Russians, it has to be said, do not make the best house guests – at least not the ones inhabiting the Kremlin anyway. They get ready for the party before they have received an invitation and their first action upon arriving is to shoot the host; such behaviour is not conducive to a convivial social atmosphere. Recent history in South Ossetia and Dagestan suggest that regardless of whatever else may have changed, the Kremlin is still using the same book of etiquette.
Following the Soviet armed intervention in Afghanistan in December of 1979, the neighbouring countries of Pakistan and Iran saw an influx of displaced people into their border regions. While it is well known that the Pakistani government aided and equipped elements amongst the refugees to fight against the Kabul regime and its Soviet backers, what is less well known is that the Tehran regime was doing likewise; establishing guerrilla training bases amongst the refugee camps in its eastern provinces and supplying the rebels with equipment. The Pakistani’s provided aid out of a sense of kindred spirit and out of self-interest, the Iranians provided aid for both these reasons and more, they were fired with a sense of revolutionary religious fervour.
For the Soviets there was nothing they could do about Pakistan; the Pakistanis were close American allies, with access to advanced American military equipment and, no-doubt, they could be confident that America would intervene directly if the Soviets attacked Pakistan. Add to that was the difficulty of operating at the southern end of a supply line that had to cross the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan. No, there was nothing to be done about Pakistan except to clear the Afghan regions close to the border of anything that might aid the rebels, all villages, animals and crops would be exterminated and the border quarantined as best it could so that the Socialist government in Kabul could be given time to overcome the resistance from reactionary elements driven by extreme superstition who didn’t want Afghanistan to take advantage of the opportunities Socialist science offered.
Iran however was a different matter. While Iran had been America’s closest ally in the region, it was now a pariah. Surely the Americans would not rush to aid a regime that held embassy staff hostage and where mobs filled the streets each day chanting ‘death to America’? Here events offered the opportunity to settle the score with this new radical superstitious regime without immediate interference from outside parties. The Soviet Union would be acting justifiably and defensively against a regime that had burnt every bridge it had and that threatened not just the Socialist revolution of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union itself, but that also threatened the reactionary monarchies of The Gulf and Arabia. And the Soviets had an ironclad legal Casus Belli; the Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship, signed in 1921 specifically bound both parties to:
‘Prohibit the formation or presence within their respective territories, of any organisation or groups of persons…whose object is to engage in acts of hostility against Persia or Russia, or against the Allies of Russia. They will likewise prohibit the formation of troops or armies within their respective territories with the aforementioned object.’
This treaty had maintained peaceful relations between Iran and Russia for sixty years, now the new regime had violated that peace. Military intervention in north and eastern Iran would not be a violation of international law and a change from the Brezhnev Doctrine; it would be to maintain both.
The new regime, while well fired with revolutionary fervour it had to be admitted, had done very much the same as the early Soviet revolutionaries had; they’d gutted the army of officers loyal to the former regime. Not only did the Iranian army suffer from the loss of officers, but they’d been largely confined to barracks following the religious takeover and had conducted almost no training. The Iranian Air Force, once the most powerful in the region, had suffered even more; experienced pilots had either fled or been imprisoned and the aircraft grounded. Not only that but they were also now cut off from the only source of essential spare parts for their aircraft; for once Soviet pilots could confront American built aircraft and be confident of a win.
There was also the possibility of a joint operation with a regional ally; Saddam Hussein, president of the Soviet client state of Iraq had expressed a desire to redress past injustices inflicted upon his country by the Iranians. If he attacked in Iran’s west and Soviet forces attacked simultaneously from their positions in the Trans-Caucasus and Turkmenistan fronts as well as from western Afghanistan, the regime in Tehran would find itself completely overwhelmed by events and unable to determine which front was most important and where they should concentrate their forces. Diplomatically inexperienced and isolated, they’d be unlikely to appeal quickly for help overseas, or know how to try to bridge the chasm they had dug between themselves and the Americans. At the very least the Soviets could be confident of securing the major regional centres of Tabriz, Mashhad and Birjand before pressure from the international community and possible American intervention, forced a cease-fire. This, combined with the Iraqi capture of Ahvaz, Dezful, Khorramabad would strip Tehran of much of its sources of revenue and all of its bases for operations against the Southern Soviet Union, Afghanistan and Iraq and potentially would result in the collapse of the regime, paving the way for a new regime, one more conducive to peaceful relations with the Socialist Sphere. Perhaps even a regime that could be brought over time into the Socialist Sphere, although the Brezhnev Doctrine acknowledged without saying it that the World Wide Revolution was no-longer a prospect for the foreseeable future.
Such was the reasoning within the inner circle of the Politburo that saw forces in the Soviet Southern Command Zones raised to an increased level of readiness in August of 1980…
