The Development of Afghan Resistance

Abstract

If there was one thing predictable following the Soviet invasion, it was that Soviet forces would encounter significant popular resistance. What was unclear was just how significant that resistance would be, how well-organised, how sustainable, how determined. However, there were grounds at the outset for the Soviet leadership to be pessimistic. In his great treatise On War, published posthumously in 1832, Carl von Clausewitz had analysed the circumstances under which what he called ‘a general uprising’ could be effective, and identified five preconditions: that the war ‘must be fought in the interior of the country’; that it ‘must not be decided by a single stroke’; that the ‘theatre of operations must be fairly large’; that the ‘national character must be suited to that type of war’; and that the ‘country must be rough and inaccessible, because of mountains, or forests, marches, or the local methods of cultivation’ (Clausewitz, 1984: 480). The parallels with the situation in Afghanistan in 1980 are almost perfect.