By Maura Reynolds
Los Angeles Times
MOSCOW — When Igor Lisinenko entered what he was told was an Afghan rebel base in 1982, he wasn’t sure what to expect. It was, after all, his first assignment as a member of a Soviet army reconnaissance team sent to confirm that airstrikes a few hours before had destroyed the base.
But the young lieutenant saw no ruined fortifications in the village near the Afghan city of Kandahar. No rebel corpses. All he saw was a handful of crumbly clay huts. And two old men carrying a little girl no more than 3 years old.
Her foot had been blown off. She was white from the loss of blood.
The patrol loaded her into a helicopter to take her to a hospital. In those few minutes, Lisinenko said Tuesday, he understood two things: The girl was doomed to die, and the Soviet military campaign was doomed to fail.
"I didn’t doubt for a second that her father would take a gun and come after me or any other Russian soldier he could find," Lisinenko recalled. "And he or some other father or brother or son found many of my friends before it was over."
As the United States prepares for possible military action in Afghanistan, Lisinenko and other Soviet veterans watch with trepidation. They know better than anyone what U.S. troops might be getting into.
"Can it be that America is nostalgic for the times it was getting daily deliveries of zinc coffins from Vietnam?" asked Andrei Logunov, chairman of Moscow Afghan Veterans Association. "This time it will be even worse."
Soviet forces occupied Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a shaky communist regime. They spent 10 years trying to wipe out U.S.-financed moujahedeen, or holy warriors, one of whom was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. The Soviet Union lost 15,000 soldiers in the process and withdrew in disgrace.
Veterans from the former Soviet Union say that what would await U.S. troops sent into Afghanistan’s mountains would be unlike anything American forces have encountered, whether in the fields of Europe in World War II, in the jungles of Southeast Asia or in the deserts of the Persian Gulf region.
First, there are no real bases for terrorists, they say. Fighters live in ordinary villages. Air or artillery strikes against them will invariably kill civilians.
"When I hear people talk about terrorist bases, I have to laugh," said Vyacheslav Izmailov, who commanded a motor battalion in Afghanistan. "Terrorists don’t sit in bases waiting for bombs to drop. They live in houses. They live with families. … If America begins to drop bombs, all they will do is convince the anti-Taliban population that the United States is their enemy."
Moreover, there are few targets other than villages, the veterans warn. There are few bridges and no factories. Most of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed by decades of civil war.
Bin Laden may be holed up in Afghanistan’s formidable mountains, which are riddled with caves whose entrances are small, hidden and remote. Soviet veterans say they are essentially impervious to bombing.
"The Soviet air force tried hard to smoke fighters out of their hide-outs using various methods and weapons," said Col. Alexander Akimenkov, who piloted bombers and helicopters during the Afghan conflict and is Russia’s top civilian test pilot. "The Soviet military dropped vacuum bombs (that pull oxygen from underground sites). They even dropped 3-ton bombs designed to cause local earthquakes that would bury moujahedeen in their caves. But we still were unable to wipe out the rebels."
The reason, Akimenkov said, is that the caves in the Kandahar gorge are actually deep tunnels, dug to mine lapis lazuli and other minerals. He described them as "underground cities."
"In Soviet times, these caves could accommodate thousands of people, which rendered most air raids meaningless," Akimenkov said.
Only Special Forces teams could rout bin Laden out from such lairs, the veterans said. But that requires good local intelligence, including reliable informants.
In his reconnaissance work, Lisinenko worked firsthand with such intelligence; he has a degree in Persian languages and he was the reconnaissance unit’s translator. Some informants were paid, others were not, he recalled. Either way, the information was mostly inaccurate.
"They would take our money and then lie," Lisinenko recalled.
Lisinenko left Afghanistan two years later with a wounded leg and a shattered spirit. These days, the 39-year-old runs a tea bag company and represents a district of Moscow in Russia’s lower house of parliament.
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