The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  2

  Islamabad, Pakistan, August 1986

  The summer monsoon was winding down in Pakistan’s Punjab province, leaving behind a rich, verdant haze over the capital city of Islamabad, whose tranquillity belied the existence of a brutal, earth-scorching war a little more than a hundred miles to the west. As I made my way through Islamabad’s light traffic to my office each morning, I was struck by the city’s extraordinary setting. To the west of the main government and diplomatic enclave lay the graceful slopes of the Margalla Hills, mere foothills, but rich in geological promise as they forced their way northward, twisting, pushing ever higher. In a stunningly beautiful stretch of Pakistan’s Northern Territories, they fused together with the great ranges that would become the towering Karakorums driving northward into China, the Himalayas stretching eastward across the rooftop of the world into India and Nepal, and the Hindu Kush, reaching skyward above the battles in neighboring Afghanistan. There were peaks topping twenty thousand feet that no one had even bothered to name.

  Down country and closer to home was the sprawling city of Rawalpindi, its nineteenth-century army cantonment an ever so faintly glowing ember of the old British empire. In the past, it was the city of Kipling and serious-minded Englishmen in khaki serving the queen on the playing fields of Central Asia. If Islamabad was too sterile, too new and ordered, for an old South Asia hand, there was always the option of disappearing into the labyrinthine alleyways and roiling sea of humanity that was Rawalpindi a few miles to the east and escape backward in time. Kipling was gone, but other serious-minded men in khaki remained, still struggling with the modern variation of the same old game.

  It all came together here in the western reaches of Pakistan’s Punjab province, the past, the present, and the future, all the tectonic forces of nature and of politics. In Afghanistan the Soviets were in their sixth year of occupation, still struggling against an undiminished rebellion. Though it would be another few years before the toll was known, casualties among the Afghan population were approaching one million killed. There were no firm estimates as to the numbers of injured, other than the reasonable guess that they outnumbered the dead. Another five million had been driven from their homes into exile either in Iran or Pakistan, and millions more were refugees in their own country, displaced by the Soviet invaders. The Soviets were on their way to losing almost fifteen thousand men, triple that wounded, and hundreds of thousands incapacitated by disease. And there seemed no end in sight.

  The bitter Washington debate over our Afghan policy that took up much of 1985 and early 1986 had ended by the time I arrived on the scene in Pakistan. There was no more dispute over our mission. The congressional hawks had been calmed and the moralists assuaged. We were in it to win. Those had been my instructions from Bill Casey and, he’d assured me, from the President.

  In 1986, there were few in the Congress or the administration who believed the Soviets were seriously seeking an exit strategy. Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze had told U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz the previous year that Gorbachev wanted to get out of Afghanistan, but there was no evidence on the ground to back up that view; nor was there any evidence that the Georgian Foreign Minister’s comments represented a consensus in the Politburo. On the contrary, it still looked as though the war might just go on indefinitely or that the Soviets might even be on the verge of winning it. In the summer of 1986, there was no talk of going easy on the Soviets to give them a breather so they could get out. The talk, instead, was of going full tilt and making sure that the loose coalition of countries supporting the resistance didn’t wobble.

  Allied with the United States in the effort to assist the Afghan people in their struggle were China, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and Egypt, all major players and all, like the United States, with their own national agendas for entering the fight. For the first six years of the struggle, those complex agendas were more or less in concert. They wouldn’t always be that way.

  China, characteristically, took the long-term view. Beijing wanted to prevent the USSR from expanding its empire into Afghanistan, within easy reach of the Gulf of Oman, where it could serve as anvil to India’s hammer on Pakistan, wedged uncomfortably in between. China had fought one brief war with India a quarter century earlier and still had unresolved border disputes with the Soviet Union that on more than one occasion had come close to serious eruption in the far northeast. China’s relationship with Pakistan had been one of the few constants in the ever shifting alliances of the region. So from the start, China was in it to win, but it was also patient.

