For some time it was touch and go whether I would be allowed to leave. General Akhtar and I had a heated exchange in his office. He insisted I remain, offering me several other posts by way of persuasion, but I was adamant. At the end of the interview, when I had told him nothing would induce me to change my mind, General Akhtar lost his temper, telling me that under no circumstances would I be retired. I told General Gul that I was prepared to forego my pension and resign my commission if need be, but go I would. Thereafter, Gul did his utmost to convince the authorities to release me and eventually he succeeded. For this I owe him a debt of gratitude.
Before leaving the ISI and the Army, which I did on 8 August, 1987,1 had promised the Military Committee that I would return as a civilian to offer my services to the Jehad as a private individual. After settling myself, and my family, back into civil life in Karachi, I booked a flight to Rawalpindi for 4 April, 1988. I was going back to the war. At the last moment I telephoned my successor in ISI to tell him of my intentions, but he advised me to postpone my journey as there was insufficient arms or ammunition forward with the Parties for any worthwhile operation. This was a bad sign, as the system called for a steady flow from the rear to the front. I decided to wait a bit. Within a week I received the dreadful news that all the ammunition stocks at my old headquarters at Ojhri camp had been destroyed in one devastating explosion.
January, 1989, was one of the coldest months in Afghanistan for a long time. By the middle of the month the bulk of Soviet troops had gone; many were back home in the Soviet Union leaving only the rearguards to ensure the withdrawal was complete by 15 February. Radio operator Vasily Savenok looked forward eagerly to leaving and to future reunions with his comrades in Moscow. He had spent a year in a small, fortified outpost overlooking the Kharga reservoir and the Ghazni road NW of Kabul. It was marked on the Soviet military maps as Hill 31. It had been built around an old, circular concrete water tank, with tunnels leading from it to underground command and communication bunkers. In the central dormitory bunker a wood fire burned, with the bodies of several soldiers wrapped around it, trying to thaw out before the next two-hour sentry duty outside, without gloves. On one wall a poster proclaimed, ‘Paratroopers, accomplish your duty in Afghanistan with honour’. Outside, the world was black and white and freezing. Dug into the hillside, and protected by sandbags, were two 122mm howitzers and a T-62 tank, each with piles of empty shell cases half-buried in the snow. The post was part of the inner ring of Kabul defenses, whose purpose was to prevent the city falling the Mujahideen as the Soviets left. The garrison waited impatiently to be relieved by the ‘Greens’, as the Soviets called the Afghan Army.
To the NE of Kabul, at the airbase, Colonel Alexander Golovanov had a heavy responsibility. His task was to keep the airfield open round the clock until the last Soviet unit had left. Although the great majority of the troops drove out up the Salang Highway, Kabul airport had never been busier, with Ilyushin military transport aircraft arriving every few minutes from Tashkent. Backfire bombers flew missions from the Soviet Union, dropping 12,000 lb bombs to secure the withdrawal route, while Colonel Golovanov organized continuous gunships patrols around the perimeter of the airfield to divert missile attacks from the transports. His comment to the Sunday Times correspondent was, “They note 10 are well prepared and well trained for combat in mountainous terrain … they are still bandits. You never see them in the field face to face. They always shoot note 11 behind the corner.” A nice compliment to the guerrilla fighters.
In Kabul there was great elation among the resistance supporters. The Soviets were going. With them out of the way the Afghan communists could not last long. This seemed to be the view of the diplomatic community as well. Led by the Americans, most embassies were closing down. The diplomats and their families gave a good impression of scuttling for safety, from a ship they were convinced was about to sink. Perhaps they would all return as soon as a new government emerged in Kabul, but for the moment the city looked like being under sedge for some weeks. I found it a bit odd, seeing the Americans pulling out at this moment. It seemed as though it was the Soviets that had been protecting them all these years, and now they feared for their safety, just as the Mujahideen appeared about to win the war. We were supposed to be their allies. The eleven staff, including four marines, watched sombrely in a biting wind as the national flag was hauled slowly down before hurrying to the airport. There they were disappointed. Heavy snow had delayed their flight for 24 hours. Next, the British abandoned their elegant colonial building. The following week it would be the French and Austrians—all promising to return when things had settled down.
