The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  One of the few Afghan leaders to inspire confidence in Moscow was Najibullah. Vadim Kirpichenko’s memoirs make no mention of his sadism and pay instead an implausible tribute to him as:

  a good organizer, a highly educated person, an opponent of . . . repression in the country, and indeed his [original] profession - a doctor - presupposed a humane quality in his character. Najibullah sincerely desired happiness and prosperity for his people and did everything within his powers to improve . . . the situation in Afghanistan.28

  During a visit to Afghanistan in 1983, however, Leonov, the head of Service 1, came to realize - as Kirpichenko and others did not - that Najibullah was a fantasist. He boasted that KHAD had 1,300 agents among the mujahideen, 1,226 in areas currently under mujahideen control, 714 in ‘underground counter-revolutionary organizations’ and 28 in the various branches of the Pakistani government. Leonov had begun to take notes of Najibullah’s account of KHAD achievements but later recalled that, as the account became increasingly fantastic, ‘I just put down my pen and ceased to write down what was obvious rubbish.’29

  The Red Army never deployed sufficient forces to compensate for the military weakness of its Afghan client-state and defeat an elusive guerrilla enemy. In Vietnam US forces at their peak had numbered over half a million. The Soviet Union, burdened by the problems of maintaining 565,000 troops in eastern Europe, 75,000 in Mongolia and 25-30,000 in other Third World countries, never felt able to station much more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, a country five times the size of Vietnam.30 A force of this size could never hope to occupy the whole of Afghanistan. Nor were Soviet forces able to seal the frontiers with Pakistan (and, less importantly, with Iran) and so prevent the mujahideen resupplying their forces. As a result, most of the Red Army’s successes in driving mujahideen from areas of the countryside were only temporary. When Soviet troops withdrew, the mujahideen returned. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev told the Politburo in 1986: ‘There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels.’31

  In March 1983, after discussing the report of a high-ranking mission of enquiry, the Politburo Afghanistan Commission came close to acknowledging that Soviet military intervention had reached an impasse. Gromyko told the Politburo, ‘The number of gangs [mujahideen groups] is not decreasing. The enemy is not laying down its weapons.’ He struggled none the less to find some grounds for optimism. ‘Yes,’ he declared, ‘the situation is stabilizing.’ Gromyko then immediately contradicted himself: ‘But the main trouble is that the central authorities have not yet reached the countryside: [they] rarely interact with the masses, about one-third of the districts is not under the control of the central authority, and one can feel the fragility of the state government.’

  As the most influential original advocate of the Soviet invasion, Andropov, who had succeeded Brezhnev as General Secretary four months earlier, was anxious both to justify the original decision to intervene and to remind other members of the Politburo of their collective responsibility: ‘You remember how arduously and cautiously we decided the question of deploying troops in Afghanistan. L. I. Brezhnev insisted on a roll-call vote by members of the Politburo. ’32 No member of the Politburo presumed to remind Andropov that the real decision to intervene had been taken at a private meeting of himself and the other members of the Afghanistan Commission with Brezhnev, and then rubber stamped by the rest of the Politburo. The sycophantic deference which the Politburo traditionally extended to its General Secretary also ensured that no one drew attention to the striking contradiction between his optimistic assurances at the time of the Soviet invasion and his assessment in March 1983. In December 1979 Andropov had assured Brezhnev that Soviet forces already in Kabul should be ‘entirely sufficient for a successful operation’. He had told the Politburo in February 1980 after a visit to Kabul that all available intelligence demonstrated that ‘the situation in Afghanistan is stabilizing now’.33 In March 1983, by contrast, he implied that there had never been any prospect of a rapid victory over the mujahideen: ‘Miracles don’t happen . . . Let us remember our [interwar] fight with [Islamic] basmachism. Why, back then, almost the entire Red Army was concentrated in central Asia, yet the fight with basmachi continued until the mid-1930s.’34

  Andropov and the Centre placed most of the blame for the impasse in the war on foreign - especially US and Pakistani - arms supplies and other assistance to the mujahideen. For the first three years of the Reagan administration (1981-83) US assistance, mostly channelled by the CIA through Pakistan, ran at a level of about $60 million a year, a sum matched by the Saudis. In 1982 Zia told Reagan’s Director of Central Intelligence, Bill Casey, that he thought the existing level of support was about right - though the mujahideen lacked the ground-to-air weapons to defend themselves against Soviet and Afghan air attacks. The objective, in Zia’s view, should be ‘to keep the pot boiling [in Afghanistan], but not [make it] boil over’ and provoke a Soviet attack on Pakistan. By 1984, however, both the CIA and Zia believed in the possibility of a mujahideen victory. CIA covert aid increased several times over and ‘Zia opened the floodgates, taking his chances with Soviet retaliation’.35

