Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

Then you improve to road network. If the Red Army could deliver supplies to Leningrad, you can be damn sure they can deliver supplies to Kabul. You also coordinate with allies, improve overall strategy, use bombs and air force in intense battles, take the casualties, but gain the ground. You don't just sit there and do nothing, like Gorbachev did!

I do, but I think you're wrong. Keep in mind that in the USSR there was no unemployment, everyone had jobs, and most people had a roof over their head and food to eat, as well as quality healthcare. There was also no massive depression during the Cold War in the West. I think that if the USSR lasted to this day, it would have been interesting, to say the least, and I know that scenario would be better for Russians, than the one that took place. It's about surviving, not about winning the Cold War. USSR couldn't have won the Cold War, but it could have given its citizens quality lives, which is much better than what Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's Russia did. The main reason that Putin is popular in Russia, is because under Putin the living standards of the average Russian, either doubled or tripled, depending on whose analysis you look at.

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

The USSR couldn't have won the cold war unless it went hot and won that one. It's simple a matter of numbers. You can't fight an opposite system and at the same time depend on it for your own survival.

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

They actually did. BUT they could not supply enough to prevent both mass starvation taking place in Leningrad or any hypothetical massive escalation in Afghanistan. In both circumstances being able to do something did not mean you could
arbitrarily do more of it.

They did what they could. Remember, it was the soviets who had built the bulk of the roads in the north of Afghanistan in first place. But there is only so much they could accomplish once the shooting started.
You would have to bring in more vulnerable convoys with construction materials and construction sites themselves would be vulnerable. This would be just part of the problem of course.

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?s...&article=23577

See the issues described in the above article and remember that the soviets had it at lot worse on every count.

What allies?

They were fighting abroad to protect an unpopular government
which was fundamentally at odds with the way of life of most locals, in a country where terrain and tradition favored guerilla warfare and bordering with a state willing to provide santuary to the guerrillas. IOW a strategic nightmare.

And none of the above had any simple fix.

They did.

They did.Holding was the problem.

Hindsight.
All the people knew, back then , was that they had to wait for years for a cheap *** car and that there were always shortage of the most basic goods.
And they were pretty fed up about it (and Internet would only make things worse, as the knowledge that in the West they had no such issues would become even more widespread). And it was not going to get much better anytime soon because the economy was not growing anymore at decent rates.
They were not expecting an economic collapse.

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

In the Leningrad Case I was referring to the Road of Life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_of_Life If the Red Army could have done that, over treacherous ice, under severe Nazi bombardment, than why are you telling me that they couldn't do the same for Kabul? Mass starvation took place in Leningrad, before the Road of Life was built, not afterwards. Preventing further mass starvation was the whole point of the Road of Life, and the plan succeeded.

Also, you're talking about the USSR not being able to overproduce Afghanistan? I'm sorry, but that's just plain silly. In addition, if your building projects are being harassed, then simply set up ambushes, coordinate, bombard, use the Rocket Corps, etc. Give the native Afghanis jobs in building the roads. Stop building, duke it out with the local forces, and continue. You can use tanks to escort convoys. You can have have scouts patrol the roads. And if you're the USSR, you can surely commit more than 118,000 men.

What allies? Offer a training program to third world militaries, where you get elite SpetzNatz training, but your unit has to serve a year in Afghanistan. How many do you think would sign up for that? Even if half of the unit survives, and it would have been much more than half, you would have elite units in countries like Angola. A win-win for both countries. Yet nothing like that was even offered.

It was a tough war, no one denies that. But the main losing factors must be considered, if one is to understand how the war was lost. And the main factors were the Brezhnev and Gorbachev Governments. If the leader you are supporting is unpopular, you simply switch support. Again, that order lay with Gorbachev, not with the Red Army.

If the Red Army can hold Kursk against the Wehrmacht onslaught, surely they can hold any ground against the Taliban.

Actually the USSR had a nice system of mass transit, so a car didn't qualify for a basic good. In addition, if one was willing to look, substitutes for basic goods were readily available. It's not like there was mass starvation. The low crime rate enabled people to grow their own crops in the gardens, which, until the 1990's, no one stole.

They were fed up about it? Oh puh lease. It's not like there was a massive revolutionary feeling in the USSR. The Internet could have made it worst, or could have made it better, cause honestly we don't know. People might have found out not only about owning a car, but also about things like traffic, car insurance, unemployment, health insurance, massive divorce rate, the public school system in the US, the lack of Sanatoriums for a low price, ethnic warfare, (which was unknown in the USSR) etc. Either way, that was a choice to be made by the people, and the Internet would have given the people that choice. Gorbachev rushed through, completely unprepared. The result was mass chaos.

And you can say that hindsight is 20/20, but can you name a single country that successfully transformed into a Capitalist economy without mass chaos? And if you cannot, doesn't chaos usually bring about ethnic warfare? Like Chechnya? Like Ossetia? Like Nagorno-Karabakh? If everyone gets a car, but there isn't a road expansion, doesn't that lead to traffic? If everyone has a car, won't there be more accidents and a need for car insurance? In a Capitalist system, like the US, which Gorbachev was modeling from, is healthcare granted to every citizen? All that stuff could have been easily predictable, had Gorbachev not been so headstrong and impulsive, saying "my way or the high way". Sound familiar?

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

As I have mentioned a couple of times, and people choose to ignore me lol, the problem was that since the population was hostile and impossible to switch over for more than a temp time, the soviets were not ruthless enough. It was a half *** attempt at intervention. If they sent far more troops and just massacred the population wherever there was trouble, the situation would be solved quickly.

