Igor is lonely

Press, 20 February 1980, Page 23

Igor is lonely

Many miles from home, the Red Army in Afghanistan is largely bored and lonely with days' of tedium punctuated by minutes of brief action and occasional panic.

During the four weeks that a Soviet battalion has been guarding this strategic mountain pass outside Kabul 12 men have died in rebel sniper fire and as many again have been seriously wounded. In the lonely .platoon base at Chavagal, three young Russian officers agreed that the rebel attacks occurred with almost clockwork regularity; daily, in the hours of daylight and with a precision not believed possible of Muslim guerrillas.

But the Red Army is holding its c .. n in spite of the losses. This key road, linking Kabul with Termez on the Soviet border, is open to traffic, and the tunnel, which buries its way three kilometres through the masive Hindu Kush mountain range, • has been closed only once since the huge Christmas airlift of Soviet troops and tanks.

Outside the smoke-filled hut convoys of Soviet tanker trucks emphasised the strategic nature of the pass. They were returning to the Soviet Union, 240 kilometres away, to refill with diesel oil so essential to the maintaining of the six Russian divisions now believed to be in Afghanistan. An armoured personnel carrier squatted in the heavy snow behind the hut, its barrel pointed down the icy road.

The three Russian officers, Dimitri, Igor and Leonid, drove south into Afghanistan on the. night of the December 27 coup which installed Babrak Karmal in power. Their commander had told them only “to be polite, to say hello and to treat the Afghans like you would your own people.” Such a briefing, in good manners did little to prepare the young officers for the rigours of Afghan life. All three professed “great shock” at the grinding poverty of Afghanistan. “We have seen men without shoes,” said Igor, “houses that you don’t see in the Soviet Union.”

Equally, the men were not prepared for the accuracy of the Afghan rebel snipers. In friendly shooting matches with their colleagues in the Afghan

army, they are frequently beaten.

The winding 150-kilo-metre road from Kabul is cluttered with an impressive array of modern weaponry' including T-62 tanks which are rated as the Russian’s second best, the lighter T-54 tanks, heavy armoured personnel carriers, together with both light and medium field guns. Most stand guard at hairpin bends, over bridges or outside villages.

A bare 15-minute drive out of Kabul are three large concentrations of heavy armoured trucks all

From the “Guardian”

hidden behind sacking that from a distance bears a remarkable resemblance to a mud wall. The Russian strategy appears relatively simple: by denying the rebels access to the road and the convoys of trucks carrying fuel and oil, they hope to force the rebels into levying more and more supplies from the villages. Finally, said Leonid, the villagers will get fed up and “turn against ,the rebels.” But the rebels are persevering with their attacks. . Their favourite weapon, said the Russians, is the avalanche; forcing a boulder with a crowbar. The avalanche closes the road and when engineers move in to clear ; the debris, the snipers open fire from crevices in the mountain tops or, lower down the road, hidden in orchards.

The most dangerous stretch is north of the pass near Doshi where the. road falls away to sharp precipices on one side and rises to sheer cliff face on the other.

Last week, Igor, from Tachkent, (none of the officers would give their last names) travelled the road and saw seven buses and trucks which had been shot up and left forpotential ambush material. Bus passengers are rarely harmed, it seems, but two vital bridges were recently blown.

At the platoon base, a stern warning has been nailed to the door. “Some men. are being slow to report for guard duty, needing up to half-an-hour to be roused”

“They should be made to understand that such irresponsible attitudes cause lives to be lost. . .”

The death toll is starting to get personal. Igor said he lost “a good friend last week, : i 'officer just out of the military academy who went to help one of his men wounded .in sniper fire.” The Red Army has orders to return fire but not to initiate shooting. The Salang Pass has been closed only once during tire last. four weeks, said the officers/ when heavy traffic, all spewing deadly diesel fumes, piled up behind two crashed vehicles in the middle of the narrow tunnel. Unable to back out, many drivers simply passed out in their cabs and might have died had not the Russians moved in quickly to organise relief work. But, the lot of the Red Army in the Hindu Kush is mostly lonely. “Pravda,” the official Soviet newspaper, is delivered every other day, and mail gets through. Units swap libraries, chiefly romances and detective novels, there’s singing to guitars around open fires at night and occasionally time to sunbathe during the day. Visitors, as a result, are welcome. The officers show a timid curiosity, glad perhaps of a diversion and the chance, to proudly show off their weapons.

The officers believe with what seemed to be a very real sincerity that they are not an occupation army and certainly do not reckon with being the biggest threat to world peace since World War 11. “We are here to help a friendly country,” said one. “This was not an invasion,, we cannot understand why the 8.8. C. and Voice of America are saying these things.” They see their role as saving Afghanistan from Chinese and Pakistani interference. • Digging the dirt out of his fingernails with a bayonet, Leonid tried to sound hopeful about the prospect of soon returning home to his wife and two children. The burly platoon commander speculated that they would be out before the summer Olympics in Moscow but when pressed agreed that it might be just wishful thinking. Wishful thinking, he indicated with a shrug, has evidently long become as vital a weapon to guarding the Salang Pass as the scores of machine guns and tanks.