  By the spring of 1983 Andropov privately accepted the need for a settlement which fell well short of a Soviet military victory. He told the UN Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuellar, that the war was damaging the Soviet Union’s relations with the West, ‘socialist states’, Islamic states and the rest of the Third World as well as its internal social and economic development.36 A way out of the conflict remained impossible, however, because Andropov saw the war in Afghanistan within the context of a world-wide struggle for influence with the United States. Under existing circumstances withdrawal from Afghanistan would be an unacceptable blow to Soviet prestige. Andropov told the Politburo in March 1983, ‘We are fighting against American imperialism . . . That is why we cannot back off.’37 The threat from ‘American imperialism’, he believed, was greater than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. During the final year of his life, Andropov was obsessed by the delusion that the Reagan administration had plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union and insisted that operation RYAN, which was intended to collect intelligence on these non-existent plans, remain the first priority of both the KGB and the GRU.38

  No solution to the grave problems either of East-West tension or of the war in Afghanistan was possible during the brief and ineffectual period in office of Konstantin Chernenko, who was already gravely ill when he succeeded Andropov as Soviet leader in February 1984.39 In the spring of that year Leonid Shebarshin, who had been put in charge of Afghan intelligence operations at the Centre in the previous year, accompanied a military mission headed by Marshal Sokolov, then Deputy Defence Minister, on a tour of inspection following what the 40th Army Command in Afghanistan claimed was a major victory over the mujahideen forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. The mission found the valley deserted, with Soviet and Afghan tanks dotted around fields of unharvested wheat. ‘Where is the enemy?’ asked Sokolov. ‘Is he hiding in the gorges nearby?’ ‘Yes, Comrade Marshal of the Soviet Union,’ the briefing officer replied. ‘We have outposts, patrols and helicopters to follow his movements.’ He claimed that 1,700 of Massoud’s 3,000 ‘bandits’ had been killed. The remainder had fled, carrying with them the bodies of their comrades.40 Sokolov reported back to Moscow that the 40th Army had inflicted ‘a serious defeat’ on the enemy and was proving ‘a decisive factor in stabilizing the situation in the DRA’.41 Shebarshin, however, was unconvinced. When he asked the briefer how 1,300 defeated ‘bandits’ could have carried away 1,700 corpses as well as all their weapons, he received no coherent reply. He later discovered from KGB and KHAD intelligence that Massoud had been forewarned of the 40th Army attack, probably by a sympathizer in the Kabul Defence Ministry, and had pulled most of his fighters and supporters out of the Panjshir Valley ahead of the
Soviet sweep, strengthening his reputation as the ‘Lion of the Panjshir’. Shebarshin learned to be generally sceptical of 40th Army body counts.42

  Of all the problems awaiting Gorbachev on his election as General Secretary in March 1985, writes his aide, Anatoli Chernyaev, ‘The Afghanistan problem was the most pressing. As soon as the new “tsar” came to power the Central Committee and Pravda were flooded with letters. Very few of them were anonymous. Almost all were signed.’43 With Gorbachev’s accession the war in Afghanistan ceased for the first time to be a taboo subject. Under Brezhnev the Soviet media had acted as if there was no war in Afghanistan, publishing pictures and stories of smiling soldiers distributing food and medicine to the grateful Afghan people, but making almost no mention of fighting the mujahideen. Some mention of the fighting had been permitted under Andropov and Chernenko but Soviet troops were invariably said to have delivered devastating blows to the perfidious robber bands who were seeking to overturn a popular revolution. At the Twenty-seventh Party Congress in February 1986, however, Gorbachev described the war as ‘a bleeding wound’.44

  At the Politburo on 17 October 1985, Gorbachev had told his colleagues that it was time to come to ‘a decision on Afghanistan’ - time, in other words, to find a way of bringing the war to an end. By now, following the deaths of Andropov and Ustinov in 1984, Gromyko was the only surviving member of the troika which almost six years earlier had won Brezhnev’s consent for a military intervention, the consequences of which he had not begun to comprehend. The change in the Politburo’s mood, Chernyaev noted, was evident as soon as Gromyko spoke: ‘You had to see the ironic expression of his colleagues - Gorbachev’s glare was truly withering. Those looks said it all: “You ass, what are you babbling about, giving us advice? You got us into this dirty business, and now you’re pretending that we’re all responsible!” ’45

  Though anxious to withdraw from Afghanistan, Gorbachev allowed his forces to make a last major effort to defeat the mujahideen . During Gorbachev’s first eighteen months as Soviet leader, writes Robert Gates, then Deputy DCI, ‘we saw new, more aggressive Soviet tactics, a spread of the war to the eastern provinces, attacks inside Pakistan, and the more indiscriminate use of air power’. These eighteen months were the bloodiest of the war. With massive US assistance, the mujahideen held out, but the CIA operatives reported that their morale was being gradually eroded. What the mujahideen most lacked was state-of-the-art anti-aircraft weapons. Zia had told Casey in April 1982: ‘The Pathans [Pushtun] are great fighters but shit-scared when it comes to air-power.’ When the CIA supplied shoulder-launched US Stinger missiles to the mujahideen in the summer of 1986, they had a major, perhaps even decisive, impact on the war.46 On 25 September a group of Hekmatyar’s mujahideen armed with Stingers shot down three Soviet helicopter gunships as they approached Jalalabad airport. DCI Casey personally showed President Reagan a dramatic video of the attack taken by the mujahideen , the soundtrack mingling the sound of explosions with cries of Allahu Akhbar! Shebarshin did not immediately grasp the significance of the mujahideen’s use of the Stingers. Early in October the GRU obtained two of the missiles from agents in the mujahideen, and he expected effective counter-measures to be devised.47 As the Soviet Defence Ministry complained, the Stingers marked ‘a qualitatively new stage in Washington’s interference’ in the war. ‘Although the Soviet and Afghan air forces adjusted their tactics to reduce losses, they effectively lost a trump card in the war - control of the air.’48 By 1987 the CIA station in Islamabad was co-ordinating the provision of over 60,000 tons per year of weapons and other supplies to the mujahideen along over 300 infiltration routes by five- and ten-ton trucks, smaller pick-ups and pack mules. Milt Bearden, the station chief, ‘discovered that on an annual basis we needed more mules than the world seemed prepared to breed’.49

