This month I'm playing a solo campaign game taken from the excellent Small Wars book of tabletop games about counter-insurgency operations.
Previous posts on this blog have covered a similar game about the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. The current campaign uses many of the same ideas, with a bit more rules crunch, and instead of a small company of legionnaires in the desert, I am running the Soviet war effort in Afghanistan from 1980-88.
I'm going to cover the first three years - 1980 to 1982 in this post, and will write about the rest of the campaign in subsequent posts. I found the system again quite fun and had to change my tactics as the campaign progressed, as we shall see.
1980: ground sweeps harm world opinion
Early in the year there was some dissent in Herat and Kandahar. There was no mujahideen activity, but I took the precautionary measure of moving troops out to the provinces, with two motor rifle divisions being sent to Herat with helicopter support, and an allied Afghan DRA (Democratic Republic of Afghanistan) infantry division going to Kandahar. I carried out sweeps with ground troops against anti-government population areas, which drove world opinion against the war and the USSR.
The world opinion mechanic reacts to pacification operations. I started off with sweeps using ground troops but this activity is deeply unpopular on the world stage. If the world opinion score gets to 10 in the game, an entire USSR division gets pulled out by Moscow. While I had plenty of military muscle on the ground, the loss of a division would hurt my efforts considerably.
At this stage in the campaign my agitprop activity was also doing a good job of discrediting the reputation of the tribal opposition in the eyes of the world media.
Towards the end of the year, revolts inevitably started in the provinces, forcing me to send tanks into Herat. Motorised infantry went into the Panjsheer Valley with my Hind gunships in support. There were successful pacification operations in Herat and the Panjsheer region. Global media attention was distracted by events in the Middle East, specifically the Iran hostage crisis.
1981: arrival of the Spetznaz
I reinforced the troops already operating in the Panjsheer Valley with an Afghan commando brigade. There was some disaffection in the ranks of my Afghan allies, but nothing to lose sleep over. The countryside was generally quiet. I did run some pacification operations early in the year, and this time switched to carpet bombing rebel areas, which has less of an impact on world opinion than sending in troops to burn villages.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this design element. The simulation provides the player with enough Soviet airpower to cover most of the country, and there is less chance of world opinion reacting to this than ground sweeps. From this point on I abandoned ground sweeps entirely, and focused just on using air power for pacification.
Towards the end of the year Mikhail Zaitsev of Southern Theatre Command took over in Kabul and changed tactics: it means fewer tanks, but we received the Spetznaz mountain brigade instead. I pulled the Afghan commandoes out of the Panjsheer Valley. The mujahideen rebels were now tooled up with Chinese rockets which gave them more firepower on the battlefield. We continued winning the propaganda war, highlighting rebel atrocities.
1982: ceasefire with the Lion of the Panjsheer
The DRA commando brigade was relegated to palace guard duty and was not available for offensive operations due to suspect loyalty. I was forced to detail some troops to try to keep the supply route open to the Panjsheer Valley, as I decided to keep an offensive force on station there permanently. The rebels decided to attack my convoys. I kept a Soviet airborne brigade in Kabul as a sort of strategic reserve that could react quickly to ambushes on the highways.
The deputy defence minister of the USSR Dmitry Ustinov flew in on a VIP visit to Kabul. He authorised deployment of an extra motor rifle division to Afghanistan. We also managed to negotiate a ceasefire with Ahmad Shah Masud, the Lion of the Panjsheer. In fact no pacification operations were required at all in late 1982. We ran a positive PR campaign highlighting the progressive nature of the Kabul regime.
There seems to be a point in any of these counter-insurgency (COIN) simulations where the player sits back and thinks "I've got this under control. This game is too easy." Surveying Afghanistan at Christmas 1982 this is what I was thinking. World opinion looked good. The Americans were focused on the Middle East. All was quiet.
Oh how wrong I was. Next time I'll share some photos from the campaign, and cover off the period 1983-85.
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