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Presenter Rory Stewart conveys misunderstood details of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and draws parallels with American actions after September 11, 2011.
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00:13Afghanistan, one of the most isolated, barren landscapes on Earth.
00:20And for three of the greatest powers the world has ever seen,
00:23an unlikely target, an enduring obsession, and an unwinnable war.
00:32In the 21st century, a US-led coalition attacked and is still mired there.
00:38In the 19th century, it was the British Empire who invaded and suffered an agonizing defeat.
00:44And in the 20th century, with communism dominating almost half the globe, Soviet Russia decided to invade.
00:52Their mission? To quell the growing Afghan insurgency,
00:56stabilize the government, train the Afghan army, and leave.
01:01They thought it would take 12 months.
01:04Nine years later, after more than a million Afghans had been killed,
01:09all the Soviet Union could look back on was humiliation.
01:14Like the British in the 19th century and the US-led coalition today,
01:19the Soviets found themselves trapped and fighting a fierce resistance.
01:36If you were going to pass a message to the American and British troops today,
01:40what would you say to them?
01:41They would be able to return to the United States quickly and return to the United States.
01:45After the British experience in the 19th century,
01:48Afghanistan was dubbed the graveyard of empires.
01:53So why did two superpowers invade in the 20th and 21st centuries,
01:59and once again make Afghanistan a place of tragedy?
02:15For many in the West, Afghanistan is now synonymous with war,
02:20a land where soldiers go to die,
02:23a place which is believed to represent such an overwhelming threat to the security of the West
02:29that over 100,000 Western soldiers are currently stationed here
02:34in a war costing $130 billion a year.
02:44It's a million miles from the vision of the country I had as a child.
02:50Because when Afghanistan first entered my consciousness,
02:54it was as a place of peace.
02:58This place, this summer, was one of the great tourist traps on the hippie trail.
03:02My mother came here in the 1960s, my sister in the 1970s,
03:06and when I visit people often in suburban houses in England,
03:09I see the distinctive blue ceramics that they bought.
03:12For travellers, this was a very peaceful place
03:15where they experienced the generosity of Afghans.
03:32All the people who came on that overland trail as hippies
03:35were feeling that they were living in a beautiful bubble,
03:39a land that time forgot.
03:41A Shangri-La where you could go to have a relaxed time,
03:44smoke some drugs and buy some woolly jackets.
03:50But a peaceful Afghanistan wasn't just a hippie mirage.
03:54In Boston, I've come to meet an anthropologist and historian
03:57who spent a lot of time travelling in Afghanistan in the 1970s,
04:02Professor Tom Barfield.
04:04You had this perfectly peaceful Afghanistan
04:06where I, as a foreigner, could travel unarmed all over the country
04:10and there was never any trouble.
04:12And I never saw anybody armed.
04:13Now people look back on it as a golden age.
04:16It was a time of peace and security where people went about their business.
04:23From 1929 to 1978, Afghanistan has 50 years of peace.
04:28Most European countries can't make that statement in the mid-20th century.
04:31Afghanistan was absolutely at peace.
04:34God expressed his love for all the children of mankind.
04:38May the life of these children of Afghanistan be a happy life.
04:44But while it was a peaceful place, it was not a unified one.
04:48Because outside the cities, Afghanistan was, and remains in many ways,
04:52a country of 20,000 diverse, isolated villages,
04:57where every village chief is almost a king.
05:01That was the case when the British invaded in the 19th century.
05:04It was still pretty much the case when the hippies came in the 1960s and 70s.
05:09And it was definitely what I found when I walked across Afghanistan at the end of 2001.
05:14These self-contained communities posed little danger to the outside world.
05:21But by the 1960s, foreign governments were beginning to take a very threatening interest in Afghanistan.
05:28Because once again, they were perceiving it as a key strategic point for empires.
05:33A center point in the Cold War dividing the new superpowers,
05:37the Soviet Union, from the Allies of the United States.
05:42Afghanistan was surrounded.
05:43To the north, the Soviet Union, east and west, the US allies, Iran and Pakistan.
05:49And while the Americans feared a Soviet push south in search for warm water port and oil reserves,
05:56the Soviets assumed that America was going to inspire instability on their southern border.
06:01And so both powers tried to bring Afghanistan under their influence,
06:06sending in billions of rubles and dollars of economic support.
06:13In the snowy countryside outside of Moscow, I have come to meet a man who spent much of his career
06:18in Afghanistan,
06:20helping to coordinate economic development in the country in the 1960s,
06:24Soviet economic adviser Valery Ivanov.
06:29In the 1960s, when we arrived in Kabul, many tens of thousands of people
06:34were already working on the objects of Soviet Union and Afghan cooperation.
06:43And the first object, which was, so-called, was the Kabul's food bar.
06:50When specialists came to that, there was a land-in-law or land-in-law,
07:02and only then started to do something.
07:05In the end, on this island, two state farms were built built.
07:11This is a colossal property.
07:14Because for every object, we gave Afghanistan a state credit.
07:19A credit on very high-quality conditions,
07:22under 2% of the year.
07:26With projects like this, Afghanistan became the fourth largest recipient of Soviet aid anywhere in the world.
