Somewhere in the Kunar province in the summer of 1984, a Mujahedin commander sat down and wrote an order that would be passed to every fighter under his command. It was not complicated. It did not require explanation. It said essentially that if you see men moving through the mountains who do not move like Soviet soldiers, do not walk like Soviet soldiers and do not smell like Soviet soldiers.

You do not try to capture them. You do not attempt to identify them. You shoot them immediately and you [music] run. The men he was describing were not ghosts. They were Soviet Spettznaz. And by that point in the war, the Mujahadin had learned enough about them to know that engaging them in any conventional sense was almost always fatal.

[music] This is the story of how a Soviet special forces unit earned a standing kill on sight order from an enemy that was not afraid of very much. To understand why Spettznaz became what they became in Afghanistan, you have to understand what Afghanistan did to the conventional Soviet military in the first year of the war.

December 1979, Soviet tanks rolled through the Salong Pass north of Kabell. And for a brief moment, military planners in Moscow believed [music] this would follow the standard script. A rapid intervention, stabilization of a friendly government, withdrawal within 6 months. The pallet bureau had seen this kind of operation before.

Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968. You move in with overwhelming conventional force. You establish control. You leave. Afghanistan was not Hungary. Afghanistan was not Czechoslovakia. Afghanistan was mountains and valleys and a population of fighters who had been resisting foreign armies. Since Alexander the Great tried his luck in the same territory and found it considerably more difficult than expected, within weeks, Soviet infantry units in the Pangashir Valley north of Kabul were taking casualties that did not make sense on paper. A convoy of armored vehicles traveling a road through the mountains would suddenly come under fire from three directions simultaneously from positions that should not have allowed for any coordinated attack. The attackers would kill as many soldiers as possible in the first 30 seconds, disappear into the rocky terrain above the valley floor and be completely gone before any Soviet response could be

organized. The Soviet military had trained for war in central Europe. Tank formations against tank formations, artillery against prepared defensive lines. What they encountered in the Afghan mountains north of Kanahar and throughout the provinces bordering Pakistan was something their doctrine had almost no framework for addressing.

The Mujahedin fighters supplied initially through Pakistan and increasingly through CIA channels were not fighting to hold ground. They were fighting to make holding any ground in Afghanistan expensive enough that the Soviets would eventually decide the cost was too high. The conventional Soviet army for all its size and firepower was poorly equipped to answer that kind of war. But Moscow had other options.

The word Spettznaz comes from the Russian phrase for specialurpose forces and the organization had existed in various forms since the Second World War when Soviet military planners developed small highly trained units for reconnaissance, sabotage, and operations behind enemy lines.

Through the Cold War, Spettznaz evolved into something considerably more sophisticated. By the late 1970s, the Soviet special forces system included units trained for everything from deep reconnaissance inside NATO territory to the assassination of Western political and military leadership in the opening hours of a potential conflict.

These were not ordinary soldiers given a different uniform. The selection process filtered out the vast majority of candidates. Those who remain trained for years in hand-to-hand combat, weapons handling across every major firearms platform in use by any military in the world, demolitions, parachute operations, long range navigation without modern equipment, and survival in conditions that would kill most people within days.

They trained in the Siberian Taigga in temperatures that dropped below -40°. They trained in desert conditions in the Soviet republics of Central Asia. They trained until the things that killed other soldiers became routine problems with known solutions. When Afghanistan became a problem that conventional forces could not solve, Spettznaz were the obvious answer.

Spettznaz units arrived in Afghanistan as part of the initial invasion force. One of the most significant early operations happened on December 27th, 1979. Before the main Soviet force had even fully crossed the border, a Spettznaz unit known as the Zenith group and a unit from the Alpha Group, the Soviet KGB’s elite special forces attacked the Tajg Palace in Kabell.

Inside the palace was Hafi Zula Amin, the Afghan president the Soviets had decided was unreliable and needed to be removed. The assault on the Taj Palace lasted approximately 45 minutes. The defending force included presidential guard units totaling somewhere between 1500 and 2,000 men. The attacking force was approximately 700 Soviet special forces soldiers.

When it was over, Aman was dead. His guard force had been effectively destroyed and Soviet forces had replaced him with Barbara Carmel, a more pliable figure. The entire Afghan government changed hands in less than an hour in the dark with surgical precision. That operation set the tone for what Spettznaz would become in Afghanistan, but it also set expectations that the war itself would complicate considerably.

The Poner Valley runs roughly northeast from Kabul through the Hindu Kush mountain range, a natural corridor that had been used by armies and traders for centuries. By 1980, it was also the stronghold of Ahmed Sha Massud, a commander who would eventually become known as the lion of Pangashir, one of the most capable guerilla leaders of the 20th century.

Massud’s fighters had already humiliated several Soviet conventional operations in the valley. Soviet infantry would advance. Mujahedin fighters would withdraw into the mountain passes above the valley floor. [music] And when Soviet forces pulled back, the mujahedin would return. The valley changed hands repeatedly without the Soviets ever establishing genuine control.