It is the same reason that the current one will fail. It was the same reason (or at least one of the reasons) that the Vietnam war failed for the americans (and the french). If you are going to send occupation forces where the population don't want you, you better be ready to either KILL or leave in shame.

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

Not entirely true. You just have to take out the leadership, and teach a painful lesson to those that are attacking your army, but not to the villagers. You don't just wipe off villages from the map; once you get attacked, you counter-attack, and follow through on it viciously. If they choose to hide in the village, than you take out the village. That way the village gets burned AFTER the Taliban units hide there, not before. As per leadership, look at how much damage was done to the Taliban in Pakistan when the glorious US missile took out Meshud. I rarely animate non living objects, but the missile that got Meshud deserves the nickname "Glory".

You also have to coordinate better with the locals. Not everyone in Afghanistan is pro-Taliban. So you arm those that are anti-Taliban, and go after the Taliban.

But in one aspect you are correct. The Brezhnev and Gorbachev Administrations half-assed the Soviet War in Afghanistan.

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

I think we are saying the same thing (in your last post).

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

I was perfectly aware of the "Road of Life".
What you don't seem aware of is a few details that the Wikipedia article gloss over but I (wrongly) assumed would be common knowledge, at least in general terms.
Leningrad needed an absolute minimum of a thousands of tons of supplies per day. A month after the opening of the road the tonnage delivered was still only 700-800 tons per day.
About 120.000 people starved to death only during January 1942, two months after the opening of the road. Another 130.000 or so died on February. Eventually enough people died or were evacuated and the improved supply system could cope.
"not afterwards" indeed :re:

Source: The siege of Leningrad, 1941-1944 by David M. Glantz
Or if you really like Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_...ad_on_the_city

More on the rest later.

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

Once again, that was during the first two months of it being established. In the end, Leningrad had a population of 640,000, that were supplied. In addition, you have to keep in mind that the Red Army couldn't devote all of their resources to the Siege of Leningrad, like they could to the path to Kabul. In addition, if they could supply 640,000 in Leningrad, that would be above the requirements of supply needed to carry out the operations in Afghanistan. And that was done with limited resources, which were much less than the resources the USSR had when the Red Army invaded Kabul. In other words, the USSR could have pulled it off, but didn't because of Brezhnev and Gorbachev, which was my initial point. So let's not go off topic, and focus on the task at hand.

Re: Excellent article on Afghanistan
 

It wasn’t me who brought Leningrad up. I previously said:

Emphasis added.

Note: they DID supply their limited contingent, they DID supply the DRA army and security forces AND they DID supply the afghan population under their control, Kabul included. They had to ship half million of tons of wheat for civilian consumption during a single year. There certainly was no mass starvation in Kabul, to the best of my knowledge.
HOWEVER every single source on the matter notes that they had a hard time doing all of this. Adding, say an half million of troops or a massive reconstruction program of the 40.000 km of roads in Afghanistan or similar massive efforts would have in all likelyhood broken the back of the logistical system, even as it was the Salang pass had to be run on a one way system for example.

You wrote

Then you backtracked to

Actually it was opened in late november, as per your source. People were still dying en masse three months later, in no small part because it failed to supply the planned tonnage in December when only a portion of the 2000 tons (and still below the 1000 or so which were the bare minimum) planned by Leningrad Front for delivery that month were actually delivered. It was a incredible effort, by any standard, but you cannot use it as a proof that every logistical problem can be handwaved away.
That is what I am trying to get across.
They could do only so much and a lot of peple died because that “much” was not “enough”.

What are you trying to say here? They did carry out operations Afghanistan after all. Or are you trying to say that the they could post there several additional hundreds of thousands of soldiers because they were feeding a similar number of civilians in Leningrad (and some troops engaged in defensive operations)?
Do you realize how massive is the difference in supply requirements between civilians on survival rations and modern mechanized troops engaged in offensive operations? If not, please read something about it.

But let’s assume for a moment that logistics was not an issue

Sorry, the Red Army still could not devote all of their resources to Afghanistan,regardless of logistics, for the very same reasons it could not concentrate on Leningrad during WW2: it had others, equally or more pressing priorities. Or are you suggesting to rob Peter (the western theater military forces, the strained economy etc.) to give Paul (a useless backwater ) when Peter is obviously far more critical than Paul ? Do you realize what was happening elsewhere during the afghan war? They could not afford to throw endeless resources at a secondary problem.

Now let’s examine what you are proposing that should have been done

Ambushing the Mujahideen? Do you realize that it was done ad nauseam?
Read the first link I posted to “The Bear went over the Mountain”. There is an entire chapter dedicated to examples of soviet troops ambushing Mujahideen. It was a standard operation.

Do you know how the whole adventure started ?
That’s right, overthrowing an unpopular leader. Does the name Hafizullah Amin rings any bells?

Bad idea. Tanks:
1)Wear the road fast
2)Wear themselves fast when used for prolonged road marches
3)Use up a lot of fuel
4)Could not often engage the enemy due to insufficient elevation of the main armament

This was practical experience. A lot of the tanks originally available with the units were sent back because they simply were found not useful and only a smaller number was needed. Which is not to say that they were never used for that purpose but they were not as useful as you seem to think.

I could go on on the other points if you are interested but really, the 90% of the things you are touting as solutions or that you seem to think were never done fall into three categories:

1)They actually were the standard tactical repertoire.
2)They were tried and did not work.
3)They were obviously unworkable.

The remaining 10% may or may not have worked but were not enough to make a difference. Find me a war where one side did 100% of what it could have conceivably done.
Really it seems to me your animosity towards Gorbachev and Breznhev is blinding you to the actual constraints the soviet leadership was operating under. Whatever you may think of them, they were not operating in a vacuum.