Produce a sentence which has a cefr level of "c1" and starts with: "although the soviets".
Although the Soviets were by then already retreating, senior moujahidin commanders were pushed by the Americans and Pakistanis to lay costly and often futile siege to fixed, fortified positions like those at Herat, which the Russian and Afghan Communist forces defended successfully, although they would have eventually yielded them without a fight when the general Russian withdrawal began.