ANA: Ghosts of the Red Army

The building blocks of the Afghan National Army:

The Afghan government is dominated by former mujahedeen guerrillas; both the minister of defense and the army chief of staff are former anti-Soviet insurgents. Most ANA generals and colonels appointed to serve just below them, however, are veterans of the Soviet-built Afghan military that hunted these insurgents through the 1980s.

Facing a dearth of professional officers, the U.S.-led coalition is bringing these former foes in from the cold, restoring their Soviet-era rank and giving them command positions. American officers say few other Afghans have the formal military training and know-how to run conventional divisions and brigades.

There's a lot here for anyone interested in military culture. It isn't really surprising that former Democratic Republic of Afghanistan officers are playing key roles in the ANA; as the article suggests, they're the only ones with any experience managing units as large and as bureaucratically complex as the forces currently being fielded. Guerrilla fighting experience does not, as a general rule, translate well into management of a semi-conventional military organization. China and Vietnam represents partial exceptions in which the transition between guerrilla and conventional military organization was managed more or less smoothly, but in both cases there was an ideologically coherent and bureaucratically sophisticated party apparatus backing the army up. In Afghanistan, this isn't really the case.

It's also not at all unusual for a "revolutionary" military organization to borrow officers from the ancien regime. The French Army of the Napoleonic Era obviously did so, as did the Red Army of the 1920s (Tukhachevsky was a former Czarist officer), and the ReichswehrBundeswehr of the 1950s. In all of these cases the officers supplied technical expertise at the expense of sometimes suspect ideology; in this case, however, I daresay that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is supposed to look much more like the Soviet-sponsored regime than the intervening Taliban regime. It's not all that likely that the officers in question will harbor much residual sympathy for the DRA, and although it can legitimately be asked whether they have "dirty hands," the same questions apply to former mujahadeen and warlord fighters.

The article suggests that one source of trouble has been friction between the Soviet style command that the erstwhile DRA officers were trained in and the Western structure of the ANA. I suspect that there's a role for NATO's Eastern European members to play in smoothing this out; every former member of the Warsaw Pact has been forced to deal with a crisis of military culture since 1989, which should generate some insight into the difficulties of the ANA.

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Multiple Layers of Fail

David Frum compares the conventional and Team B views of Soviet military spending and arms control.

The conventional view:

The Soviets could increase their arms spending, therefore arms control was worthwhile.

The Team B view:

Because the Soviets were spending so much, they probably could not spend more. This implied that arms control was a waste of time. The US was trading something it COULD do (build more) for something the Soviets could not do (build more).

We'll briefly set aside the fact that a) Frum is simply wrong about Team B's conclusions about the Soviet economy, and about the political positions of major Team B players (Richard Pipes, for example, argues that the greatest achievement of Team B was to prove that the Soviets were preparing for pre-emptive war, a view that Frum associates with Luttwak), and b) Team B analysis got Soviet domestic politics, Soviet military doctrine, Soviet military procurement, and Soviet foreign policy preferences terribly wrong, and that by "terribly wrong" we mean wrong in the sense that they bore no meaningful relationship with reality, and were deeply outclassed by the (also flawed) CIA analyses of the same questions. Instead, we're going to focus on Frum's rather odd interpretation of arms control. Arms control provides an opportunity for two players to eschew the payment of substantial costs in order to maintain the status quo; this is to say, arms control agreements tend to reaffirm the status quo at a lower cost than unconstrained competition. Every arms control agreement will involve one state that is economically more capable of increased military spending than the other, but this hardly means that there are no gains to be had from efforts to control arms. Money not spent on unconstrained arms races might, conceivably, be used to purchase things other than weapons. Or, to go all Tea Party, money not spent on unconstrained arms races might be returned to tax payers. I suspect that Frum is operating on the assumption, common to conservatives of all stripes, than money spent on defense simply isn't money in the same sense that money spent on, say, social security or tasty, tasty bourbon. Moreover, even if arms control agreements don't achieve the actual reduction of arms (and sometimes they don't) their presence tends to reduce tensions.