  Saudi Arabia, in particular its Wahhabi clerical structure, was distracted at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by the Iranian revolution and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and Shia militancy. The Saudis were more than bystanders in the Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s, and thus their involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan was just another important facet of Saudi policy in the region. They had been independently supporting the Afghan resistance in the period just before the Soviet invasion, and the decision to join with the United States after the invasion was a rational extension of their consuming concern with Iran’s spreading influence. And not a few in the royal family thought lending a hand to the Afghan resistance gave the powerful Wahhabi clerics something important to do farther from home. Pakistan’s leader, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, was a pious man who had opened up Pakistan to the Wahhabis, who were establishing Koranic schools, madrassas, in growing numbers. And at that time, with oil prices in the $40-a-barrel range, the costs of working with the Americans seemed manageable.

  The United Kingdom, under Margaret Thatcher, was never far from the United States in dealing head-on with Soviet expansionism. And with an inside track on the rules of “the great game,” the British were a natural ally, though there was always an underlying prickliness about the come-lately Americans taking the lead in their old backyard.

  Egypt was a well-compensated quartermaster and armorer, supplying tens of thousands of tons of Soviet/Warsaw Pact–design weapons to the Afghans and in the process fulfilling its duty to the jihad. Later in the conflict, Egypt and many other Islamic nations found Afghanistan a convenient dumping ground for homegrown troublemakers. Egypt quietly emptied its prisons of its political activists and psychotics and sent them off to the war in Afghanistan, with the fondest hopes that they might never return.

  The CIA program had grown over the last six years, from a few tens of millions of dollars under President Carter to hundreds of millions in the early 1980s. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had in 1980 secured an agreement from the Saudi king to match American contributions to the Afghan effort dollar for dollar, and Bill Casey kept that agreement going over the years. Thus, the budget for the new fiscal year beginning on October 1, 1986, would approach half a billion from Riyadh and half a billion from U.S public coffers. These funds would be spent on everything from Chinese- and Egyptian-made small arms, mortars, and rockets to recoilless rifles and the thousands of Japanese trucks and Chinese mules required to carry it all across zero line, as the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan was called.

  It seemed to me, as I took stock of the war a month after I’d arrived, that the stage was set. Now all we needed was a little luck.

  The Kremlin, August 1986

  Anatoly Chernyaev had one of the most daunting tasks in the Kremlin. As foreign policy aide to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, his job was to guide the new Soviet leader through the political mine field blocking a speedy and graceful exit of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The durable and imperturbable foreign policy expert knew the job had to be done, not only for his boss, but for the good of the USSR. From the day he signed on as Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser a year earlier, he began to apply the common sense and political savvy he had developed over the last two decades in the Central Committee’s International Department to the USSR’s most consuming foreign policy issue—Afghanistan.

  He knew the mai
n obstacle to quitting Afghanistan was ideological—how to get out without looking beaten, as the Americans had in running away from Vietnam. Perhaps the Americans had the resilience to survive the loss of prestige, but the USSR didn’t. That was a fact. Chernyaev also knew that Gorbachev didn’t have the option of blaming the disaster of the Afghan enterprise on a string of dead predecessors. He couldn’t simply cut his losses and declare it had been a mistake from the beginning. Things weren’t done that way in the USSR. Maybe Khrushchev had pulled off attacking Josef Stalin’s years of tyranny in his “secret speech” a generation ago, but that had been an internal matter, not one that involved an issue as fundamental to Soviet policy as dismantling the Brezhnev Doctrine of never abandoning a fraternal socialist nation. Gorbachev would have to sidestep the issue of the decisions made seven years ago and chart a new course. Never mind that those decisions were colossal errors, based at least in part on intelligence from the KGB that bore scant resemblance to the truth. It wasn’t that the KGB didn’t know the realities, Chernyaev decided, it was that they reported what they thought Moscow wanted to hear.