  By the spring of 1986, Gorbachev had decided on the replacement of Karmal as Afghan leader by the much tougher but also more flexible head of KHAD, Muhammad Najibullah, who had the strong backing of the Centre. Early in May Gorbachev bluntly told Karmal that he should hand over power to Najibullah and retire to Moscow with his family. There followed what Anatoli Dobrynin, the only other person present, described as a ‘painful’ scene in which Karmal ‘obsequiously begged Gorbachev to change his mind, promising to perform his duties in a more correct and active way’.50 Gorbachev refused and Kabul Radio, using a traditional Soviet euphemism for dismissal, announced that the PDPA Central Committee had accepted Karmal’s request to resign for ‘health reasons’ and elected Najibullah in his stead. As a sop to the wounded pride of Karmal and his supporters he was allowed to retain his membership of the PDPA Politburo and to continue to serve as President of the Afghan Revolutionary Council.51 To Gorbachev’s fury, however, Karmal contrived to hold on to some of his former power. He was finally forced to resign from the Politburo and the presidency of the Revolutionary Council in November.52

  The outcome of the war in Afghanistan was sealed at a dramatic meeting of the Politburo on 13 November 1986. A year earlier, Gorbachev had given the army a last chance to defeat the mujahideen or at least to create the illusion of victory. Now he was determined to bring the war to an end and made an unprecedented criticism of the Soviet high command:

  We have been fighting in Afghanistan for six years already. Unless we change our approach, we shall continue to fight for another 20-30 years . . . Our military should be told they are learning badly from this war . . . Are we going to fight endlessly, as a testimony that our troops are not able to deal with this situation? We need to finish this process as quickly as possible.

  Gorbachev set a target of two years for withdrawing all Soviet troops, but was anxious to ensure that ‘the Americans don’t get into Afghanistan’ as a result.53 Chernyaev believed that Soviet troops could have been withdrawn in two months. The reason for the delay was essentially to avoid losing face after the long struggle for influence with the United States in the Third World: ‘The Afghan problem, as in the beginning of that adventure, was still seen primarily in terms of “global confrontation” and only secondarily in light of the “new thinking”.’54

  At Gorbachev’s proposal, the Politburo appointed a new Afghanistan Commission, chaired by Eduard Shevardnadze, Gromyko’s successor as Foreign Minister. 55 Shevardnadze’s oral report to the Politburo two months later was, by implication, a devastating indictment of the distortions in previous intelligence and other reports to the leadership which had sought to conceal the extent of the failure of Soviet Afghan policy:

  Little remains of the friendly feelings [in Afghanistan] toward the Soviet Union which existed for decades. A great many people have died and not all of them were bandits. Not one problem has been solved to the peasantry’s advantage. The government bureaucracy is functioning poorly. Our advisers’ aid is ineffective. Najib complains of the narrow-minded tutelage of our advisers.

  I won’t discuss right now whether we did the right thing by going in there. But we did go in there absolutely without knowing the psychology of the people and the real state of affairs in the country. That’s a fact. And everything that we’ve done and are doing in Afghanistan is incompatible with the moral character of our country.

  The Prime Minister, Nikolai Ivanovich Rhyzhkov, praised Shevardnadze’s report as the first ‘realistic picture’ of the situation in Afghanistan: ‘Previous information was not objective.’ Even the hard-liner Yegor Ligachev agreed that Shevardnadze had provided ‘the first objective information’ received by the Politburo. Chebrikov, the KGB Chairman, who was a member of the Afghanistan Commission, attempted a half-hearted defence of previous intelligence reporting, claiming that, though the Politburo appeared to have ‘received much new material’, that material could be found in earlier reports. None the less, he agreed with the conclusions of the rest of the Politburo on the Afghan situation: ‘The Comrades have analysed it well.’56

  As Gorbachev acknowledged, ‘They panicked in Kabul when they found out we intended to leave.�
��57 In implementing the decision to withdraw, he also had to cope with a rearguard action mounted by some sections of the Centre and the military. He retaliated with a series of public disclosures which revealed that Soviet military intervention had been decided by a small clique within the Politburo that had put pressure on Brezhnev.58