Matthews Matt M. We Have Not Learned How to Wage War: There The Soviet Approach in Afghanistan 1979-1989

Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute Press,US Army Combined Arms Center, 2011. — 77 p. — ISBN: 978-0-9841901-9-5Over the course of the last eight years, a plethora of new primary research material related to the Soviet war in Afghanistan has emerged. With Lester W. Grau and Michael A Gress’s important translation and editing of the Russian General Staff history, titled The Soviet-Afghan War:
How a Superpower Fought and Lost, in 2002 to the recent work of the Woodrow Wilson International Center Cold War International History
Project and The National Security Archive, the conflict has now come into sharper historical focus. Recent secondary sources such as Gregory Feifer’s The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan, and David Loyn’s In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation, have also helped shed new light on the war. Additionally, Stephen Tanner’s revised edition of Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War against the Taliban has examined the long history of the many conflicts in Afghanistan. It is interesting, however, that many Western military analysts have viewed the Soviet experience as a failure, an episode from which few lessons can be gleaned.1 In fact, there is not a single reference to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the US Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency Field Manual FM 3-24 published in 2006. A military analyst who suggested including the Soviet conflict in the manual concluded that, “Pentagon officials seemed to have little awareness about what Moscow had been trying to do there or for how long.”Is There Still Anyone on Your Side? Invasion and Consolidation December 1979–February 1980
A Deviation from the Original Plans: The Search for Victory 1980–1984
Are We Going to Be Stuck There Indefinitely? The Search for a Way Out 1985–1989
ConclusionsMaps
Soviet Invasion
Panjshir, 7 April–May 1984
Second Eastern Offensive of 1985
Zhawar Campaign, 1986