  During the course of 1979, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov and Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov had come to two disturbing conclusions on Afghanistan. First, they had decided that the United States planned to establish military bases in Afghanistan to replace their listening posts in Iran, which they had lost when the shah was overthrown. Such a move, Andropov and Ustinov insisted, would forge yet another link in the chain of America’s encirclement of the Soviet Union. Their second conclusion was that Hafizullah Amin, Afghanistan’s foreign minister at the time, was maneuvering to displace Moscow’s own handpicked man in Kabul, Nur Muhammad Taraki, who had seized the presidency and the premiership in the April Revolution just a year earlier.

  The threat to Taraki from Amin was viewed as all the more sinister by some in the Politburo because of a KGB black propaganda effort to malign Amin by portraying him as an agent of the CIA. The logic was compelling—after four years at Columbia University, Amin had to be a CIA agent. Once in power, the reasoning went, he would change camps, abandoning Afghanistan’s ties to the USSR and aligning with the United States. How long would it then be before U.S. intermediate-range Pershing missiles were aimed at the USSR from American bases in Afghanistan?

  As was sometimes the case with propaganda efforts, the KGB operation against Amin backfired. About all it accomplished was to stir up more trouble in an already deeply divided People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and give the Moscow leadership one more bogus reason to complete the slide toward military intervention. In the end, the Politburo hard-liners swallowed the story of Amin being a CIA agent and added it to the growing list of reasons to take the plunge into Afghanistan. The fact that Amin was no friend of the United States, and even nursed a lifelong grudge against Columbia University for twice failing him in his doctoral thesis, was never factored into the equation. Amin was a central part of the problem, and that was that.

  The mounting crisis had been brought home to the Politburo in monthly installments throughout 1979. In February, the American ambassador in Kabul, Adolph Dubs, was murdered during a failed rescue attempt after he’d been kidnapped by terrorists and held in the Hotel Kabul. The Soviet (and KGB) hand was visible in the cover-up—the three captured terrorists were summarily executed before American authorities could interrogate them. The autopsy showed that Dubs was shot several times in the head from a distance of about six inches, but the United States was able to do nothing beyond protest the use of force in freeing Dubs and cut off the remaining aid to Afghanistan, which it had intended to do anyway.

  Then in March, Afghan warlord Isma’il Khan butchered a number of Soviet officers, soldiers, and their families in the ancient southwest Afghan city of Herat. After the Herat incident, Taraki pleaded for the USSR to send in a contingent of troops to put down the growing rebellion. That same month, Amin quietly took one of Taraki’s posts, appointing himself premier. The “CIA’s man in Kabul” was on the move, or so the advocates of intervention in the Politburo concluded.

  Through the spring, Taraki’s pleas for Soviet military intervention were repeatedly rejected by the Kremlin, but the Politburo opened debate over Afghanistan in earnest after the Herat slaughter. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko initially declared that “under no circumstances” could the Soviet Union “lose” Afghanistan, a position he almost immediately reversed when he decided that if the USSR intervened in Afghanistan, the world would brand it the aggressor, détente with the West would collapse, and the USSR’s actions would be declared in violation of the tenets of the UN. Alexei Kosygin, the ailing seventy-five-year-old Premier, allied with Central Committee Secretary Andrei Kirilenko, led the opposition in the Politburo to any military intervention. They would not waver from that position throughout the debate.

  But Taraki persisted. Send in your Central Asians, he said, nobody will even notice. Thus the Soviet military adventure in Afghanistan began incrementally. First there was the deployment in June of a battalion of Soviet Central Asians dispatched in to “guard Soviet installations.” They were followed by another detachment of airborne troops in July. Then Andropov sent in a unit of KGB special operations troops the same month.