07:34But at the same time, in the south of the country,
07:37the United States was also constructing dams and housing.
07:41Two superpowers jockeying for influence in a far smaller country,
07:46as indeed they were doing again and again across the world,
07:50because the Cold War stretched from Berlin to Korea,
07:54Latin America to Indochina.
07:57Communism denies religion and debases the individual
08:00to a part of the vast machine that powers the state.
08:04Children are taken early and moulded to fit the machine.
08:08Here is no search for truth.
08:19As communism and capitalism clashed,
08:22foreign aid flowing into Afghanistan paid for places like this,
08:26Kabul University.
08:28Here, many of the bright young minds of Afghanistan,
08:31hungry for new ideas, were excited by the opportunity
08:34to bring rapid change to their country.
08:37Some focused on communism, others immersed themselves in political Islam,
08:43an ideology rejecting both the Soviet Union and the United States.
08:48The university became a hotbed of Afghan radicalism.
08:54In the 1970s, the peaceful gardens and foreign-funded buildings
08:59here at Kabul University had been taken over by radicals,
09:03Maoist and Leninist students marching in the streets,
09:07and over there, professors funded by Egyptian Muslims
09:10training on Kalashnikovs, Islamists and Communists,
09:15in a race to see who could kick over the traces of the old Afghanistan
09:19and create their new paradise.
09:22And it was the Communists who got there first, infiltrating the army,
09:26and in April 1978, taking control of the country.
09:36Communism was a foreign idea, but it was Afghans themselves,
09:41and not foreigners, who implemented it.
09:43They believed ideology would transform their country.
09:46And coming to power, the new communist president, Nur Mohamed Taraki,
09:51announced a manifesto of staggering ambition.
09:55Secular education, equality for women, and with wild optimism,
10:00he predicted the mosques would be empty within a year.
10:05In Kabul, I've come to meet Hamidullah Tarzi,
10:08who was a minister in these first Afghan communist cabinets,
10:11and I wanted to talk to him about the wisdom and the speed
10:15of some of these extraordinary reforms.
10:18The women in those days were emancipated.
10:20They would be able to go to the general television,
10:23they would go there, they would go out.
10:25And so there was a complete different change for the women in general.
10:28And education for them? Education was there, of course.
10:31It was very, very much pronounced. Education was given to them.
10:35Why did people resist them? Why was there a resistance?
10:38Because people resist them because, you see,
10:41their main problem was that they were, you know, not very religious.
10:47They didn't say prayer, they didn't, you know, respect the Islamic, you know.
10:52They went very hard and, you know, roughshod over the mullahs,
10:55and they were very much against the mullahs.
10:57And then things went down, down, down, down, down, down.
11:03When people tried to resist the revolution,
11:07the Afghan communists responded with terror,
11:09brutally driving through their reforms.
11:12And nothing symbolises the horror of their rule more than this,
11:16the Pulai Chaki prison.
11:21It almost feels inappropriate to be here.
11:24I have a friend in Kabul who had 71 members of his family executed in the courtyard adjoining this building.
11:34The few months after the Afghan communists took power,
11:3712,000 Afghans had been arrested, put in Kabul prisons, and were then executed.
11:54And this contained at one time 15,000 prisoners, many of them political prisoners.
11:59The contrast between this brutal, rigid, concrete prison, and the reality of rural Afghanistan,
12:09the mud houses, the villages, in the centre of which there sat some great modern horror.
12:19It's the brutal arrival of a modern state trying to impose its ideology on a country.
12:29By 1979, the Afghan communists were facing growing unrest,
12:34particularly in the more conservative religious countryside outside Kabul.
12:38Their followers were beginning to mutiny, and they were losing control.
12:45Finally, the Afghan President Nur-Mohamed Taraki flew to Moscow
12:49to see his friend and ally, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
12:54And he pled with the Soviets to send troops to Afghanistan
12:58to prop up and secure this communist revolution.
13:01But the reaction was not what you might expect.
13:06You would have thought that the revolution in Afghanistan in 1978
13:11would have been a great moment for the Soviet Union.
13:14Suddenly, a new communist country had emerged in the late 1970s.
13:19The Cold War, you would have thought, was swinging in their direction.
13:23But actually, the reaction that came here in the Kremlin
13:26was not one of celebration, not one of popping champagne corks,
13:30but profound nervousness and trepidation about what Afghanistan had got itself into
13:37and what this would mean for the Soviet Union.
13:41And the historical records of the Politburo have now been released,
13:45confirming just how bewildered and anxious the Russians were.
13:50Again and again, the documents show the Foreign Minister,
13:54the Intelligence Minister and the Defence Minister
13:56saying that if the Soviet Union got involved,
14:00it would firstly spark Muslim resentment.
14:02It would turn the Afghan government into a puppet
14:05and it would destroy the Soviet Union's reputation around the world.
14:10And yet, in the end, despite all these fears, Brezhnev considered invasion.
14:17A man who saw Russia's interaction with Afghanistan firsthand
14:21was Sir Roderick Braithwaite, later Britain's ambassador to Moscow.
14:25The crucial incident was when Taraki, the President,
14:28was a sort of favourite of Brezhnev's, the then Soviet leader,
14:32was assassinated by his number two, Amin.
