Afghanistan and The Stinger Myth

The Soviet Union’s involvement in Afghanistan lasted almost an entire decade, from 1979 to 1989. Estimates over the exact amount of casualties during the brutal nine-year conflict vary, but the general consensus among scholars is that at least one million civilians were killed, in addition to 90,000 Mujahidin fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers.  

Yet, to this day there is controversy over what forced the Soviets to withdraw its combat troops from Afghan soil in 1989. For many former American Cold War hawks the answer is clear: The Stinger surface-to-air-missile (SAM).

As Congressman Charlie Wilson told the Washington Post in 1989: “Once the Stinger made their helicopters useless, that put the Russians on foot against the Mujahedin and there’s no one on Earth who can fight the Mujahedin on Foot.” This sentiment was also widely propagated in the American media during the conflict. For example, in an influential 60 Minutes Special by CBS News on Afghanistan in October 1988 the host announced: “The Stinger is generally credited with having won the war for the Mujahedin.” 

In the first decade of the 2000s, the Hollywood movie Charlie Wilson’s War further trumpeted this view and credited Charlie Wilson’s determination to increase the funding of “Operation Cyclone” – a secret CIA program to arm and finance the Afghan resistance – and supply the Mujahedin with anti-aircraft weapons with bringing down the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. (Wilson, in fact, did not favor the Stinger SAM at the beginning of his involvement in the covert operation.)

Around 900 to 1,200 Stinger SAMs and approximately 250 reusable gripstocks (launchers) were channeled via Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) operators to the Afghan resistance in the last three years of the Soviet-Afghan War. The first Stingers were fired on September 26, 1986 when a Soviet-trained Afghan engineer turned Mujahedin shot down three Mi-24 helicopters in Jalalabad.

According to a U.S. Army analysis from early 1989, quoted in Alan J. Kuperman’s article “The Stinger Missile and U.S. Intervention in Afghanistan,” the Afghan resistance achieved “approximately 269 kills in about 340 engagements.” Kuperman notes, however, that this number is difficult to verify. According to the official records of the Soviet 40th Army, the Soviet military’s losses consisted of 113 fixed-wing aircraft and 333 helicopters (in comparison, the United States lost 5,086 helicopters during the Vietnam War).

The effectiveness of the Stinger can be attributed to six technological advantages, according to Kuperman: “it required little training; it was truly man-portable, weighing just 35 pounds; it was a “fire-and-forget” weapon, it was faster and had greater range than earlier SAMs; it could attack fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters from any angle, unlike the primitive SA-7 and Redeye, which could focus only on a jet engine’s exhaust from the rear; and once locked on target, it could not be deflected by flares.”

The Stinger SAM was undoubtedly a successful weapon on the battlefield. Yet, the question remains: Did the introduction of the Stinger trigger the end of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan? Here the answer has to be an unequivocal “No.”

Rodric Braithwaite, in his superb work Afgantsy, succinctly summarizes the principal reason: “Gorbachev took the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan a full year before the first Stinger was fired.”

Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed general secretary in March 1985. According to his own account he and the Politburo almost immediately began “to seek a way out of the situation.” This statement is supported by the UN negotiator Diego Cordovez , who would broker the final Soviet exit from Afghanistan during peace talks in Geneva: “From the time Gorbachev came in things began to change… It was immediate and very significant.”

Kuperman states that the principal reason why the Soviet general secretary had no desire to continue the war was that his political pet project - perestroika, or restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system, could never take off without Western support, namely the technological and economic cooperation that occurred during the period of détente that began in 1971 and ended with the Soviet invasion in 1979.

Interestingly, Kuperman points out in his essay that it was President Jimmy Carter and his decisions to end détente in 1979 and to support the Afghan resistance movement with weapons – thereby preventing the early defeat of the nascent insurgency by the 40th Army – that influenced Gorbachev, rather than the Reagan Administration’s Stinger program.

“(…)[T]he major U.S. escalation of aid in 1985-1986 appears not to have been crucial to the rebels’ continued survival, nor to have had significant impact on Soviet decision making,” Kuperman emphasizes. Indeed, former Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnazde once noted: “The Stinger definitely prolonged our stay…It made our military men, our hawks, much more determined than ever not to withdraw, not to appear to be giving in under duress.”

Looking at Politburo records the Soviet military strategy between 1985 to 1986 was to “bomb” the Mujahidin to the negotiation table by stepping up the bombing campaign, deploying additional elite Spetznaz special forces, as well as more heavy military equipment. However, the number of Soviet troops deployed to Afghanistan remained capped at 120,000.

In October 1985, the Politburo finally approved Gorbachev’s plan to apply “a combination of military and political measures” to “expedite the withdrawal” of Soviet forces and leaving “a friendly Afghanistan” behind. In November 1985, the secretary general tried to convey the Soviet Union’s policy shift to U.S. President Ronald Reagan during a summit, but he “did not pick up at all” on this new development, according to then-U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

In February 1986, Gorbachev told the 27th Party Congress (February 25, 1986 – March 6, 1986) that Afghanistan was a “bleeding wound” and “we should like, in the nearest future, to withdraw the Soviet troops stationed in Afghanistan…,” although he simultaneously  announced that “counterrevolution and imperialism” were the principal causes of the war rather than Soviet foreign policy.

It was also on February 25, 1986 that the interagency Planning Coordination Group (PCG), a committee responsible for managing covert U.S. program in the Reagan administration, gave the green light for the deployment of the Stinger SAM to Afghanistan. Given this timeline, it clearly could not have influenced Gorbachev’s withdrawal speech cited above.

The “watershed change in the Politburo’s official policy” as Kuperman calls it, occurred in November 1986, when attendees switched from insisting on a “friendly” Afghanistan to a merely “neutral” government in Kabul. More importantly, the Soviet authorities imposed a strict deadline for withdrawal – “one year – at maximum two years,” according to Gorbachev – no matter what the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan would be like. It was this decision that ended the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

On the battlefield, Soviet forces quickly adopted to the new threat posed by the Stinger SAM, by flying higher altitude missions (thereby increasing the number of civilian casualties due to less accurate bombing), equipping aircraft with infrared flares, flying helicopter gunships very low among the mountains, and switching transport flights and other military operations to the night. Additionally, the Red Army set out to buy Stingers from the insurgents, albeit with relatively little success. 

“Although none of the Soviets’ countermeasures were totally successful, the Stinger… did not succeed in forcing Soviet helicopters out of the sky,” according to a U.S. military analyst quoted by Kuperman. Braithwaite concurs in Afgantsy: “After initial panic, the Soviet countermeasures reduced the loss rate to much what it had been before the Stingers arrived.”

While the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan may have weakened hardliners in the Kremlin – according to one French expert by “undermining the prestige of both the old Brezhnevian guard and the army” which “gave Gorbachev more room for maneuver” – the actual impact of the Stinger SAM on these developments is minimal to non-existent. Kuperman’s summary is worthwhile quoting in full here:

Although counter-intuitive and contrary to popular wisdom, it appears the U.S. counter-escalation of 1985-1986 was largely irrelevant to the Soviet withdrawal decision of November 1986. This is clearly the case for the Stinger, which was not utilized in Afghanistan until September 1986, a mere two months before the Politburo’s decision to adopt a withdrawal deadline. At the key November 1986 Politburo meeting, no mention was made of the Stinger nor any other U.S. escalation.