I appreciate that Team B involved most of the major foreign policy luminaries of neoconservatism, and consequently that some effort must be made by conservatives to rescue the project from the diaper genie of history. I would suggest, however, that simply pretending that the project never existed, or focusing on its rhetorical and policy success (the Team B folks won the policy debate, after all) would be a better strategy that engaging in the pretense that Luttwak, Pipes, Wolfowitz, Nitze, and rest had the faintest fucking idea what they were talking about. didn't make a series of dreadful, repeatable analytical errors. Because of course, it's really not as if this collection of men had no idea what they were talking about; they really, genuinely knew a lot about Soviet and American defense policy. The problem was that they reached their conclusions before they made their analysis; having been created, Team B could hardly reaffirm the CIA, or come to the (correct) conclusion that the CIA was overestimating Soviet military and economic capabilities. This problem was compounded by another fundamental error, which was to characterized Soviet domestic politics as the simple, dyadic conflict between tyrants and dissidents. This led them to ignore the relevance of the Soviet Union's own military industrial complex, and of differences within the CPSU. Wise fools, as they say. Tragically, almost all of these errors would be repeated verbatim when the same folks turned their attention to Iraq and Iran.

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Great Gamble Addendum

Ralph, in comments to the Great Gamble review:

Soviet casualties and aircraft losses (reported thru military channels to the General Staff) were much lower than what is popularly believed. The Soviets definitely had a "casualty avoidance" mentality and endeavored to fight the war "on the cheap," in my opinion -- committing relatively modest forces.

This is something I forgot to mention in the review. Feifer argues, more or less in passing, that Soviet war dead from Afghanistan probably exceeded the 14427 official figure, possibly by a factor of four or five. I've seen this argument in other places, but I've never seen very good sourcing for it. I suspect that the 14427 number is probably the floor for an estimate of Soviet dead in Afghanistan (why would they exaggerate?) but I'd have to see some good evidence as to why a substantially higher number is plausible. It's bloody difficult, even in an authoritarian state, to make dead soldiers disappear, and it's really, really difficult to make 50000 dead soldiers disappear. Units have to be filled, bodies have to be buried, families of the dead get irritable and vocal, and so forth.

Anybody know of any good data on the subject?

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Sunday Book Review: The Great Gamble

As conditions have deteriorated in Afghanistan in the past several years, academic and military specialists have paid greater attention to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, in an effort to support one faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan against another. The Soviets withdrew in 1989, having suffered serious losses of prestige, blood, and treasure. Gregory Feifer's The Great Gamble covers the political and strategic details of the war in depth, with some forays into tactical and operational details of the actual fighting. He also draws larger conclusions about the impact of the war on Soviet and Afghan society.

Feifer deals at some length with Soviet decision-making prior to the war, arguing that the Soviets understood their own motives as defensive. The Soviets had grown unhappy with Hafizullah Amin, believing that his control over the country was slipping and that he was making too many overtures to Pakistan and the United States. The Soviets were also concerned with the spread of Islamic radicalism in the wake of the Iranian revolution, and wanted to shore up their southern flank. There was some opportunism to the Soviet action, as they believed the US was preoccupied with its own affairs and unlikely to become involved in the conflict. Many within both the Red Army and the CPSU were ambivalent or outright opposed to the invasion, however. Greater engagement had hazy prospects of success, they argued, and the game wasn't worth the candle. In part because of the declining physical and mental capabilities of Leonid Brezhnev, the hawks prevailed; the Soviet Union began what was expected to be a brief, cheap military intervention in December 1979.

Feifer's book would be better characterized as a history of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan than of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan. While he does include some operational details, the focus is much more on the ambiance of the war, the slowly shifting expectations of Red Army soldiers, and the Soviet relationships with the Afghans. In some ways this is fitting; counter-insurgency campaigns lack the kind of decisive battle found in more conventional combat. At other times, however, Feifer seems uncertain as to whether particular battles or operations even took place. The book often fails to sufficiently explain the context of the engagements is does discuss.