  KGB reporting during the summer of 1979 grew increasingly alarmist, with declarations that the military situation was out of control. There was always the suggestion that the American hand was behind the troubles, particularly after Amin succeeded in his widely predicted move against Taraki. After surviving two attempts on his life and brutally consolidating his power within the Kabul structure, Amin ordered Taraki killed in October. The KGB concluded that America’s man was now fully in charge in Kabul, and by the time the first snows had fallen in 1979, the analysis of a looming, American-fomented disaster on the USSR’s vulnerable underbelly had seized the imagination of the Politburo. GRU reporting from the Afghan capital countered the gloomy KGB dispatches in those critical months, but it was ignored.

  Leonid Brezhnev was outraged by Taraki’s murder just days after his warm reception in Moscow, during which Brezhnev had assured Taraki that he would “take care of him.” Taking the assassination as a personal insult, the ailing Soviet leader shifted his position in favor of a military response. Andropov, whose KGB had worked behind the scenes to remove Amin over the summer, including the two failed attempts on his life, also took Taraki’s murder personally, and with Brezhnev coming on board, the course for intervention was set.

  Events began to move rapidly in the fall. In late October, the KGB sent specialist teams throughout Afghanistan to conduct Operation Zenith, a polling effort to determine popular reaction to a Soviet military intervention. KGB reporting now focused on the proposition that Hafizullah Amin was sliding into the Western camp, adding a new spin that a bridgehead in Afghanistan would give the United States a much needed base for the ultimate invasion of Iran as punishment for the hostage taking by the ayatollahs. The encirclement of the USSR by American missiles would be complete, and Afghanistan’s “loss” would spark similar problems for the USSR among the “fraternal” nations of the Warsaw Pact. The fact that none of this was true was simply no longer in consideration.

  On December 12, 1979, the Politburo met and formally ratified the proposal to send in the Army. Defense Minister Ustinov, KGB Chairman Andropov, and Foreign Minister Gromyko signed the order to dispatch a “limited contingent.” Brezhnev’s close confidant Konstantin Chernenko wrote out by hand a short protocol endorsing the proposal to intervene, entitling it “Concerning the Situation in ‘A’”; he then asked all Politburo members present to sign diagonally across the text. Brezhnev, who joined the meeting late, was the last to pen his shaky signature across the document.

  Operations Oak and Storm were launched on Christmas Eve, and there would be no turning back. Amin was killed, and the new Soviet “emir of Afghanistan,” Babrak Karmal, was installed in a military operation that went like clockwork even though it was devised on the fly, as gr
and entrances by foreign armies into Afghanistan have generally been over the centuries. Going into Afghanistan had been a breeze, but then it always happened that way.

  That was how it had all started almost seven years ago. Gorbachev had given the Army leeway to do what it had to to get the job done militarily in 1985, but even that hadn’t translated into measurable gains on the ground—just a more costly stalemate. Now it was time to get out, and Chernyaev had to manage the road map for a clean exit and to keep his job in the process. He had his work cut out for him.

  Gorbachev had made his first move in the fall of 1985 at a Politburo meeting, when he read moving passages from emotion-filled letters from mothers who had lost sons in Afghanistan. Chernyaev noted in his diary that Gorbachev raised the emotional pitch while sidestepping the underlying question of whether the entire venture had been a mistake from the start. He first questioned the Afghan policy publicly in February 1986, at the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, and would raise the stakes again the following week in a speech in Vladivostok, when he described Afghanistan as a “bleeding wound.”

  There would be no turning back after that.

  First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, August 1986

  For the last two years, Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin had had the taxing job of making sense of a badly managed war. As deputy chief of the First Chief Directorate’s Analytical Department, and as the KGB’s most experienced general officer in South and Central Asia, Shebarshin was doing his best to inject a small dose of something not much in evidence when the Politburo had decided to invade Afghanistan seven years earlier—reality. His mission was to help get the Army out of Afghanistan while leaving behind a friendly government. It was a tall order, Shebarshin concluded, a political challenge rather than a military objective.