14:37And Brezhnev took that very personally.
14:40He had vowed to protect this guy.
14:42This guy ended up dead. Amin was out of control.
14:48Amin was destroyed by people.
14:53And the Russians told me about this.
14:56And the Afghans, whom I knew,
14:58come in night, take them,
15:00without the law, without the evidence, without the evidence,
15:02without all, in the train and beat them with bulldozers.
15:07The decision was taken absolutely at the last minute.
15:10There was a great outcry that the CIA had failed to predict it,
15:14but they couldn't predict something
15:16that the Russians themselves hadn't yet decided to do.
15:25Christmas Eve, 1979, Soviet Special Forces
15:29exploded into the Afghan Presidential Palace,
15:32up through the gardens, swarming in through the windows,
15:35shooting the President's bodyguard,
15:37and then the President himself.
15:3980,000 Soviet troops followed, flowing across the borders,
15:43and the world looked on in horror.
15:54This is a callous violation of international law.
15:58It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government
16:02to subjugate an independent Islamic people.
16:09Why did the Soviet Union finally make the decision
16:12to send in their troops?
16:14The answer is that, like all empires,
16:16they didn't want to look weak.
16:18This was a mini-communist state,
16:21an ally on their borders,
16:22and they couldn't let Afghanistan collapse.
16:26Something had to be done.
16:29We underestimate the sense of insecurity that all empires feel.
16:34We were terrified at the end of the 19th century
16:36at the height of British imperialism,
16:38that somebody, the Germans,
16:39or somebody is going to take it all away from us.
16:41And I think that affects policy-making in empires at the imperial level.
16:48So you see a threat, you think,
16:50well, if we don't deal with it now,
16:51it'll come round and bite us from behind.
16:53And I think Afghanistan falls into that category.
16:57But for every wary and neurotic politician,
17:00there was a Soviet soldier confident of success.
17:04And none more so than the Vanguard,
17:07the Soviet Parachute Regiment, or Blue Berets,
17:10is the cream of the Soviet military.
17:12Among these veterans are many men
17:15who were involved in that invasion.
17:17This is the 25th anniversary concert
17:19in the Blue Berets band.
17:21And almost everybody in the audience
17:23is somebody who has either been in the military
17:25or is related to someone in the military.
17:28Ladies and gentlemen,
17:30on the stage of the jubilee,
17:31the концепция of the Air Air Force
17:33is the Green Berets.
17:53Like many American and British soldiers today,
17:56these troops felt they were part of a bigger mission
17:58to modernize and change Afghanistan for the better.
18:03For us, when we arrived from the Soviet Union,
18:06Afghanistan was a country like a story.
18:09Because we truly believed,
18:12that we were living in a different era.
18:15Afghanistan was still in the middle of the century.
18:17There was a very popular story
18:19called The Lampus of Al-Azhar.
18:21It was a western, right?
18:22And when you come to Afghanistan
18:24and you see it all in the naivu,
18:26you get into this country.
18:29It's a country of contrast.
18:35These invading soldiers were told their mission
18:37was to support the new Afghan communist government
18:40and that the intervention would be over in a year.
18:43But they'd completely underestimated the Afghan reaction.
18:50The Afghans turned against these foreigners
18:52just as they had against the British in the 19th century.
18:55This was driven partly by nationalism,
18:58but religion was also a key factor.
19:01The Russians made this very easy
19:02because the Soviet Union was a declared atheist state.
19:05So they made a real, we are atheists.
19:07We actually have a bureau of atheism.
19:09It's easy.
19:10So we're fighting against these atheist communists.
19:13So that was easy to talk about.
19:15It was placing the war in a jihad context.
19:21When Afghans try to explain why they fought the Russians,
19:25they often talk about religion.
19:28Here I've come to meet a group of six mujahideen
19:30from a poor village 90 miles from Kabul.
19:33They are almost all that remains of a unit
19:36which was once nearly 50 men,
19:38most of whom were killed in the fight against the Russians.
19:41This is how they explain their war.
19:44I've been in the EU and the Afghan aqui.
19:50I've been fighting against them.
19:52I've given up to my country.
19:53I've been fighting against war for many huntinganni.
19:59I've been fighting against them.
20:01For example, I'm fighting against the war.
20:04Since Ammar Mahazlan is a sahaja,
20:06I'm Aminter Masur.
20:08I'm a judge and that he's a man's man's rights.
20:10I don't understand how to make a safe place.
20:15Every place where they are,
20:17the gang will have to destroy their body.
20:20Every person who is the commander,
20:22will have to destroy their body.
20:24We have to do three days a day.
20:29We can do things and do things.
20:31We can do things and do things.
20:33We can do things and do things.
20:39Many in the Soviet capital had agonised over the decision to invade Afghanistan.
20:45Many in the Politburo itself warned it was a trap.
20:48So was the growing insurgency confirmation that the sceptics had been right?
20:54In Moscow, I've come to meet a man who was on the front line of the Soviet war,
20:59one of Russia's most decorated and respected war heroes,
21:03General Ruslan Alchev.
21:05Of course, I think it was a mistake in Afghanistan.