Comparative questions about the Soviet and American experience in Afghanistan immediately leap to mind in any discussion of the Soviet war. Some differences are stark, while some similarities are frightening. On the one hand, the Red Army never displayed the technical and technological capacity that has characterized the American war. Soviet units often suffered casualties that would be shocking to Americans; entire company-sized units often suffered complete destruction. Soviet aircraft also suffered a much higher rate of attrition than their American counterparts, due in no small part to the effectiveness of US and Pakistani supplied anti-aircraft weapons. Soviet cruelty to civilians also appears to have been much more regular and much more brutal than that displayed by Americans since 2001. To put it bluntly, the worst Taliban propaganda about American atrocities pales in comparison to the self-reported behavior of Red Army soldiers.

And then there are some nagging similarities. While both the Soviet leadership and the rank and file of the Red Army had a tenuous relationship with orthodox Marxist ideology, many in both groups genuinely believed that the they were "saving" Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a feudal backwater, beset by an archaic religious ideology and a premodern tribal structure. Many Soviets believed that the invasion would substantially change Afghan life for the better. The Soviets engaged in many infrastructure projects designed to increase opportunity for Afghans, and to improve the prospects for economic development. The Soviets also took an interest in social revolution, with an eye towards breaking the hold of Islam and tribal organizations over Afghan life.

Soviet tension with its Afghan puppets also carries some reminders of the US experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Vietnam. The Soviet invasion was precipitated by the perceived need to intervene on behalf of one faction of the Afghan Communist Party against another. It is the only war I know of in which both factions requested Soviet intervention in the weeks leading up to the invasion. The Soviets continuously pressured Karmal and Najibullah to end corruption, reform governance, and build bridges with opposition forces in order to reduce the scope of the intervention. As in the American experience, these efforts rarely worked; both the Soviet and American proxies had their own constituencies to worry about. Concerns about legitimacy limited Soviet actions, just as they have American. The Soviets didn't want to annex Afghanistan, and didn't want it to appear as if they intended to do so. This made it difficult to take a heavy handed approach to even recalcitrant Afghan political actors. The Soviets were more willing to conduct negotiations with mujahadeen figures than their Afghan proxies, and on several occasions signed truces with various resistance factions.

The Red Army suffered all of the problems of shifting to COIN as the US military, and then some. Soviet military engagement was never completely coherent in terms of objectives; on the one hand, there was the realization on the part of the high command and the political authority that accomodation with Afghan civilians was necessary. On the other hand, the poorly disciplined and conventionally oriented Red Army proved too unwieldy to conduct warfare with the precision required by COIN; civilians were regularly butchered, and often deliberately targeted at the operational level. There were also some ideological problems, as Red Army political doctrine had trouble coming to terms with the notion that factors independent of class conflict could drive and insurgency. Soviet doctrine improved over the course of the war, at least in the tactical and operational senses. The Soviets became much better at conducting search/destroy and convoy missions through experience, and on many occasions successfully isolated and destroyed significant mujahadeen concentrations. On the other hand, rebuilding the Red Army as a COIN-oriented forces proved too much, and in any case excited neither the high command nor the Soviet political leadership.

Feifer suggests some other similarities that hearken more to the American experience in Vietnam than in Afghanistan, at least so far. The end of the war preceded the collapsed of the Soviet Union by three years, meaning that there was rather less time to dwell on the experience in Russia than in the United States. Nevertheless, some of the same bitterness and resentment of war critics that emerged in the wake of the fall of Saigon was also evident among Red Army veterans of Afghanistan. Even during the war, critics of the Soviet Union (and of the war) were attacked by veterans an unpatriotic, and unappreciative of the sacrifices made by Red Army soldiers. Feifer argues that while the collapse of the Soviet Union pushed the Afghanistan conflict off the radar screen of most Russian citizens for a while, that there has recently been some re-evaluation of the war, focused on the experience of Red Army soldiers.

