RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
Thirty years after Soviet tanks rumbled through Afghanistan, many of them are still strewn, wrecked and rusted along the mountainsides, a reminder of a war that Russians withdrew from in humiliation. It entered that war in confusion. The year was 1979, and it was shortly after Afghanistan's communist party had taken over the government. In its zeal to modernize its feudal society, the new Afghan government seized land and killed landowners, angering much of the countryside.
ARI SHAPIRO, host:
All of this worried its neighbor, the Soviet Union, at a time when the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was bloated and ill and hardly able to make decisions.
MONTAGNE: We pick up this story with Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer. He's written a new history of that war called "The Great Gamble."
Mr. GREGORY FEIFER (Author, "The Great Gamble"): Essentially, the Soviets saw what was going on in Afghanistan through their ideological glasses. They wanted to go in and shore up a very young communist regime in Afghanistan. And so they simplified it, they blamed all of the country's unrest brewing in the countryside on one of Afghanistan's two leaders. There was one, the president with whom the Soviet leadership was quite close, and there was his rival, the prime minister. And the idea was, just get rid of him and all of Afghanistan's problems would go away, and it would continue developing toward a mature socialist state.
MONTAGNE: There's one story that you tell that really brings out how much intrigue was involved, and even bungling.
Mr. FEIFER: Absolutely. When I was speaking to the KGB's chief representative in Afghanistan at the time, he told me that years after the invasion, the head of the Afghan intelligence service told him that he should write a book about all the plots and skullduggery that was going on. And the KGB chief respondent saying, you know, no one would believe it. You know, it would read like fiction.
The common view of the war was that it was a Soviet territorial grab. But really, the truth was much more confused, and actually the Soviet Union spent about a year turning down requests by the Afghan and communist government to bring in Soviet troops. When it was finally decided that the Soviet Union would take action, the idea was to get rid of the Afghan leader. And the Soviet leadership had decided that they would poison him. And so his cook, who was a Soviet agent, delivered poison in a glass of his favorite drink, which was Coca-Cola. And when the Soviets showed up at the presidential palace hours later to check on whether he had died, he was still very much alive. It turned out that the Coca-Cola had counteracted the effects of the poison.
Now, there was a second attempt two weeks later that was relatively more successful. This time, the poison was delivered in some soup, and it made the president ill and he was dying. And his aides called up the Soviet embassy, and the people at the embassy had no idea what was going on. They had no idea that there was a plot to kill the Afghan leader, so they sent doctors. So Soviet doctors came to the presidential palace and started resuscitating him, and he had essentially recovered when the Soviet invasion actually began. There was no one decision to launch an invasion, it was basically this sort of inertia that surrounded these attempts to - bungled attempts to poison the Afghan president.
MONTAGNE: And to end this story - and I get this from your book - this president who was revived by a Russian doctor was simply just killed by Russian soldiers. The Russian soldiers' experience in Afghanistan has often been compared to American soldiers experience in Vietnam, in the sense that they were traumatized and disillusioned.
Mr. FEIFER: For many soldiers, the war was just simply hell. And there was a lot of disease. Many people say that more soldiers died from disease in Afghanistan than they did from combat. Soldiers had to essentially steal to survive Soldiers stole food from their own canteens, and of course they would also steal from the civilian population. And a lot of the soldiers to who I spoke who took part in the opening years of the war say that they really believe that this thievery from the civilian population really escalated the war very quickly. That that's what lead the local population to rebel against the Soviets.
MONTAGNE: The Russian soldier's lives were hellish. They also, however, were incredibly brutal towards the Afghan population.
Mr. FEIFER: Absolutely. A lot of the people - a lot of the veterans who fought in Afghanistan were told before going there that they were going to take part in a patriotic mission to help their communist brothers, and what they found themselves in was a bitter counter-insurgency. Battling in the mountains - they had huge Soviet columns of mechanized forces rumbling up and down trying to attack on Mujahideen that consisted of small groups of men, highly mobile. Locals, of course, they knew the territory very well, and they would just continue climbing higher and higher and melt away. Operations were poorly coordinated, and they quickly became very demoralized. And they responded from the top down by taking out their aggression essentially against the civilian population. The Soviets really committed unspeakable atrocities. They mined huge parts of Afghanistan. There were thousands and thousands of civilian casualties. On the other hand, there were atrocities carried out against these young Soviet conscripts who were fighting in utterly alien territory, and didn't really know what they were doing.
MONTAGNE: Greg, how much of the story, of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, can be applied to the coalition war that is taking place today?
Mr. FEIFER: Well, the NATO forces in Afghanistan are now about to dramatically increase under a new Obama administration in the United States. It is vital to try to stabilize the country as best we can. And that will require rebuilding the society so that the government there can be sustainable. We have to do essentially the opposite of what the Soviets did. We have to be incredibly sensitive to the needs of the local population. And our mission is to rebuild the society so that the government can be sustainable. It's an incredibly difficult task, but it's vital that we understand what happened in Afghanistan if we have any chance of succeeding now.
MONTAGNE: Greg, thanks very much for joining us.
Mr. FEIFER: You're welcome.
MONTAGNE: Gregory Feifer is NPR's Moscow correspondent, and he's the author of the new book, "The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan." And you can read more twist and turns of those attempts to poison the Afghan president at our website, npr.org. This is Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
SHAPIRO: And I'm Ari Shapiro.