hello Shura, Greeting from your soldier friend Yuri : Zsura, you promised to write but you forgot, you lazy s...: I suppose you've been living it up where you are., while here we're up to our necks in muck and bullets. We've arrived in a new place , not far from Almaznaya. The worst thing is that they aren't Dushman ( bandits ) round here, they are mercenaries. They've got DSKs ( heavy machine guns ) and mortars, and sometimes they have us so tightly pinned down that we feel well and truly buggered. Four of our lads have been killed and our commissar, Batuev, was blown up by a mine. There was almost nothing left of him afterwards. As for your battalion -it's being slowly hammered into the ground.
  I won't write much, it's impossible to describe everything ....
  How's civvy life going ? Did you get your teeth replaced? Dinka and Grinya send you greetings but are offended of course : everyone promised, but none has written so far. Everything's just bloody fine here and we're counting the days till demob. Then it'll be home for all, won't it ? The three of us will drop in on you, okay? Shura, could I borrow your parade uniform when we come ? We don't have any, we've got nothing. We'll only be given battle dress, so where will we find the badges and other stuff ?
  Shura, do write to me, dare I hope or not ? Will you ? If there's any problem, write to the three of us at least once a month. Is it too much to ask? That's it for now.
  By the way, the third company has been wiped out. They're all either lying in hospital or in tin 'boxes'. Goodbye, we embrace you strongly.
  Yuri.'
  15.7.82
  
  
  It had never been posted. This letter was taken from the dead body of a twenty-year-old Russian soldier by Masud's partizans in Hannabad.
  
  For Yuri the war was over in 1982...for ever.
  
  
  

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by ambi (U13776277) on Sunday, 15th February 2009

  Interesting stuff; in some ways the universal soldier's letter home.
  
  Obviously commissars still played a front line role even at that late stage?

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• Message 3

  , in reply to message 2.

  Posted by stalteriisok (U3212540) on Monday, 16th February 2009

  i can always remember when the russians moved into afghanistan and everyone said it was russias vietnam
  
  my wonderful quote was something like "no way - the russkies dont mess about - they dont care about casualties - theirs or civilians - it will be over in a year"
  
  hey - WRONG - its still going on now and we DO care about casualties
  
  we are hitting them with the leading edge of technology using elite troops and we still cant make progress
  
  two weeks after we leave all will be back as it was before us - ie the will of the people - or at least the people who are going to go the hard yard
  
  why do we bother
  
  we had a hint when Russian prisoners were skinned alive !!
  huge reprisals then occurred - helicopter gunships and napalm took out villages - then the next prisoners sufferred the same fate !!
  
  st

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• Message 4

  , in reply to message 3.

  Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Tuesday, 17th February 2009

  The Vietnamese commies had received a steady flow of arms from Russia and China throughout the Vietnam war until in the end , the North Vietnamese were better equipped than the Soutrh.
  The Afgan partizans were mostly self-supporting in many ways. Partizans complained that the Pakistanis stole a lot of weapons that were destined for them, substituting old rifles instead. Although 'comissars 'sold Kalashnikovs ( even Kulakovs ) to partizans for money or for hashish. All of Russian soldiers smoked hashish. It was one of ways of supplying themselves by arms for mujahideen Other way was to capture it in battle. That was they were forced to set up the mobile groups, each of one hundred and fifty men. Each group had three platoons of thirty men , armed with Kalashnikovs, Kalakovs, light machine guns (PKs) and RPG7s, a small headquarters unit and a heavy weapons squad of only fifty men, armed with mortars, artillery, heavy machine guns and AGS 17 grenade launchers.
  The KGB was trying hard to infiltrate the Resistance . KGB even helped their puppit Babrak Karmal to set up a sister organization in Afghanistan , called Khad.But it was all useless for Khad.
  
  "no way - the russkies dont mess about - they dont care about casualties - theirs or civilians - it will be over in a year' -at the beginning they thought it wouldn't take them long to win the war against such a small country. It came as a great shock to them when they found that, despite all their MI24s and jets (MIG 23s or SU 25s) and all their bombing , they couldn't defeat what they considered to be a second-rate enemy .
  
  P.S. These MI-24s were heavily armoured underneath, the only vulnerable area was the plexiglass cockpit, so unless a mujahid machine gunner could get above the helicopter, he had very little chance of shooting one down.

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• Message 5

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Wednesday, 18th February 2009

  I think that only the one theory of Mao is proved without doubts.
  I mean his theory of guerilla war: the capital city was the ultimate objective. Like a ripe plum it would fall to the advancing guerilla armies when they had liberated the rest of the country. It had happened in China, it had happened in Nam and it had happened in Afghanistan too.

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• Message 6

  , in reply to message 5.

  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Saturday, 21st February 2009

  What is considered as a victory against guerilla warfare, especially when talking about mountainous countries or tropical jungles? In Colombia they are fighting for... half a century now the communist guerillas - and imagine that communists were in decline for the last 20 years now... but still they are there... so how about Afgan guerillas whose populatiry rises every time westerners (now Americans, earlier Russians) will make an attack anywhere (on a village, on a narchotics plantation etc.).
  
  The problem for Russia or for America is not however "how to win the war" against those Afgan guerillas. The whole question is to maintain standing armies smoking hot there in that sense USSR did its game 10 years there (their "failure" came only with the collapse of the USSR... there is no sign that had this collapse not come that they would abandon Afganistan just like this...). Now US does its game. Afganistan is the button of central Asia, the bridge between far-east and middle east, next to China, close to Kazakstan, Russia's space portal (just note where is Kirgistan and where is that base under closure that as-if served to help operations in Afganistan). And the new US government currently concentrates efforts there having re-conquered Iraq and reverted oil sales of Iraq and most of the middle east to dollar mainly/only (apart Iran of course, but through isolation imposed by US and stupidly followed by EU, US achieves again oil sales through the dollar... i.e. printing again and again the same fictional no-value money (dollars in circulation mean that this currency in real terms worths already 10 to 100 or possibly up to 1000 times less than Zimbabwe's currency... this is a real statement, it is not a impressionists' view, we are talking about an economy that bought oil for free, paid nothing, rien, nada... by printing... its toilet paper, all that for at least the last 50 years!!!!).
  
  Hence, it is of not interest the whatever success that US army may have against Afgan guerillas. It is their presence there that matters. In fact, in case they were very successful they would have to import guerillas from the international scene in order to continue to fight (and partially that is what they do with all that myth about Obamas, Zarkawis and other funny stories about hypothetical world-wide terrorist organisations that as-if they have to fight (despite the fact that as recently as in Jugoslav wars it was them that paid for their transportation and payments to come and fight in Bosnia and Kosovo... isn't it funny? But it is not that we live in funny times, it was always like this...

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• Message 7

  , in reply to message 4.

  Posted by OUNUPA (U2078829) on Sunday, 22nd February 2009

  In 1982, Nick, one of the best known and effective Afghan partizans-Masud said :
  'The Russians are not interested in Afghanistan for itself. What they really want is what they have always wanted-a warm water port in the Indian Ocean and control of the West's oil supply in the Gulf'.
  
  'hypothetical world-wide terrorist organisations'- why hypothetical ? KGB-FSB is a real organization .

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