21:10In particular, with Afghanistan, it was a mistake in Afghanistan,
21:13because we had a lot of influence on Afghanistan, economic and political,
21:18and there was no need to be a mass of forces.
21:23There needed to be a ton of actions on the level of certain services,
21:28and more to be involved in politics, and more to be involved in other issues.
21:34And that's why we made a lot of mistakes.
21:38Why?
21:39Because the military force is a force.
21:42It destroys the homes.
21:45Unfortunately, there are bad attacks.
21:48There are bombs, guns, guns, guns, guns.
21:50The peaceful people die.
21:52They are not responsible for anything.
21:53They are responsible for anything.
21:53And this always causes a response reaction from a certain side,
21:59and sympathy, as a rule, is not on our side.
22:01In one of these attacks on this beautiful district of the Panjshir,
22:07the Soviets entered with nearly 400 aircraft and helicopters,
22:13carpet bombing the valley floor and following up with 13,000 troops.
22:18But the Mujahideen had simply disappeared.
22:23And when the Soviets left, they returned.
22:27And we came to an animal, and the people left.
22:38And then we had the power.
22:38The fire and meat, the oil and water, the animals came into the territory.
22:43We went to a gang.
22:45The water and the animals were moving into the territory.
22:48The workers were moving into the territory.
22:50Therefore, people were showing food.
22:52The money, the food, the food, the food, the food,
22:55the food, the food...
22:56All the Khashyar would do the same place.
23:08I said to him, that this is where we i was born.
23:09I said to Afghanistan, if I have a forty-seven percent.
23:17He asked if the Khashyar was strong, what are we?
23:22I said to him, my God, I didn't!
23:25He said I am strong.
23:27Islam, it's the truth.
23:30It's the truth that we have told you,
23:33so that you live with us.
23:36We will do it.
23:42The resistance of the Mujahideen was about to become even more formidable,
23:47for they had a new ally, the unlikeliest friend,
23:50because the United States had spotted an opportunity
23:54to strike a blow to their enemy in the Cold War.
23:58Running the CIA in Asia at this time was Chuck Kogan.
24:03The Soviets were taking advantage of our perceived weakness
24:08and were advancing on all fronts.
24:11The Cuban proxies in Angola, their advances in the Horn of Africa,
24:16and it seemed as though we had lost momentum.
24:20And then at the end of the 70s, in 79, this opportunity arose in Afghanistan
24:29when the Pakistan Intelligence Service approached us
24:35and asked if we could help support the Mujahideen,
24:39the rebels who had risen up against the communist government.
24:43When this opportunity arose in Afghanistan, I mean, the watchword was revenge.
24:50Revenge above all for Vietnam.
24:53The communist governments have supported the resistance in Vietnam
24:55and 58,000 Americans have been killed in this faraway land,
24:59in the first ever humiliation of the United States.
25:03Now, six years later, the US saw a chance to give the Soviet Union a taste of their own medicine.
25:09We felt that somehow if we could sort of break this balance
25:14and inflict as much damage possible on Russian soldiers,
25:19this would be sort of a semi-vindication.
25:25Kogan authorised a plan to covertly supply weapons across the Pakistani border
25:30to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan,
25:32but only weapons that could not be traced back to the US.
25:36And Kogan agreed the plan directly with Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia.
25:42This Afghan covert action program run by the agency would never have gotten off the ground without Zia.
25:49And I can remember meeting Zia in Zia's rather modest bungalow in Raul Pindi.
25:55And during the meeting, Zia brought out this huge map of Pakistan and Afghanistan,
26:02and he put a red template over the southern part of where Afghanistan touches Pakistan and Iran.
26:11The Pakistanis who always want to have an influence in Afghanistan as an insurance against India
26:18and as a sort of a rear guard for themselves, they decided to help the Mujahideen.
26:26At the same time, Zia used another simile which he used frequently,
26:30and that is the pot should be kept boiling but should not boil over.
26:35In other words, the Soviets should not be antagonised by this huge amount of weaponry
26:41to the point that they would intervene to attack across the border into Pakistan
26:46or some other action, air attacks, and we were very conscious of this.
26:52For that reason, Kogan's operation remained relatively small and secret.
26:58And in itself, it would have had only a modest effect upon the outcome of the Afghan-Soviet war.
27:11But at this point, the Islamist Afghans acquired the most unexpected anti-communist ally of all,
27:17the Christian, Texan, wealthy socialite, Joanne Herring.
27:22There are very few champions like Miss Herring.
27:24That's right, that's right.
27:26The man you just met is one of the richest men in Houston.
27:30Right.
27:30And he is wonderful.
27:32He does so much, and I'm working on him for Afghanistan.
27:37This is an evening which both shows Joanne Herring as part of the Texan elite
27:43with whom she raises money at gala dinners like this and through whom she influences policy.
27:48But it's also a reminder that she's a very unique individual.
27:52She is somebody who almost single-handedly created the entire American support for the Mujahideen during the Afghan war.
27:59The CIA was, of course, already involved with the resistance.
28:03But it was this society hostess which took it into a different league financially.
28:08And she did it for the most improbable reasons and in the most unlikely way.
28:12I worked with the Afghan poor in the mountains.