It was a problem that called for a different approach. Spettznaz units operating in the pondier were given a mandate that differed fundamentally from conventional Soviet operations where regular infantry units were tasked with holding ground and protecting supply lines along the Salong highway. Spettznaz were tasked with finding and destroying Wujahedin command and logistic structures.

That meant going into the mountains, operating in small units of between eight and 20 men, sometimes dressed in local clothing to avoid immediate identification and moving at night when Mujah hadin fighters expected Soviet patrols to be in their bases. The tactic of disguise became one of the defining features of Spettzna’s operations in Afghanistan and one of the things that terrified the Mujahadin most.

A Soviet soldier in standard military kit was identifiable at distance. You could plan accordingly. You could place an ambush and wait, but a group of men moving through the mountains and shawar kamese carrying weapons that included captured mujaheden rifles could be on top of you before you understood what you were looking at.

There are documented accounts from Afghan fighters who encountered Spetznaz units and initially believed they were other mujahedin from a different group, sometimes from a rival commander. The men moved correctly. They sat correctly. They wore the right things and carried the right weapons.

And then when the moment was right, the situation reversed catastrophically. The specific operational doctrine that Spettznaz developed in Afghanistan over the course of the war built on three principles that individually were not revolutionary. Combined, they created something that the mujahedin found genuinely difficult to counter.

The first principle was patience. Soviet conventional forces typically moved with the noise and signature that armored vehicles and large infantry formations inevitably create. Spettzna’s units would insert into an operational area of often by helicopter landing in terrain that made the insertion itself dangerous and then simply wait.

They would establish observation positions on the high ground above a valley or a known supply route and watch for days before acting. A mujahedin supply column moving weapons from Pakistan through the mountain passes of Kunar province would pass through the same routes repeatedly. Spettzna’s units learned those routes and learned the timing.

The ambush when it came was not reactive. It was the conclusion of a process that had started days or weeks earlier. The second principle was aggression at the point of contact. When Spettzna’s units engaged, they did not engage from a distance and then consolidate. They moved directly into the contact, closing range as quickly as possible, using the speed and violence of their assault to prevent the Mujahedin from executing a disciplined withdrawal.

The Mujahedin had perfected the hit-and-run tactic against conventional Soviet forces. Against Spettznaz, the same tactic frequently failed because Spettzna’s units were trained specifically to deny it, to stay on top of a retreating force and prevent the kind of clean disengagement that made guerilla warfare effective. The third principle was the elimination of command.

Spettznaz were trained to identify and prioritize enemy commanders and communications personnel in any engagement. A mujahedin unit without its leader frequently fell apart tactically. A unit that lost its radio operator lost its ability to coordinate with supporting groups or call for reinforcement. Spettzna’s units in the mountains above the Kuna River and throughout the provinces of Nangahar and Logman became very good at identifying who in a group was giving orders and making sure that person was among the first casualties. The cumulative effect of these three principles applied consistently across hundreds of operations throughout the early and middle years of the war was a shift in the psychological dynamic between hunter and hunted. Mujahedin fighters were accustomed to being the ones who chose when and where engagements happened. Spettznaz changed that calculation in

specific areas of the country and the change was deeply unsettling. By 1983 and 1984, the Mujahedin command structure had accumulated enough experience with Spettzna’s units to begin developing specific countermeasures. Intelligence networks were extended to try to track Spettzna’s movements.

Fighters were warned about disguise tactics and instructed to challenge any unfamiliar group approaching their positions, regardless of what they looked like. The shoot on sight orders that emerged from several Mujahedin commanders during this period were not the product of irrational fear. They were rational responses to a tactical problem.

If you could not reliably distinguish a Spettzna’s unit from your own fighters until they were close enough to kill you, the rational solution was to treat any unidentified group approaching your position as hostile until proven otherwise. The problem with that solution was that it also created friction within the Mujahedin Allian alliance itself since different commanders groups operating in the same area now had to navigate a rule set that could result in friendly fire incidents.

It was an acknowledgement that Spettznaz had managed to impose a cost on the Mujahadin that went beyond physical casualties. There is a particular operational area in Lagar province south of Kabell where Spettznaz units conducted a series of operations in 1984 that became something close to legendary in the classified Soviet military records that were eventually made available after the fall of the Soviet Union.

A mujahedin logistics network operating in the province had been supplying weapons and fighters to groups conducting attacks on the road from Kabo [music] to Gardez. Multiple conventional Soviet operations had failed to significantly disrupt it. The network was distributed across several villages and used a rotating series of [music] couriers and safe houses that made it difficult to target with the kind of largecale operation that conventional forces mounted.

A spetzna’s reconnaissance element spent approximately three weeks in the area before any direct action was taken, moving in small groups, establishing a detailed picture of how the network operated and who the key personnel were. What followed was a series of targeted oper targeted operations across four nights that effectively dismantled the network’s command layer without ever engaging the broader fighter population in the area.

