Lesson 13: Even after you leave, prevent mission creep. Lesson 12: …also before you leave, secure firm and enforceable agreements that would not only meet your own minimum requirements for a negotiated settlement, but also those of your local allies, because the end of an intervention by itself cannot end hostilities. Lesson 11: …but before you leave, secure enforceable guarantees that POWs and MIAs are found and brought home, and give the returning soldiers proper welcome and care. Lesson 9: Talk to moderates on the opposite side. Lesson 8: You cannot succeed in a military intervention unless the side on whose behalf you intervene is willing to fight for your joint cause. Lesson 7: Rather than try to mold your local allies in your own image, empower them, encouraging self-reliance, and pay attention to indigenous traditions. Lesson 6: Once in, ensure effective inter-agency coordination and cooperation. Lesson 5: If you do decide to go in, develop an exit plan in advance. Lesson 4: Once the decision to send troops has been made, formulate the goals of the intervention and communicate them clearly to the agencies involved in implementation also, shape your messaging to other key stakeholders likely to influence the outcome of the intervention.
Lesson 3: Examine aspects of a country’s history relevant to your planned undertaking. Lesson 2: Ensure a sufficiently broad and comprehensive inter-agency process of reviewing potential decisions to use force, factoring in the views of all key stakeholders in general and those to be tasked with implementing the decisions in particular. Lesson 1: Before making final decisions on issues of fundamental importance, such as military intervention, determine what national interests are at stake, what options exist for advancing or defending those interests and what costs and benefits each of these options would generate, both direct and indirect and do not let leaders’ personal ambitions impact the ultimate decision. All of these lessons are meant for consideration by nations’ military-political leadership.
The lessons listed below, which are discussed in greater detail in subsequent sections of this research paper, are lined up in the order in which they would have come up-starting with the Soviet leadership’s decision to consider sending a large contingent of troops into Afghanistan, moving onto its management of the actual intervention and, finally, onto its decision to withdraw the troops and beyond. Where possible, the author made an effort to relay these strategists’ analysis of the failures and successes of the intervention because he felt that such assessments, based on first-hand experience, are not always given their due in English-language literature on the subject. The following is a selection of military-political lessons gleaned mostly from the recollections of Soviet strategists who were involved in making and executing the fateful decision to send troops to Afghanistan, as well as from writings by some of post-Soviet Russia’s prominent military analysts. and its allies as Washington leans toward ending its own military campaign in this war-plagued Central Asian country. However, even with that debate unfinished, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan offers plenty of lessons to explore-some of which can, perhaps, be applied by the U.S. 12, 1979, authorizing the deployment of a “limited contingent of Soviet troops” to Afghanistan.
Debates continue to this day about the full array of national-level, organizational-level and personal-level factors that led the Communist Party leadership-including General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and a handful of other Politburo members-to adopt a resolution on Dec. That intervention, which began in December 1979 (with 30 military advisors and some guards remaining beyond February 1989), did not only fail to firmly anchor Afghanistan to the so-called socialist camp, as the Soviet Politburo had hoped, but contributed to the demise of the USSR by imposing formidable human, financial, economic, political and reputational costs on the already declining empire needless to say, it caused numerous casualties and widespread grievances among Afghans as well. Boris Gromov became the last serviceman of the Soviet 40th Army to cross the Friendship bridge from Afghanistan into Uzbekistan, heralding the end of a Soviet military intervention that had lasted nearly a decade.