The most important lesson of this book for the United States in Afghanistan is that drawing on even recent historical experience for lessons is perilously difficult. The US Army and the US Marine Corps are not the Red Army; the Taliban don't have the same degree of support from Pakistan or the United States; the US invasion appears to have been more popular in Afghanistan at any point than the Soviet; US goals for nation-building are different than Soviet; the US economy is far more capable of weathering the strain of prolonged conflict than the Soviet. And yet; both the Russians and the Americans had to transition between a conventional and a COIN force. Both had to deal with unreliable, unaccountable proxies. Both had to deal with the confusing composition of Afghan society. Both had to conduct operations in an inhospitable climate. Both had to deal with steadily increasing unhappiness and alienation on the domestic front. While it might be enough simply to say that Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires," it remains unclear whether the similarities outweigh the differences, or on what metrics a comparison should be made. Learning is hard, and stuff.

As for the book, it probably lacks sufficient detail to leave specialists on Afghanistan, on COIN, or on the Red Army terribly pleased. Feifer doesn't provide much about Afghan society, or about the changes wrought by the invasion, Soviet occupation policies, or the widespread destruction caused by fighting. He also doesn't delve into a lot of detail about the tactics and composition of the Red Army. Feifer gives some account of the US and Pakistani contribution to the war, but intelligence specialists probably won't be satisfied. However, The Great Gamble does provide a reasonable overview of the politics of the conflict, with enough fighting to contribute considerable flavor. I can't recommend the book unreservedly, but many readers will find it productive.

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Sunday Book Review: Hawk and Dove

Nicholas Thompson'sThe Hawk and the Dove is an exceptionally readable dual biography of George Kennan and Paul Nitze. George Kennan is, to some, rather an odd dove; he helped formulate the vision of containment that led to NSC-68 and militarized confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, he was hardly a pacifist; nevertheless, in the way in which debate over national security policy became structured in the Cold War, Kennan most often stood on the "dovish" side. Nitze, the most direct father of NSC-68, as well as Team B, plays the role of "hawk." Nitze is also Nicholas Thompson's grandfather.

Both Kennan and Nitze were privileged and wildly talented. It's true enough that an Ivy League pedigree won an undue degree of influence in the 1940s and the 1950s (a situation which absolutely, positively does not hold today), and Thompson details the manner in which Kennan and Nitze built their social networks and, eventually, their influence within government. Nitze was much better at this than Kennan; whereas Kennan believed that ideas were key to moving the machinery of government, Nitze understood the value of creating, nursing, and maintaining a group of bureaucratic warriors, as well as key connections with other major policymakers. It's hardly surprising that the most prominent neocons found their start with Nitze; he understood that the bureaucracy responds to ideas that are prominent within the social circles of the bureaucracy, rather than to ideas that are popular within the general public or that are well regarded in the academy. Nitze also came to understand that the best approach to seizing influence over foreign policy was bipartisan; to make sure that your people were part of the larger machine of foreign policy, regardless of who happened to control Congress or to sit in the White House at any given time.

Nitze became obsessed with the question of how nuclear weapons could be utilized in an actual war. This isn't because he wanted the nuke the Soviets; he genuinely believed that if the Soviets ever achieved "escalation superiority," which in its essence meant "more megatons than us" that they would be able, by threat of nuclear annihilation, to win serious diplomatic concessions. US "preparedness" prevented both nuclear conflict and inevitable concession to Soviet aggression. Nitze spun out scenarios of nuclear war that were based on pure fantasy; the Soviets would somehow squirrel away the bulk on their population in vast civil defense shelters, then use their larger warheads to deal a devastating first strike to the US, secure in the knowledge that only their cities, infrastructure, and industry would be destroyed by a US counter-strike. The debates became tribal, as all such arguments will; the enemy became pacifist appeasers, and the use of any tactic to defeat this enemy, including accusations of treason and the invention of "facts," became legitimate.

