Word: chechnya
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...perhaps as many as 1 in 5--who had served in Afghanistan and learned how to fight a guerrilla war. Surely these veterans, the so-called Afghantsy, many now commanding the Grozny operation, had not forgotten everything they learned? After spending two weeks with the units sent to quell Chechnya, however, I no longer have any illusions...
...Chechnya began almost on the same day in December as the conflict in Afghanistan had begun 15 years earlier. But that is all the two campaigns have in common. In Afghanistan a small group of special forces from the kgb and the gru, the military intelligence service, assisted by several paratroop battalions, managed to take Kabul, the capital, in one day with minimal losses. In the Chechnya war, our commanders seemed to be totally oblivious of this lesson when they went after Chechen leader Jokhar Dudayev. They should have used elite troops; instead, they went in with raw recruits...
...conditions of life for the soldiers in Chechnya were dreadful. In Afghanistan we were issued special rations of canned meat, condensed milk, juice, crackers, tea and a Sterno can, so you could heat up kasha or rice with the canned meat. All I saw our soldiers eating in Chechnya was pearl barley with a bare hint of meat. Looking at this meager fare, I had the impression that we must have eaten up all the army's stores of dried rations in Afghanistan and that no one had bothered to produce any since then...
Idid not see a single soldier in Chechnya with a sleeping bag, gloves or other proper kit. In fact, you would have thought the Russian army had just crawled out of a cave, where they still cook over a fire and sleep on the ground instead of in tents. The soldiers had no change of underwear and had not been able to wash for weeks. It seemed, in fact, as if this war was being waged 200 or 300 years ago. The only difference was that what our soldiers were carrying in their dirty hands were not old-fashioned muskets...
...Russian Research Center, which is housed in Coolidge Hall, initially had arranged to have Dudayev's emissary, Aslamebek Kadiev, speak at the seminar which discussed the war from Chechnya's point of view. The general later promised to call in the middle of the session...