Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989.

The Guardian ^ | March 20, 2011 | Shepard Cowper-Coles

[cunning_fish]

This magisterial study of the Soviet nightmare in Afghanistan is a lesson to us all. This is the book that every politician, every general, every diplomat contemplating getting into, or out of, Afghanistan should be made to read. It is a book that we should have had 10 years ago, and need more than ever today. It is a minor masterpiece.

Sir Rodric Braithwaite has produced what will become the definitive account in English of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, from the time in autumn 1979 that the gerontocrats in the politburo reluctantly agreed to accede to Afghan requests to intervene, against the Russians' better judgment, to Gorbachev's decision to staunch the "bleeding wound" and withdraw nearly 10 years later.

Braithwaite brings to the task a deep knowledge and love of Russia: its language, its people, and its wounded soul. Beyond that he makes good use of his understanding of international affairs, from more than three decades as a diplomat, ending as ambassador to Moscow and foreign policy adviser to prime minister John Major. He is an historian of distinction and rigour. And he writes with great fluency, in an easy style that makes one want to read on and on.

What comes across most strongly, however, is his humanity. In every chapter, we feel his sympathy for the suffering that the intervention brought for tens of thousands of Soviet citizens, and for scores of thousands of wretched Afghans. Yet, as Braithwaite points out in his epilogue, for all the agonies that the Afghanistan episode brought a dying Soviet Union, it was, in Soviet terms, a relatively small war. And Russia has managed, more or less, to bind its wounds and move on.

[OddLane]

BTTT.