Nitze's greatest failure, and the biggest difference between him and Kennan, was his de facto assumption that Soviet domestic politics didn't exist. For Nitze and his acolytes, the assumption that all of the relevant policymakers in the Soviet Union were incorrigibly and equally hostile was sufficient in order to proceed with analysis. Weapons production was always the result of a nefarious plan formulated in the Kremlin, and never the result of the bureaucratic strength of various faction within the Soviet military. Any modernization, even one required to match US capabilities, was evidence of an evil Soviet plot to acquire escalation dominance. But this was only part of Nitze's trick; by the time Team B was put together, Soviet arms production and capabilities could be inferred from imputed Soviet intentions. This is to say that evidence of Soviet weapons production at time A indicated evil Soviet intent, which then led Nitze and his cohort to estimate future Soviet production based on that indication of evil Soviet intent. The result, of course, was a wild overestimation of Soviet capabilities, and a complete misunderstanding of Soviet intent. Richard Pipes famously declared Team B a success, because it had established that some within the Soviet Union believed that a nuclear war could be won. What Pipes declined to note was that a) a similarly influential group within the United States believed the same thing, and b) the Soviets who believed in the possibility of victory were, like their American counterparts, a minority of the strategic establishment, c) almost to an individual, these Soviets believed that the war would begin with an American nuclear attack, and d) the most hawkish elements in the Soviet Union won bureaucratic victories on the backs of men like Paul Nitze. The products of School Nitze, as it were, would repeat these errors with Iraq, Iran, and China.

Thompson's Kennan is a man who was wrong about many things, but who was right about one big thing. Kennan had frankly bizarre views about a number of subjects, including the value of democracy, race relations within the United States, and the project of modernity. However, he was fundamentally correct to identify the internal politics of the Soviet Union as dysfunctional, and to conclude that the regime had a limited lifespan, even on the time metrics normally associated with empires. The Soviet Empire was not, by his argument, the sort of creature that could survive in the long term, and it certainly could not outlast the Western democracies, however flawed they might be. The Soviet permanent war economy depended on a permanent perception of threat, and as this faded the Soviet experiment became less tenable. Kennan was also correct that Soviet expansion was limited in immediate aims, and that it could be successfully managed. Thus managing the Soviet Union was worthwhile, as it was a foul regime led by awful men, but the task had to be undertaken in a measured fashion.

Oddly enough, Kennan and Nitze interacted only at a few key times during their careers. Kennan made his key contribution before Nitze really found his niche in government, and Nitze gave a particular shape to Kennan's basic framework. Kennan's influence on major policy was minimal after the early 1950s, while Nitze had his hands in some manner on almost every strategic decision until the late 1980s. The two were friends early on in the same sense that all Ivy League cogs in the US foreign policy machine were friends; they were never particularly close, yet they never personalized their disagreements. Personally, I found the Kennan half of the book fascinating, simply for the basic weirdness of its subject; Kennan was an odd duck, with strange ideas. The Nitze sections left me infuriated; Nitze and his clones pursued one big idea, and didn't both to worry overmuch about whether it was right, or at all helpful to the country. It's not quite right to say that Kennan's ideas deserved more credence, as his central argument was extremely influential; however, Nitze's acolytes should have been chased out of government and indeed out of public life. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle should have had to struggle to publish an op-ed in the Dayton Daily News; instead, they were able to repeat their flawed analysis of the Soviet Union on a succession of other states, all to dreadful effect.

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The "Bomb Iran" Lobby is Getting Kind of Amateurish...

Jeffrey Herf has taken to The New Republic in an effort to convince Americans that negotiations will go nowhere unless we threaten Tehran with an extensive bombing campaign. Herf is a specialist on Germany; Divided Memory is an excellent study of the different ways in which East and West Germans remember Nazism, and War by Other Means is interesting enough, even as it rather misses the point by over-emphasizing the role of Germany (and the missile debate more generally) in ending the Cold War. The vast expansion of literature on the Soviet point of view, in particular, has not been kind to Herf's argument. In any case, Herf has some theories about relations between democracies and autocracies, and Marty saw fit to give him a platform. Yglesias identifies some problems; here are some more.

