I just repeated the mission like traitor caravan, because I could steal more armored vehicles in them. :>
This by the way annoyed me too... At the end of chapter 1 you see all the Russian soldiers, all the tanks, all the apcs... And yet in normal gameplay there is nothing like that. Russians sure as hell are superb in hiding their armored assets in Afghanistan when nothing important is on the time table.
Once I had an enemy tank in side-ops, but only because I've walked over everything with my own tank. Still it was no threat at all.