The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War - Book Review

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2003 by William C. Green

Jalali, Ali Ahmad, and Lester W. Grau, eds. The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War. Quantico, Va.: U.S. Marine Corps Studies and Analysis Division. 416pp. (no price given)

What could be both more poignant and ludicrous than Commander Abdul Baqi Balots's account of his survival of a firefight in which his closest friend was killed? "I saw a lot of Soviets coming at me and they were all firing (they put ten bullet holes through my baggy trousers)....Habib Noor told me that, unless we crossed the stream to the north, we would not be able to engage the Soviets....I ran across and jumped but landed directly into the stream. 'Oh, Allah,' I cried, 'you have killed me without dignity.' Then I made a big jump, I don't know how since even a tank can't clear it, but I did and got out of the stream."

This episode is recounted in Ali Jalali and Lester Grau's book The Other Side of the Mountain. The two editors are well known for a sequence of publications on unconventional warfare going back to the early 1990s. For those who follow this field, it is no surprise that they are employed at the U.S. Army's distinguished Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Their highly readable compilation is a significant contribution to the literature on guerrilla warfare, and it has immense implications for the contemporary (at this writing) U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

The work consists of ninety-two "vignettes" of tactical action, with a few longer accounts of more protracted operations, all based on interviews with mujahideen participants. The book was inspired by a Russian text used at the Frunze Combined Arms Academy, detailing Soviet tactical action in Afghanistan. Jalali and Grau earlier produced an English translation of that book under the title The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan (National Defense Univ. Press, 1996). The Other Side of the Mountain points out when one of its short stories covers the same actions or operations as in Bear, but the works are not parallel texts.

The present work consists of fourteen chapters and a conclusion, composed of two to sixteen stories apiece. Each chapter illustrates a different type of tactical combat. There is a short discussion of the tactic before each chapter and a commentary at the end. This format has been used in military writing for many years (such as in the study Infantry in Battle, edited by George Marshall, Military History and Publications section of The Infantry School, 1934). However, in recent decades the implicit analysis this approach provides has been greatly strengthened by the more explicit case-study method. If these stories had been written and presented as formal case studies, some existing weaknesses could have been avoided--the chief one being burying the chapter "Blocking Enemy Lines of Communication" halfway through the book, despite the editors' and contributors' amply demonstrated contention that logistics dominated the Soviet war in Afghanistan and was its chief strategic (not tactical) factor.

The thematic organization of the chapters is a powerful approach, but it means sacrificing any sense of chronological development. As a result, there is little sense of the evolution of mujahideen tactics during the war or of their interaction over time with Soviet tactics, despite occasional references to such evolution in the chapter commentaries. In fact, the work places unreasonable expectations on the background knowledge of the reader. A summary of the war's origins, conduct, and outcome is badly needed. A table listing each major mujahideen faction, with its leader, ideology, and sponsors, would also be helpful, as these factions are referred to throughout the narrative. The book might also have addressed popular myths or conceptions about the war--for example, the U.S. view that distribution of Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahideen broke the back of Soviet air support and hence was the decisive point of the struggle. The editors at a number of points indicate their disagreement with this vie w but never provide a formal rebuttal. On the other hand, the book capriciously provides detailed background information on such relatively trivial points as the official U.S. Army load weights for mules, Central Asian horses, and camels.

The book has a strong geographic bias--most of the actions it describes are in the vicinity of Kabul or on the route connecting Kabul and Jalalabad. Most of the remaining actions are in the Kandahar area. There is nothing from the Herat region, or the area around Mazar-e Sharif, or the Panjshir Valley. This bias may be explained by a point the editors make in their introduction, that a number of interviews could not be completed because of the 1996 Taliban advance on Kabul and the north. Still, they need to explain how they have compensated for this imbalance in their material, especially in view of their own contention that the conduct of the war varied by region and by the ethnicities involved.