28:18I felt that they were an honorable people and that they valued honor.
28:23But they valued freedom more than anything on earth.
28:27And when you think of the juggernauts that they have faced,
28:31Great Britain was the strongest country in the world.
28:34The sun never set, really, on the British flag.
28:37And they were now facing, when I was there, the greatest build-up of military might in history.
28:47And they were willing to fight to the death against that with pitchforks, so to speak.
28:54Joanne Herring's mission was to make sure it wasn't pitchforks or ancient rifles that the Mujahideen had to fight with,
29:00but that they could take on the Soviet military with the latest in 20th-century weaponry.
29:05And the secret of her success was one relationship in particular.
29:11So, guess who I was dating? Charlie!
29:15The minute Charlie heard about it, wow!
29:18He understood the communists and he wanted to stop them too.
29:24Joanne Herring's boyfriend happened to be Texan Congressman Charlie Wilson.
29:28And crucially, he sat on the Congressional Committee, which set the budgets for the CIA covert operations.
29:36And what happened next was brilliantly portrayed in the Hollywood film, Charlie Wilson's War.
29:42What do you want me to do, Joanne?
29:45This is what I want you to do.
29:47I want you to save Afghanistan for the Afghans.
29:50I want you to deliver such a crushing defeat to the Soviets that communism crumbles, and in so doing, in
29:56the Cold War.
29:56I'll tell you, I do it too, but I got this Dairy Queen problem in Nagadoches.
30:00Don't underestimate me, Charlie. Believe everything you've heard.
30:04What exactly do you want me to do?
30:06Go to Pakistan and meet with Zia.
30:08Zia?
30:09Muhammad Zia Ulhaq.
30:11He's the president of Pakistan.
30:13I've already arranged it.
30:14With Joanne Herring's help, Charlie Wilson lobbied and cajoled the committee,
30:19and persuaded them to channel incredible quantities of funds in secret to the Mujahideen.
30:25Total US funding for the resistance went from $5 million to $9 billion.
30:30It became the largest covert operation in US history.
30:35But Charlie Wilson never pretended to have a deep understanding of Afghanistan itself, let alone its problems.
30:42When I try to think about Charlie Wilson, I tend to come back to this building,
30:48because this, the Lincoln Memorial with the Gettysburg Address on the wall,
30:52was Charlie Wilson's favorite place in D.C.
30:55When he talks about Afghanistan, he said that the war in Afghanistan was like Gettysburg.
31:00How could Charlie Wilson think that a bundle of mountains in the center of Afghanistan,
31:0610,000 miles away, was like Gettysburg?
31:09Somehow, though, in his mind, he was a hero, he was Lincoln,
31:15and what was happening in Afghanistan seemed to him something that threatened the very survival of the United States.
31:31These Texan anti-communists, who spoke of their common cause with the Mujahideen, romantically painting them as religious freedom fighters,
31:39were really only using Afghanistan as a proxy for their fight with Soviet Russia.
31:44But the billions of dollars of US funding matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia,
31:49and the supply routes and safe havens provided by Pakistan transformed the fortunes of the Afghan resistance.
31:56It changed from 1980 to 1989.
32:01It changed from the situation,
32:03because we provided the Mujahideen with weapons,
32:07with weapons, with weapons.
32:10If we were in the first battle,
32:12our battalion, which I was then commanded,
32:15our weapons were in general,
32:18in general,
32:19our weapons were in the first place.
32:20We went to the first battle,
32:22but in the last few months,
32:24we were in the first battle,
32:26and then we started to move against weapons.
32:28Then we began to move against weapons,
32:31and then we began to move against weapons.
32:46And when America started supplying Stinger and other anti-aircraft missiles to the Mujahideen,
32:53they started bringing down Soviet helicopters.
33:02But it was the mines, or what we would call today IEDs, that the Soviets remember.
33:08And Afghans had become the specialists in mines they still are today.
33:14General Muslim led the Afghan resistance in this part of the Panjshir Valley.
33:21I have been fighting for several years in the past.
33:23In the past, I was the only one to 18-18-18.
33:29I was the only one to 18-18.
33:30I was the only one to 18-18.
33:32I was the only one to 18-18.
33:40I was the only one to 18-18.
33:43I was the only one to 18-19.
33:45I was the only one to 18-19.
33:51I was the only one to 18-19.
33:53I was the only one to 19-19.
33:54I was the only one to 18-19.
33:55Then, for me, my whole army was to 18-21.
33:59My soldiers were going off the走ards.
33:59I was to 18-22.
34:00And I was the only ones to 18-19.
34:00The bulk of Soviet supplies came by roads like these.
34:04And the Mujahideen attacks began to kill thousands of Soviet soldiers and cut off their supply routes.
34:10The Russians began to call this conflict a war of mines.
34:41The tanks, which you can see here, were the most powerful tanks.
34:47The tanks and the tanks were destroyed by the rocket.
34:54They were destroyed by 100 tanks and 400 tanks.
35:04I thought it would have been destroyed by 1,000 people.
35:12The Soviet army brought in helicopters, experimented with new tactics, took the most brutal revenge
35:19against villagers, but they were never able to defeat the insurgents.