By the time the Mujahedin command in Logger understood what had happened, the people who knew how the network operated were gone. The fear that Spettznaz generated among Mujahedin fighters was not uniform. And it is worth being honest about that. The Mujahedin were not a single organization. They were a collection of groups with different commanders, different ideologies, different levels of training and equipment, and very different experiences with Soviet forces.

Some groups, particularly those operating in in remote provinces far from the areas where Spettznaz were concentrated, knew about Spettznaz primarily through reputation. Others had direct experience. The groups with direct experience were the ones issuing kill orders. The groups operating in the Ponir Valley, in Kunar, in Nurstan, and in the provinces along the Pakistani border, where Spettzna’s units conducted their most intensive operations were the groups that had learned the specific cost of an encounter.

The reputation that spread from those groups to the broader Mujahedin community was shaped by what those groups had actually experienced. It is also worth noting that the Mujahedin were not without their own successes against Spettznaz. These units suffered casualties throughout the war, operating in small teams and hostile terrain far from immediate support, was inherently dangerous, and the Mujahedin, as they adapted to the threat, occasionally managed to identify and ambush Spettzna’s elements before the element of surprise went the other way. There are Soviet records of Spettzna’s units that were compromised and caught in terrain that negated their tactical advantages. The war was not a series of Soviet victories followed by a Soviet departure. It was a grinding, complicated, decadel long conflict that cost the Soviet Union 15,000 dead and tens of thousands wounded and ultimately failed to achieve its political objectives. But the tactical record of

Spettznaz within that broader failure is a separate question from the strategic outcome. Tactically, in the specific mission set they were assigned, Soviet special forces in Afghanistan were extraordinarily effective. The kill orders were evidence of that effectiveness. One of the most discussed aspects of Spettzna’s operations in Afghanistan among military historians is the degree to which those operations represented a genuinely novel application of special forces doctrine and the degree to which they simply reflected good execution of principles that had been established earlier. The answer is probably both. Soviet military thought about special operations had been evolving throughout the Cold War and Afghanistan provided a laboratory for testing theories and doctrine that had previously only existed on paper or in exercises. The experience of fighting a guerilla war in mountainous terrain against a highly motivated enemy who was receiving foreign support and

increasingly sophisticated weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles that began arriving in significant numbers in the mid 1980s. force adaptations that went beyond what the training manuals had anticipated. The arrival of Stinger missiles from the United States in 1986 changed the tactical calculus around helicopter operations, which had been a central component of Spettzna’s insertion and extraction doctrine.

Units that had relied on helicopter-born operations had to adapt, incorporating more ground infiltration routes through terrain that was itself dangerous independent of enemy action. The adaptations made and the lessons absorbed in Afghanistan shaped the Russian special forces doctrine that would be applied in subsequent conflicts.

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was completed in February 1989. The last Soviet soldier crossed the friendship bridge over the Amu Daria River and a war that had lasted almost exactly 9 years and 2 months came to an end. The Afghan government that the Soviets had supported collapsed 3 years later.

Ahmed Sha Masud, the commander who had defined resistance in the Ponir Valley against both Spettznaz and conventional Soviet forces throughout the war, survived the Soviet conflict and the subsequent civil war, only to be assassinated by al-Qaeda operatives in September 2001, 2 days before the attacks on New York City and Washington.

The men who had fought for the Mujahedin against Soviet forces who had learned to fear the sound of a helicopter and to issue kill on sight orders for men dressed in their own clothing became in some cases the same men that a new generation of Western soldiers would face in the same mountains after 2001. The terrain did not change.

The nature of guerrilla warfare in the Hindu Kush did not change. What had changed was which foreign army was discovering again how difficult Afghanistan could be. The story of Spettznaz in Afghanistan is not a simple story about elite soldiers doing elite things. It is a story about what happens when a military that is losing a war at the strategic level deploys its best people to try to solve specific tactical problems.

and about the gap between tactical success and strategic outcome that defines so many modern conflicts. The Mujahedin commanders who ordered their fighters to shoot unfamiliar men on site were acknowledging something real within the specific domain of small unit operations in the mountains of eastern and southeastern Afghanistan.

Soviet spets had achieved a level of effectiveness that forced the enemy to change its behavior. That is a meaningful thing. It is not the same as winning the war. And the men who came home from Afghanistan knew the difference. But the kill on sight order stands as a particular kind of tribute.

The kind that an enemy gives you not because they respect you, but because they have calculated that the most rational response to your presence is to eliminate it as quickly as possible and not ask questions afterward. In the mountains above Kunar and Logar and the Poner Valley, Soviet special forces had made themselves precisely that dangerous.

And the men who issued those orders were acknowledging in the most direct language available to them that they knew it. If military history and special forces operations are something you want to explore further, the next video on screen covers another conflict where elite units change the outcome of engagements that conventional forces could not resolve.

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