The Soviets kept to their withdrawal timetable exactly. The last Soviet soldier to cross the bridge at Hairatan to Termez did so on 15 February, 1989. During the previous weeks thousands of troops had driven up the Salang Highway in tanks, trucks and APCs, running the last gauntlet before gaining the sanctuary of their motherland. They had left Kabul a battalion at a time, usually at night, overloaded with Panasonic TV sets and other Western electrical goods unobtainable at home. They wore their medals and some took their pet dogs. It was a more or less dignified departure. Their diplomats did not have to climb desperately on to the last helicopter from the roof of their embassy as the Americans had done in Saigon 14 years earlier. The next day in the Chicken Street bazaar, a trader commented: “The Red Soldiers had no money and no manners. I had no time for them at all—they seemed like peasants to me. I think there will be a lot more fighting before we see the hippies back again.
The very last man to cross into the Soviet Union was the 45-year-old widower, Lieutenant-General Boris Gromov. He walked over without a backward glance to embrace his teenage son, Maxim, who had been brought to welcome him. Gromov was a veteran of three tours in Afghanistan. His had been the difficult job of extracting the Soviet Army without a bloodbath on the way to the border. Although the Mujahideen did their utmost to hamper the withdrawal, the weather and the elaborate security precautions prevented any major Soviet disaster. According to Gromov, only one soldier died on 15 February. He had been shot by a sniper some 20 kilometres north of Kabul. Moscow was impressed with Gromov’s performance; he was to be promoted to command the Kiev Military District, an extremely prestigious appointment, and made a Hero of the Soviet Union.
On the same date, thousands of miles away, at the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, William Webster, the man who had replaced Casey as director, gave a champagne party. The toasts were to victory; the Vietnam debacle had been reversed; now it was the Soviets in retreat and counting the cost in men and money of a nine-year war. The Soviets were out of Afghanistan. Revenge, for the rough handling the US forces had received in Vietnam, due in part to the Soviet Union’s supplying America’s enemies with the means to fight, was complete. I believe that, with the fulfilment of the Geneva Accord, which had been signed in mid-April, 1988, the US lost interest in finishing the war. From that moment on my doubts were confirmed and it became clear to me that their aims had now diverged away from a military victory towards a compromise peace, towards a stalemate. As I will explain in later pages, the objective of the US became to ensure that no Islamic fundamentalist government was established in Kabul. For the Americans, if that happened, it would merely be replacing one adversary with another. Ironically, in this they had the support of the Soviets, who were equally fearful of Islam stirring up religious or nationalistic feelings in their republics north of the Amu River. From the moment the Soviets agreed to quit Afghanistan it was in the interest of both superpowers to prevent an outright military victory for the Mujahideen.
The Soviets set about achieving this by pouring in vast quantities of military hardware for the Afghan Army. In fact, as I know full well, General Gromov was certainly not the last Soviet soldier in Afghanistan. Several hundred remained in the guise of advisers, and to service and fire the Scud medium range, surface-to-surface missiles that were to feature prominently in the battle for Jalalabad in mi
d-1989. Their Afghan venture had cost the Soviets over 13,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and 311 missing. Reportedly, it had required one million roubles a day to keep the war going. In terms of cash, the price rose steeply as soon as they withdrew. Only the most massive logistic effort could keep Najibullah’s men fighting, and the Soviets supplied it. American officials estimated that Afghanistan received military supplies worth up to $300 million a month after February, 1989. In the six months following their withdrawal at least 3,800 aircraft flew in, carrying food, fuel, weapons and ammunition. Compare this with the US aid for 1988, valued at $600 million, and the imbalance is crystal clear.