35:28The Russian special forces that landed from helicopters on these ridgelines were some
35:34of the toughest, most courageous, best trained troops in the world, and yet they never really
35:40saw their enemy.
35:41They were attacked with mines, people shot into their tents at night, they were suddenly
35:46ambushed with rockets, and when they wanted to put all their military training, all their
35:50courage, all their energy into action, they felt they were fighting an army of ghosts.
36:08And so, if the Soviet tactics hadn't worked, weren't working, and weren't going to work,
36:14why did they continue?
36:16British ambassador once said to me that the US and its allies could not leave Afghanistan
36:21because they had lost too much blood and treasure.
36:25And the same thought has been in the minds of people for centuries here.
36:33Because when empires begin to lose, begin to spend, begin to have soldiers killed, begin
36:40to make promises, begin to produce justifications, it becomes more and more difficult for them
36:45to leave.
36:46And they end up simply piling more corpses on top of their soldiers' bodies in the hope that
36:53this can somehow justify their loss.
37:00In very blunt terms, those soldiers are dead and gone, and they're never coming back.
37:08And you can never honour soldiers by piling more corpses on top of their head.
37:14But no general feels this, no politician can say this.
37:35At home, the Soviets tried to conceal the failures and brutality of this occupation.
37:41The public was told the Soviets were popular, were helping the Afghan people, and that the
37:46rebels were only a small minority of terrorists.
37:51In a Moscow library, I met with Vladimir Vyatskin, a state photographer sent to Afghanistan in the
37:571980s.
37:59The reality was on one side.
38:03And this year, I was supposed to film this, where we were with Afghans and brothers.
38:09We came to a humanitarian mission to build a hospital, a school, to teach, to teach, to
38:14teach.
38:15But in 20 kilometres from this place, the Soviet soldiers killed Afghans.
38:22When he began to take photographs and ask questions about the war, he was sent home and banned from
38:29further travel.
38:30How much was he able to see of Kabul?
38:35How much did you see Kabul?
38:38You could see the university, the university, the university, the newspaper, the newspaper, the
38:46But after the war went to the war.
39:07As the Soviets tried to maintain the illusion that Afghanistan was a largely peaceful mission,
39:12dead bodies were returned to Russia, sealed in unopenable zinc coffins, and delivered to their
39:19families at night.
39:27Finally, Mikhail Gorbachev, who became General Secretary in 1985, made the decision to withdraw.
39:33It was the right decision, and a courageous one.
39:37But he had many interests to manage, not least the military, who were demanding more time
39:41and more resources.
39:43So the deadline was set three years out for 1988.
39:49The parallels between Gorbachev and Obama are really striking.
39:53In both cases, they come in, they accept that it's not going well.
39:56In both cases, they do a mini-surge.
39:59They say to the military, OK, we're going to give you a little more time, we're going to give you
40:01more troops, we're going to try harder.
40:06Under Gorbachev, the amount of expenditure on Afghanistan, in fact, goes up.
40:10But at the same time, they're setting a deadline.
40:13And a deadline that completely erodes their authority.
40:16So between these two impossibilities, the impossibility of winning, and the impossibility
40:22of acknowledging that you can't win, all the tragedy of Obama and Gorbachev emerges.
40:32You know the story.
40:34And we read them poorly books, and you've forgotten their experience.
40:38When they were in the same time, they were in Afghanistan.
40:43And the Afghans don't like it, when they come to them with weapons,
40:46even with good intentions.
40:48And no one doesn't like it in the world, when they come to them with weapons,
40:51they say that they need to live.
40:52They have a feeling that they come to our steps.
40:59We also came to them.
41:01We didn't have any problems.
41:03We didn't have any problems.
41:03We didn't have any task.
41:05We only went through a week, a month, a month.
41:08We went to them, and they all went to them again.
41:10We didn't have enough strength.
41:12We needed to carry out troops.
41:13And if the coalition decided to carry out a half a million or a million,
41:17then how much of them will be held?
41:19And if they will be held, they will be held.
41:22Let the politicians think.
41:23But I think it's not real.
41:25If you were going to pass a message to the American and British troops today,
41:31what would you say to them?
41:45But the route out of Afghanistan is never quick or straight.
41:50Although it was now clear that Russia was withdrawing,
41:53it would still be years before the final soldier left.
41:56And whilst the bloodletting continued,
41:59no one really believed in the project any more.
42:03Half as many soldiers died again following the decision to withdraw.
42:11By the time they leave, there's nobody there to greet them.
42:15Nobody from the Department of Defence.
42:17Nobody from the Politburo.
42:19Nobody from the Party.
42:21They've sacrificed 25,000 lives for the ideal of the Soviet Union.
42:27And not a single person pays them the courtesy of meeting them at the border.
42:39The Afghan war may not have brought down the Soviet Empire,
42:43but the war had dealt it a major blow, both financially and to its prestige.
42:49And the Politburo was embarrassed even to honour the sacrifice of its soldiers.
42:57This is the great monument to the Soviet soldiers of the Second World War.
43:03For generations now, Soviet soldiers have come to this flame to remember their sacrifice and their victory.
43:10But the Afghanstis, the Soviet soldiers from Afghanistan, returned to a different world.
