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The tragedy and valor of AfghanMajor General Alexander Antonovich Lyakhovsky
"Afghan War" Dedicated to Soldiers - Valiant Knights of their Fatherland.
In May 1989, a week after another trip to Afghanistan, while testing a new technique with a shell fragment, my right leg was broken. It was especially offensive that this happened not in a combat situation, but as a result of an error in the calculations of the designers.
More than eight months had to be spent in hospital wards. It was lucky that he fell into the hands of such a doctor as the Doctor of Medical Sciences, an Afghan colonel V.K. Nikolenko, who saved more than one thousand of the wounded and sick. He performed the operation masterly and saved my leg.
At that time, Afghan topics were in the center of attention of the Soviet public. However, many of the materials that were published at that time were guilty of inaccuracies, bias, or were the speculations of their authors. I had never thought of writing about Afghanistan before, but reading these fables, I was only amazed at my ability to distort and alter everything, and therefore, taking advantage of the forced idleness, I decided to describe my vision of the events that took place in this country. However, some Soviet leaders were not interested in the people learning the truth about Afghanistan, and therefore information about this war was kept secret. There was no access to documents even after the end of the war. Personal contacts helped, as well as the fact that I myself had to prepare a lot of reports, letters, and other documents. It only remained to regret my own hindsight, because when leaving Kabul we burned a huge number of documents, believing that we would never need them again. At that time, no one thought about researchers. However, not only we did this, so much was lost forever.
In 1990, the documentary novel On the Scorched Land of Afghanistan was published in several issues of the Army magazine. Unfortunately, at that time it was not possible to write everything that I would like to write in it, but this story found positive responses from Afghans, and when summing up the results of the competition for the best materials published in military journals in 1990, for this story I was awarded the first encouraging Prize of the Minister of Defense of the USSR. This served as an incentive to start work on the book. The journalist Vyacheslav Zabrodin helped me a lot with this.
Although much has already been written about the war in Afghanistan, there is still no complete picture of events and a comprehensive analysis, showing the actions of Soviet troops and PDPA forces. There are still many blank spots that are unknown to a wide range of readers.
In the book "The Tragedy and Valor of Afgan" I tried to fill this gap. But the topic of the "Afghan war" is so multifaceted that I only managed to touch on it. Much still awaits its explorer. Here, from the position of an army officer, the Afghan epic of the Soviet troops is interpreted through the prism of the rivalry between the two superpowers, which clashed in this country in the 70s and 80s. At the same time, the main emphasis is placed on documentary material (reports, reports, speeches, recommendations) and memories of direct participants in the events, sometimes to the detriment of the author's text. It is to some extent even overloaded with documents, but I deliberately took this step, because they are the most impartial witnesses of the events in Afghanistan.
The "Afghan war" is history. Based on a comprehensive analysis of the situation, there is reason to believe that the Soviet leadership was drawn into this war as a result of well-organized strategic misinformation as part of a global operation, which had the ultimate goal of eliminating the socialist camp and the collapse of the USSR. This was the last war of the Soviet Union, but not the last on earth, so its lessons and experience are very instructive in our turbulent times, especially in terms of their use in peacekeeping operations under the auspices of the UN and in resolving various kinds of conflicts.
After all, the "Afghan war" once again proves that relying on force as a means of achieving a political goal is often untenable.
The tragedy and valor of Afghan
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