There are those who say the Soviets did not suffer a military defeat in Afghanistan. As a soldier who fought them for four years I disagree. Without the efforts of the Mujahideen on the battlefield no amount of political expediency would have got the Soviets out. At no time during the war were the communists able to do other than hold the towns and bases, try to secure their lines of communication and carry out a series of search and destroy operations of varying sizes. By and large the Soviet soldier fought poorly, as he lacked motivation. He was frightened of night operations, he seldom pressed home attacks, he was casualty shy and kept behind his armour plate on the roads instead of deploying into the hills. With the introduction of the Stinger, which boosted aircraft losses to an average of one a day, the Soviet high command tacitly acknowledged they could not win the shooting war. If you cannot eradicate a guerrilla army you have lost. The Soviets acknowledged that when they left Afghanistan. To win in the field would have meant a vast escalation of men, money and equipment. There was no way that Gorbachev was even going to contemplate such a price.
Gorbachev, who had nothing to do with invading Afghanistan in the first place, must have been hugely delighted with the kudos he gained from withdrawing. The invasion had cost the Kremlin dearly in terms of international goodwill. It had antagonized the Muslim world, damaged Soviet influence among the non-aligned nations and set back Sino-Soviet reconciliation. When, as I am sure they did, the Soviet supreme command told Gorbachev the costs of a military victory, he quickly decided to make the best of a dignified pull-out. The blaze of international publicity was just what he wanted. The Western nations were eager to see Gorbachev as the great reformer, and the Afghanistan invasion would be quickly forgiven and soon forgotten. At the time of writing (September, 1990) this is the precise position, with the Soviet Foreign Minister at the UN castigating Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait, as though his country could never contemplate such aggression, let alone carry it out. Politicians’ memories are conveniently short.
With the signing of the Geneva Accord, the whole fabric of the strategy to win the war started to come unravelled. Incredible though it may seem, when the Soviets left Afghanistan and military victory by the Mujahideen was anticipated by everyone, including both the Soviets and Afghans, there was a deliberate change of policy by the US to prevent it. Both superpowers wanted a stalemate on the battlefield. The Soviets sought to achieve this by their massive beefing up of the Afghan Army and Air Force, by the importing of Scud missiles, by the continued use of advisers and by getting the Afghans to concentrate their forces in a few strategic cities and bases, particularly Kabul, with orders to hold them at all costs. Above all else they had to keep Kabul. To do this they had merely to stay dug in, stay on the defensive, make the maximum use of airpower and missiles and keep open an air and land bridge to the Soviet Union. The Soviet planners had grave doubts as to whether or not the Afghan army could survive after they withdrew. If Najibullah could hang on to what he had got, then the chances of a compromise political solution were good. On the battlefield winner takes all. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted to see the Mujahideen in that position.
The US now had the same goal as the Soviets. They set about achieving it by both military and political means.
First the military. Although there was no agreement with the Soviets in the Accord that the superpowers were to cut back on arms supplies to their respective allies, this is precisely what the US did. In order to hinder the Mujahideen, who were determined to harass the withdrawal, there was a substantial cut in arms shipments. I was told that this was to ensure the Soviets had no excuse for delaying their departure, but I believe this was a cover for a real change in their policy, as the cutbacks continued after the Soviets had gone.
Mujahideen supporters in Congress voiced their concerns. Two US senators requested a congressional inquiry into why arms shipments had been curtailed. As the Washington Times reported in early April, 1989, Senator Orrin Hatch, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to the chairman requesting an inquiry as to what the CIA was up to in Afghanistan. Mr Hatch was worried by the rate of the Soviet arms build-up, whereas, by contrast, US weapons shipments ‘have slowed down to nothing’. Four months later the Times of London reported the chairman of the Intelligence Committee as confirming and supporting the cutback. Mr Anthony Beilenson stated, “Supplying military aid to the Afghan rebels is no longer in our interest now that the Soviets have withdrawn”. There can surely be no clearer statement of the new American policy.