The essential problem is an old one in the history of negotiations between dictatorships and democracies. As was the case in the famous negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe in the 1980s, there is a fundamental asymmetry whenever a dictatorship sits down at the table with a democracy...All the domestic political pressures of the debate will be asymmetric: They will have an impact only on the governments of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.

Herf doesn't back this statement up, which suggests to me that he's done almost no research on the issue. If he had, he'd know that there is in fact a literature on negotiation, and that democracies have some key advantages in negotiations with dictatorships. In particular, the constraints that democratic negotiators face can work to their advantage in determining outcomes within the range of mutually acceptable alternatives. Hard domestic constraints, assuming that they allow any agreement at all, are a massive plus at the negotiating table, because they limit what a negotiator can give away. It's particularly fascinating that Herf invokes negotiations over the French and British nuclear arsenals, because, by his own account, the democracies won those negotiations, and won them because of electoral constraints. Indeed, democratic transparency often works to the advantage of negotiators; an American President can credibly argue that a treaty will not survive the Senate, while a Soviet General Secretary has much more trouble proving that the Red Army will veto a proposed arrangement. Herf would be well-advised to conduct additional research into the reasons why West prevailed on those negotiations, at least before engaging in another intellectual indefensible polemical exercise.

In December 1979, President Carter and our NATO allies agreed both to counter the new Soviet weapons by stationing American intermediate-range missiles in Europe and to propose a new round of arms-control negotiations with the Soviets, offering a scaled-backed NATO deployment in return for a reduction in their SS-20s. The USSR, however, demanded something more: that the nuclear weapons of Britain and France be counted in any negotiations. Under the Soviet scheme, Britain and France would have to pay the price for reductions in Soviet missiles by reducing or eliminating their nuclear arsenals, thus creating a "nuclear-free" Europe.

There's rather a different way of thinking about this. Desiring the inclusion of British and French nuclear arsenals in the arms control negotiations may have been part of an actual, legitimate goal of Soviet foreign policy, rather than a negotiating "ploy". The United Kingdom had, of course, developed its nuclear deterrent in collaboration with the United States. The primary delivery system for British nuclear weapons was the Polaris missile, designed in the United States. The United Kingdom was, moreover, tied to the United States through alliance in NATO. France was less constrained, and the French nuclear deterrent more independent, but nevertheless it's hardly obvious that the Soviet desire to include the British and French arsenals as an element of the negotiations was either absurd or illegitimate. In the case of war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, British and French missiles could destroy Soviet cities with exactly the same effectiveness as American missiles. Thus, I'd rather refrain from using the term "gambit" to describe what most rational observers would conclude was a rational, legitimate objective of Soviet foreign policy.

This brings us to the one policy option that Tehran truly fears--and thus the only one that gives these negotiations any realistic chance of success: a credible threat of military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities by the United States, perhaps joined by Britain and France, or Israel. If the Iranian leadership believed that such an attack was a real possibility, it, or some parts of it, might be persuaded to change course.

Right; the mullahs only understand the language of force, etc. Of course, if Dr. Herf had taken the US-Soviet analogy a bit farther, he might have been forced to notice that one of the key developments in the Soviet arms control stance in the mid-1980s was the Soviet realization that the US was not preparing to launch a preventive nuclear attack. Reagan's rhetoric and arms buildup, whatever effect they may have had on the Soviet economy and on Soviet human rights, most certainly strengthened the hand of hardliners who argued that the US was planning to fight and win and offensive nuclear war. One of keys to Gorbachev's success was his ability to argue that Reagan didn't actually plan to attack, contrary to what appeared to be US preparations for war. In this sense, it was Soviet security, rather than Soviet vulnerability, that gave Gorbachev the ability to pursue arms control with Reagan. Had American hardliners such as Richard Perle and Dick Cheney prevailed, Reagan would have pursued a much more aggressive stance, and it's unlikely that Gorbachev would have been able to budge the Soviet military-industrial complex. The Soviet Union would probably still have collapsed, but it almost certainly would have been a much more chaotic and bloody affair. Herf misses out on this because of either his inability or his refusal to understand that dictatorships also have factions, interest groups, and bureaucratic roadblocks, and his refusal to allow that the core interest of the Iranian leadership is their own security and survival, rather than nuclear weapons.

