The First Drone War? When the Mujahideen bled the Soviet Bear

Our series on asymmetric warfare revisits pivotal moments in modern history when underdogs rewrote the rules of war, and forced superpowers to reckon with new realities.

PART - 2

The bruising Soviet-Afghan War between 1979-89 saw unmanned surveillance, guerrilla adaptation and shoulder-fired missiles prefigure the drone-powered asymmetries of modern warfare.

No one conquers Afghanistan, that ‘graveyard of empires’ as the hoary geopolitical cliché goes. That has apparently been the lesson, repeated through centuries of imperial misadventure, and paid for in blood by the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and, more recently in the historical timeline, the United States.

Overconfidence in Afghanistan is punished not just by terrain, but by culture and the fierce independence of its people. The Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) was only the latest in a line of imperial blunders stretching back to the 19th century.

When British troops entered Kabul in 1839 to replace Dost Mohammad Khan with Shah Shuja, they assumed a swift correction in the ‘Great Game’ – the century-long, slow-burn chess match between the British and Russian empires played out across the mountains and deserts of Central Asia. Instead, they faced disaster. By 1842, nearly 16,000 British and Indian personnel were killed or captured in one of Britain’s worst military defeats - the First Anglo-Afghan War. Only one European, William Brydon, survived the retreat to Jalalabad, a lone, wounded symbol of imperial hubris crushed by Afghan defiance.

The pattern repeated in later Anglo-Afghan Wars (1878–80, 1919) with early successes being followed by tribal revolts and untenable occupations. By the late 20th century, Afghanistan was once again at the crossroads of global rivalry. The 1978 Saur Revolution brought Marxist rule under Nur Mohammad Taraki (the Afghani Lenin) whose radical reforms alienated the deeply traditional society. After his assassination by his deputy, the devious Hafizullah Amin, chaos deepened. Fearing instability and Amin’s increasingly erratic behaviour (suspicions of him being a CIA agent?), Soviet forces assassinated him in a brutal raid on the Tajbeg Palace in December 1979, installing the pliable Babrak Karmal in his place.

But the die was cast. What Moscow hoped would be a brief, surgical intervention became a grinding war of occupation. That war is since remembered as a Cold War misadventure, but it also holds a deeper resonance, especially in wake of the success of Ukraine’s ‘Operation Spider’s Web’ against Russia earlier this month.

In many ways, the Soviet-Afghan War was a dress rehearsal for the drone wars of the 21st century. Though drones then were rudimentary and non-lethal, the core elements of modern remote warfare - surveillance, precision, asymmetry and psychological warfare - were all present.

The USSR deployed unmanned reconnaissance aircraft in Afghanistan as early as the early 1980s, notably the Tupolev Tu-141 ‘Strizh’ and the Tu-143 ‘Reys’ were jet-powered drones used for photographic surveillance. These drones flew pre-programmed routes over mujahideen-held territory, capturing images of trails, encampments and weapon caches.

Though non-lethal, these UAVs were a significant technological step, allowing the Soviets to monitor an elusive, terrain-savvy enemy. Despite their limitations like short range, vulnerability to weather and lack of real-time feedback, they foreshadowed the evolution of modern drones like the Bayraktar TB2 or MQ-9 Reaper.

Mujahideen fighters developed primitive but effective counters to Soviet aerial surveillance by camouflaging camps with tree canopies and mud, moving primarily at night or in foggy conditions and using donkey trails, not roads, to avoid detection. Leaders like Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley were masters of guerrilla warfare. Massoud’s blend of classical military acumen and local legitimacy made him a nightmare for Soviet field commanders and helped him elude as many as nine Soviet offensives mounted against the Mujahideen.

By the mid-1980s, the war’s dynamics altered radically when the CIA, funnelling arms and funding through Pakistan’s ISI in Operation Cyclone, supplied the sandal-wearing mujahideen with FIM-92 Stinger missiles - portable, heat-seeking and lethal to low-flying Soviet aircraft. The Saudi regime matched U.S. dollars with ideological zeal, while China and Egypt supplied surplus weapons.

Helicopters like the Mi-24 Hind, once symbols of Soviet dominance, suddenly became vulnerable. The Stingers neutralized air superiority, forcing Soviet aircraft to fly higher and limiting their ability to support ground forces or exploit drone surveillance. This was asymmetric warfare at its sharpest: a $75,000 weapon threatening multi-million-dollar gunships in an inversion of military economics still seen in today’s drone conflicts. Over time, Soviet confidence in surveillance turned to disillusion as intelligence without action, or without consequence, soon became noise.

The Soviet-Afghan War was not the first drone war in the way we think of drone warfare today but it was certainly its spiritual prelude in a sense. In the high passes of the Hindu Kush, the Soviets tried to win with machines in a war that instead demanded patience and understanding.

The Soviet failure in Afghanistan (like America’s Vietnam quagmire) remains a cautionary tale where even advanced surveillance cannot replace local intelligence, hearts-and-minds, or adaptability.

That said, as former diplomat Rodric Braithwaite details in his brilliant Afghantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89 (2012) – a revisionist account dismantling many long-standing Cold War-era myths about the Soviet-Afghan War – the simplistic Western narrative that casts the USSR as an expansionist aggressor defeated by freedom-loving mujahideen backed by the heroic CIA is misleading to say the least.

Braithwaite shows the Soviet invasion was not part of a grand imperialist strategy, but a reluctant reactive move. The Kremlin was deeply divided over intervening in Afghanistan. The decision was made hastily and defensively, to stabilize a neighbouring Marxist regime (PDPA) from spiralling into chaos.

Unlike the U.S. in Vietnam or Iraq, the Soviets never deployed more than 120,000 troops - a relatively small force given the scale of Afghanistan. Braithwaite reveals that the Soviets tried to avoid mass civilian casualties (especially early on) and spent significant resources on development, such as building roads, hospitals and schools.

It bears recalling that the Mujahideen were fractured along ethnic, tribal, and ideological lines, and often fought each other as much as they did the Soviets. Many Afghans, especially urban and secular ones, were ambivalent or even hostile to the Islamist fighters.

While there certainly were abuses, Braithwaite’s portrayal of Soviet troops is more nuanced and humane than the Western stereotype of the sadistic Red Army. While acknowledging the tactical impact of weapons like the Stinger missile, Braithwaite downplays the myth of a CIA-engineered victory. The Soviet decision to withdraw was driven more by domestic political and economic exhaustion, Gorbachev’s reformist agenda and the realization that a military solution was impossible.

From a technological point of view, ruminating on the Soviet-Afghan War in hindsight, one finds that the conflict prefigures the dilemmas of drone-era warfare. Lessons like the seduction of remote surveillance, the illusion of control, the limits of firepower and the ingenuity of the insurgent – all of these remain enduring. So too does a simpler lesson: in asymmetric warfare, belief can often be a stronger weapon than bullets or technology.

(Tomorrow, we look at the run-up to, and examine the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, when Somali militias using guerrilla tactics and urban chaos brought down American Black Hawks and forced a U.S. retreat)