Even my friend Charles Wilson has, I understand, lost his former enthusiasm for a military victory. As I know from experience, most American officials were always resentful of the ISI, and how my bureau would brook no interference with arms allocations or operations. The Americans always wanted to control the war. With General Akhtar gone, and myself retired, the Americans were able to concentrate their efforts on the less experienced newcomers to ISI. House of Representatives member Bill McCollum from Florida put it neatly when he was reported by Insight magazine in April, 1990, as saying that all US military assistance to Pakistan, the third largest recipient of US foreign aid, should be re-evaluated, if not cut off, if ISI was not brought under control.
Next, the Americans’ political tactics to secure a stalemate. In this they played on the well-known tendency of all Afghans for political infighting and the rivalries between Parties. With the Soviets out of Afghanistan the Mujahideen had achieved a notable victory, the Jehad had succeeded, the infidel had been driven from their homeland. This common enemy, this common mission, had gone a long way towards uniting normally irreconcilable and fractious Mujahideen groupings. Without the Soviets there was bound to be a tendency for Parties and Commanders to think more in terms of their future political positions and authority. Old jealousies and ambitions that had temporarily submerged in the anti-Soviet crusade would rise to the surface again. The US deliberately set out to encourage these dissensions. They now wanted to direct the attention of the Mujahideen from military to political matters. The more the Mujahideen squabbled, the more their Leaders and Commanders concerned themselves with what was happening in Peshawar rather than in Afghanistan, the less likely they were to win on the battlefield. The US promoted the idea of bringing back Zahir Shah, supported the calling of a Shoora with equal numbers of representatives from each Party, irrespective of its size, and encouraged the setting-up of an interim government of Afghanistan in Pakistan, knowing it would be recognized by nobody, including themselves. I have no doubt all these things were designed to foster the break-up of Mujahideen unity in prosecuting the war.
In this endeavour they were assisted, unknowingly, by the actions of General Gull It was to be expected of him that he would wish to make his mark professionally, that he would institute changes to the existing system in order to prosecute the war more effectively. He seemed to want to give the Mujahideen forces a more conventional flavour and he obviously wanted to deal more directly with the military leadership of the Jehad, rather than through its political Leaders. It was in furtherance of this that he took over the chairmanship of the Military Committee. Gul felt, and in this he had the support of the President, that some Leaders were getting too powerful. To reduce their authority and, at the same time, he hoped improve the combat effectiveness of the Mujahideen, General Gul re-started the system of allocating weapo
ns direct to Commanders. This delighted the US and CIA who had advocated this method from the start.
During my time at ISI the Americans genuinely believed that giving arms direct to the people they wanted to use them would lead to a better battlefield performance by Commanders. While this might have been true in the short term, or for a special operation, we knew from past experience that in the end this method led to corruption and chaos. Certainly it cut out the Party Leaders from the supply system, and thus antagonized them, but it also promoted infighting between Commanders, as those who could not get the weapons they considered their entitlement from ISI resorted to looting from fellow Commanders. How could ISI deal directly with hundreds of Commanders? This was the system that had led to the ‘Quetta incident’ in 1983, which had been instrumental in my appointment to ISI.
Another facet of this new arms distribution system, and one which was to have a catastrophic effect on supplying the Mujahideen during the actual withdrawal, was that it necessitated the build-up of stocks at Ojhri Camp. This ISI arms and ammunition depot had to hold the bulk of the weapons destined for the Commanders. The individual ‘packages’ had to be sorted out at Ojhri, as it was no longer policy to keep stocks moving quickly to the Party warehouses. In early April, 1988, a few days prior to the Soviets signing the Accord, we lost the entire stock of arms and ammunition at Ojhri in a devastating explosion. Add to this the US cutback on supplies and the disastrous strategic error of the attack on Jalalabad a few weeks after the Soviets had left Afghanistan, and the real reasons why the Mujahideen snatched defeat from the jaws of victory become clearer.
The Bear Trap (Afghanistan’s Untold Story) Page 29