43:15They came from an almost shameful, secret war.
43:18And the million who returned, many of them psychologically damaged,
43:23returned to a Soviet Union that was itself collapsing.
43:33Now, twelve years later, veterans of Afghanistan still meet in places like this, Moscow's combat bar.
43:42I wanted to sit with them and find out what these veterans thought all this killing and sacrifice had been
43:50for.
43:50The slogan of internationalists.
43:53I am a commenter,
43:57and I am a part of all the countries.
44:01For these ideas,
44:04we did our own work in Liria,
44:08Cumbia,
44:09Livan,
44:10Afghanistan
44:11and other countries,
44:13where were ideas of internationalism.
44:20I assumed that we should enter this country
44:26under the name of Afghanistan,
44:28in order to bring this idea
44:32of world internationalism.
44:36Could you ask a little bit about that,
44:39whether they felt that they were trying to modernize Afghans?
44:43We were there.
44:45Electrification of the whole country.
44:47Because we were there not only fought,
44:52and more than a third contingent of military personnel
44:57consisted of people of working professions,
45:01military cities,
45:03police clinics,
45:05and even churches.
45:07But many of these other veterans
45:09were much more skeptical about their mission
45:11and the ideology behind it.
45:13I don't know where Russian people
45:15were marching with us.
45:17I don't know,
45:18what we are doing here?
45:20Were all habilshed on
45:21the boys kids,
45:23but lots of officers.
45:25And then we just turned off the 말라� customers.
45:33They did not try fighting Russia.
45:38We also have prepared ammunition.
45:39And battery ended.
45:40They were pref tasked with military� sitio and 코로나 gamer families.
45:41They should be here as a country.
45:42No, don't worry, don't worry! Why are you coming to us? Russia is my country. I will protect her.
45:48This is my country. I will protect everyone. They are the same! They also protect their country.
45:53Afghanistan has no one was predicated by people.
45:58And America will not be predicated by people.
46:03Guys, I want to take this bottle again for all of the guys.
46:08And we will create an eternal life, eternal life.
46:25Yesterday, we lost a lot of people.
46:27We lost a lot of people.
46:29But the traditions were preserved.
46:30Here's the third toast.
46:33Don't drink it, we'll drink it.
46:35But the traditions were preserved.
46:38Our Afghan traditions.
46:49But elsewhere, others were celebrating.
46:51The US felt it had won a war without losing a single American soldier.
46:57For it was Afghans who had fought on their behalf.
47:02Hundreds of thousands had died and Afghanistan had been left with a shattered economy and government.
47:08Would the US take responsibility for Afghanistan in the future?
47:13The man who ran the CIA's covert action in the latter part of the war now lives in rural Vermont.
47:20He's never spoken publicly about Afghanistan before.
47:23And I wanted to ask Tom Twetton about the American post-war plan.
47:28We have this sort of piece of paper in our system, which is called a finding, that's signed by the
47:37president.
47:37Our finding on Afghanistan said, push the Russians out, support the Afghans, give them all the support they need.
47:46But it didn't say anything about what came next.
47:49I can remember being president at a congressional hearing in which one congressman actually said,
47:56so what party are you going to back?
48:00And we said, well, that's not our problem.
48:04We don't do that.
48:06We're a tool of foreign policy.
48:09That covert action tool worked, was successful in this case.
48:14And then over to you diplomats.
48:18That was a problem of really bad timing because 88, 89, the wall came down in Berlin.
48:25It was the major event of the 20th century, the end of the Cold War, really.
48:35And Afghanistan fell off the bottom.
48:38There were no funds for the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
48:41But what the Americans did leave was modern weaponry, some in the hands of Islamists increasingly connected to global terror
48:49networks.
48:51There was one goal that trumped all others.
48:57Helped the Afghans defend their soil, kill the Russians.
49:01Who was there to do it?
49:03They were all Islamists.
49:05And we didn't spend much time thinking about, you know, what degree of Islamist is it that we can't tolerate.
49:18Twetan's CIA had avoided the trap of outright occupation.
49:22But they had worked within a dangerously narrow and limited vision.
49:27Funding brutal warlords, men linked to terrorists who would eventually kill thousands across the world.
49:37But the first to reap the consequences were not the Americans, but the Afghans themselves.
49:43Ten years of Soviet occupation had left Kabul largely intact.
49:48But when the Mujahideen seized the capital, they turned on each other, firing rockets from the ridgelines, destroying the very
49:56city and killing the very families they'd fought to liberate.
49:59The civil war, perhaps the very darkest period in Afghan history, lasted for five long years.
50:08I asked these Afghan men about its impact on their lives and their city.
50:14The military forces were largely in an Ms. Liów.
50:15The border became many many runges in the border.
50:18They all have nerdy and ships near the wall.
50:22But nowadays they had a new runges in the border where there were many runges of their lives.
50:30They were very active in the border, they were very active in Africa.
50:33They were very active on their ship and the other rockets.
50:39They were very active in the entire Marseille.
50:43The Japanese war had the time of theics of the militias of Turkey.
50:45It was out of this dark period that the Taliban emerged, believers in a strict interpretation
50:51of Islamic law.
