The captain had watched the deception play out with mixed feelings. There was only one interpretation of the events – the Afghan soldiers were inexperienced, the disciplines of a modern army were not natural to them. They were gullible because they’d been organized according to Western military concepts, indoctrinated to being told how to behave. They did not recognize when an order seemed out of place. These were the soldiers he and his comrades would be relying upon to defeat the uprisings, inheriting men who had rolled over in muddled disarray as motorized rifle divisions entered Afghanistan from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, soldiers who hadn’t fired a shot as fifty thousand foreign troops took control of their country. He was not troubled by the Afghan troops’ strength, he was troubled by their weakness. The invasion had been intended to capture the Afghan military machine, funded and built up over the years by lavish subsidies. The purpose of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan was not to fight the war but to direct it using the Afghan military. But even before the desert dust kicked up by the invasion had settled it was apparent that there was no war machine to capture. As a ring of Soviet troops spread around the country taking the major cities, Herat, Farah, Kandahar and Jalalabad – a near-perfect loop of successful tank and troop manoeuvres – the Afghan forces melted away. On New Year’s Day, the Afghan 15th Division revolted in Kandahar. When the Soviet 201st Division entered Jalalabad the 11th Division of the Afghan army simply deserted, a whole division lost in less than a few hours. It was clear to the captain that the real war was only just beginning.

He had never been one of the more bullish officers who considered the resistance to a Communist state primitive, fragmented and disorganized – a tribal opposition equipped with mismatched rifles, some dating back fifty years, and led by squabbling factions. Such an assessment, though accurate in its material analysis, overlooked one key advantage the enemy possessed. This was their home. Superior weapons did not guarantee victory in this mysterious landscape. Smitten with the mystique of this country, the captain had spent many hours reading about the history of resistance in Afghanistan, the defeat of the British and their pitiful retreat from Kabul. One fact above all else had struck him, that since expelling the British:

The Afghans have never lost a war.

What better opponents to carve a brilliant career from? He entered this war from a position of supreme respect for his adversaries but also supreme confidence that he would become the first soldier that these mighty warriors would be defeated by, or, if they preferred, they could die fighting.