And this gets rather to the core of the problems with Herf's approach. He assumes away Iranian domestic constraints, in spite of overwhelming evidence that a) dictatorships face internal constraints based on public pressure on bureaucratic infighting, b) that domestic constraints have unpredictable, and indeed often positive, effects on negotiating stances, and c) that dire military threats often empower the domestic actors in target countries that we're least interested in seeing gain power. He seems to believe that since the regime successfully stole an election and hasn't collapsed in the past three months, that it is free of domestic constraints. Such a position does not, as they say, demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of the way that authoritarian regimes operate; indeed, it would likely get Herf laughed out of an Introduction to Comparative Politics course.

In addition, Herf displays a cavalier ignorance of the Iranian regime; I suspect that the one thing the leadership TRULY fears is being overthrown by its domestic enemies, but not being an Iran specialist I try to refrain from writing statements like "the one thing Tehran truly fears." Other than all that, however, Herf's essay is just spiffy.

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Castro: But I Want to Nuke them Now!!!!

Ahem:

In the early 1980s, according to newly released documents, Fidel Castro was suggesting a Soviet nuclear strike against the United States, until Moscow dissuaded him by patiently explaining how the radioactive cloud resulting from such a strike would also devastate Cuba....

The Pentagon study attributes the Cuba revelation to Andrian A. Danilevich, a Soviet general staff officer from 1964 to ’90 and director of the staff officers who wrote the Soviet Union’s final reference guide on strategic and nuclear planning.

In the early 1980s, the study quotes him as saying that Mr. Castro “pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including possible nuclear strikes.”

The general staff, General Danilevich continued, “had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S.”

That information, the general concluded, “changed Castro’s positions considerably.”

This is interesting in that it mirrors the (very public) conversation that the Soviets and the Chinese had about nuclear weapons in the 1960s. To sum up very briefly, the Chinese argued that the Soviets should be much more aggressive in their thinking about nuclear weapons, while the Soviets were quite realistic about the prospects for victory in nuclear war. In that case, the Soviets had insufficient leverage to bring the Chinese into line, and eventually concluded that a certain political distance between Beijing and Moscow was desirable in case the Chinese did something stupid. In the Cuba case, the Russians of course were able to essentially dictate policy to Havana.

The report is also intriguing in terms of thinking about the relevance that information plays in actor behavior. It's sort of remarkable to think that Castro wasn't aware of the consequences that a nuclear attack on the US would have on Cuba; I'm inclined to think that just about everyone in the US (or at least everyone after November 1983) was aware of the devastating environmental effects that nuclear war would entail. Maybe Castro was just playing for bargaining space, in the same sense that it's possible that Mao was feigning ignorance about the effectiveness of nuclear weapons in the 1950s. But then again, it's not wholly unreasonable to think that Castro, a busy man, may simply never have taken time to educate himself on what nukes really do.

Finally, I find it interesting that the Soviets took the "even if we win, you lose" tack in explaining the situation to Castro. I suspect that the Soviets were well aware that, even under the most rosy scenarios of a pre-emptive attack, nuclear fallout was the least bad thing that could happen to Cuba, and that the utter nuclear destruction of the island was much more likely. As a corollary to this, I have to wonder whether Castro, like some American policymakers, was taken in by the idea that the Soviets had presumptive nuclear dominance and could destroy the US whenever they liked. Team B made this a fashionable opinion in the US, and it'd be interesting to see whether it filtered in modified form to Havana.

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