50:53Many were the orphaned children of the Soviet war, taught in fundamentalist schools.
50:58They captured 90% of the country in just two and a half years.
51:03They're infamous today for their brutality, but many Afghans were at first grateful that
51:08the Taliban had won, because they ended the rule of the warlords, the gangsta militias,
51:13and the civil war.
51:38There was no security, there was no war, there was no war, there was no war.
51:42One person was killed, one person was killed, and the entire country was killed.
51:48I'm afraid many people in the centre of the old city of Kabul felt like that.
51:53After three years of seeing these great heroic leaders, the resistance against the Soviet Union,
51:58turned into these monsters of depravity, corruption, power and killing,
52:03the Taliban seemed a relief.
52:10But for millions of Afghans, Taliban rule was hell.
52:15They banned girls from school, forced women to hide even their faces,
52:20and they inflicted the most terrifying punishments.
52:24And yet the West did not interfere.
52:27It wasn't the Taliban's cruelty that led to the next foreign invasion, it was this.
52:38The mastermind of 9-11 first came to Afghanistan to fight for Islam against the Soviet Union.
52:46He wasn't an Afghan, nor were the 9-11 hijackers, but the Taliban government gave them refuge.
52:54Once again, a superpower invaded, and this time with good reason, to get Al-Qaeda.
53:00The coalition brought many improvements to Afghanistan, particularly in the early days.
53:07But the US soon faced the almost irresistible temptations of empire.
53:12Like the Soviets, they were tempted to reshape Afghanistan ever more in their own image.
53:19And when the resistance began against them, like Britain and the Soviets before them,
53:24the coalition did not want to seem weak.
53:27And once again, another superpower and its allies were trapped into investing more and more into Afghanistan.
53:37Now, the Taliban has formed again, and the country faces more upheaval, or even civil war.
53:49We're on our way to find Mullah Rokati.
53:52He's a Taliban commander who took the name Rokati because he used to fire a lot of rockets.
53:56The last time I met a Taliban commander, people pulled guns on me and threatened to kill me.
54:04This time, I'm really hoping for more of a political discussion.
54:07I found him in reflective mood, thinking back on the invasion and the cycle of Afghan politics.
54:14The Taliban have been a very strong government.
54:17The government has been a strong government.
54:20This Israel has been a boat, or country-class population and China.
54:32In fact, while I saw Sparta as Wohnza puthh, and country people take care of my family,
54:42and back then complètement.
54:44In turn, when the troops started to join Kristin, they saw her on how to think about the problems we
54:47All were victims.
54:48On the aunt, Tonia and I took notes that they OK, I stayed in the young man.
54:50When I was in Afghanistan, I would say that Afghanistan would have been in peace,
54:58in peace, in peace, in peace.
55:02I would say that Afghanistan would have no peace, no peace, no peace,
55:09and it would have been in peace.
55:17In Afghanistan, there was a number of people who had a report on the other side.
55:25If they had a report on the other side, they would get a report on the other side.
55:29The Taliban made the report from the Taliban.
55:33We made the report from the U.S. government,
55:37and we made the report from the U.S. government.
55:49Three mighty imperial powers, the British Empire,
55:54the Soviet Union, and the United States,
55:58all came here occupied and were trapped, for each.
56:03Over the last 200 years, it was easy to enter Afghanistan,
56:07but proved very difficult to get out.
56:11In Boston's Helmand restaurant,
56:14owned by the sister of the Afghan president Hamid Karzai,
56:17I reflected on these two centuries of Afghan history
56:21with my friend, the historian Tom Barfield.
56:24Foreigners always coming into Afghanistan think,
56:26look, we have just what the Afghans need
56:29and are surprised that the people aren't buying it.
56:32And a little bit more knowledge would be,
56:34there is nothing that has been tried militarily or civilian
56:38in Afghanistan that two empires before
56:40haven't already succeeded or failed at doing.
56:44A little knowledge of that would be like,
56:47been there, done that.
56:48or, you know, this road leads to a bad end.
56:59The price paid in these wars by the people of Afghanistan
57:03is unimaginable.
57:06A self-contained country,
57:08targeted repeatedly by imperial powers,
57:12left with its society shattered
57:14and over a million Afghan dead.
57:18This suffering and the intervention of all these foreigners,
57:22Victorian, British and Soviet Russian,
57:25CIA and Bin Laden,
57:26and the current coalition of nations,
57:29has shaped modern Afghanistan.
57:32But ultimately, this is a story that reveals for me
57:35less about Afghanistan itself
57:38and more about the foreigners.
57:41There's something about invasion,
57:43particularly invasion of Afghanistan,
57:45which means that you go in very briefly
57:48and you get trapped.
57:49Because all these theories,
57:51your fear of Muslim terrorists,
57:53your fear of some other great superpower,
57:57your worries about your own pride,
57:59trap you in that country.
58:01And from that point onwards,
58:02there's nothing that you feel you can do
58:04other than to dig ever and more futilely deeper.
58:16Afghanistan has been, for so many men,
58:19a place of heroism, self-sacrifice.
58:22And yet, in the end, all this energy,
58:25all this courage,
58:27was in pursuit of something which is simply wrong.
58:34It's like a
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