An Iconic Bridge Witnesses US Allies Fleeing Afghanistan, Just as the Soviets Did

 DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP) — The Friendship Bridge has an eerily Orwellian name and a storied history in Afghanistan's wars.

And, once again, the bridge that spans the Amu Darya River between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan served as a backdrop for a watershed moment in the fighting this week. Pro-government soldiers streamed onto the crossing, seeking safety on the opposite bank, in a chaotic retreat from Mazar-i-Sharif.

The scene on Thursday mirrored an iconic moment 32 years ago, at the end of the failed Soviet war in Afghanistan when the bridge served as the defeated Soviet Army's final exit route out of the country.

Then, on Feb. 15, 1989, red flags attached to armoured vehicles flapped in a winter wind as the departing Soviet troops drove and marched across the bridge. After a decade of occupation and defeats, that was supposed to signal an organized, dignified exit for the superpower's army.

Gen. Boris V. Gromov, the Soviet commander, walked alone behind the last armoured column as it rumbled across and out of the country. He then declared that Russia had completed its mission in Afghanistan.

“That's all there is to it,” General Gromov told a television crew. “Not a single Soviet soldier or officer is working behind my back.”

The Red Army formally withdrew.

The armoured vehicles moved slowly and precisely across the roiling, glacier-fed river, as if in a parade. Women on the Uzbek side greeted the soldiers with the traditional bread and salt greeting. Soldiers were given wristwatches as a thank you for their service. Television cameras captured the event.

The Biden administration made a point of avoiding a similar scene of ceremonial closure for the US Army in Afghanistan, which is now hardly imaginable given the unexpectedly rapid collapse of the US-backed government on Sunday.

On July 12, the American commander, Gen. Austin S. Miller, quietly left the country. And, without a formal handover to the Afghan Army, the US evacuated its headquarters at Bagram Air Base, which was originally built by the Soviets.

Of course, the Soviet pomp in departure did nothing to prevent a grinding civil war in the aftermath of withdrawal, or soul-searching at home about the war. And, given what happened after that, Gen. Gromov's march came to symbolize the ignoble end to the Soviet war.

Mohammad Najibullah, the leader the Russians left behind, stayed for three years after the parade on the Friendship Bridge, far longer than President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country on the eve of the parade.

Despite the fact that the American occupation lasted longer, the Soviet Union established deeper roots, according to Yuri V. Krupnov, a Russian expert on Afghanistan and director of the Institute of Demography and Migration in Moscow.

The Soviet Union educated approximately 200,000 Afghan engineers, military officers, and administrators, providing a solid foundation for the Najibullah government.

“You can criticize the Soviet Union all you want, but the goal was to build a contemporary, modern state” and to secure the empire's southern borders, he explained. Hydroelectric dams, tunnels, roads, and bridges, including the Friendship Bridge, were built by the Soviet Union.

The government that the Soviets left behind also limped along for a longer period of time, he claimed, because Moscow entrusted its client army with heavier weapons such as tanks and artillery, as opposed to the lightest arms given out by the Americans. The Soviets also brutally suppressed the narcotics trade, preventing the rise of a corrupt class of police and officials.

Regardless, it failed. The Najibullah government fell apart in 1992, and the Soviet-installed leader was captured and executed in 1996 by the Taliban, an emerging new force in Afghanistan. In Kabul, his body was hung from a utility pole.

Following their departure, Russians described having an Afghan syndrome, similar to the Vietnam syndrome in the United States: they wanted nothing to do with the country.

The retreat of soldiers loyal to the American-backed Afghan government over the Friendship Bridge, which collapsed just three days later, was a more chaotic scene than the Soviet departure decades earlier.

After breaking through the Afghan Army's front lines, the Taliban quickly seized Mazar-i-Sharif. The government's security forces and the militias of two warlords, Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad Noor, fled to the bridge 45 miles to the north in search of safety.

According to social media posts, by evening, the Friendship Bridge had become a stalled traffic jam of cars and pickup trucks loaded with soldiers.

There was no graceful exit.

According to the foreign ministry, Uzbek authorities allowed in one group of 84 pro-government soldiers but arrested them for illegal border crossing. They were preventing others from crossing.

Source: 

• The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/world/middleeast/afghanistan-taliban-soviet-friendship-bridge.html