Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  Earlier, during the 1960s, two competing philosophies swept through Afghan schools and universities — Commu­nism and Islamic fundamentalism. At the same time, the economy started to crumble. As the 1970s dawned, the United States had almost totally withdrawn to focus its nation-building energy on Vietnam. In 1973, while on a trip to Italy, King Zahir was over­thrown by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, who leaned toward the Communists. The Soviets had, by this time, spent years training and equipping the Afghan army and held con­siderable influence in the country. And Daoud, seeing that his real opposition came from the Islamists, cracked down on them, and thousands fled to Pakistan. But much to the displeasure of the Soviets, who were expecting to control Daoud, he continued to exert an independent streak, insist­ing on such radical ideas as Afghans ruling themselves. This was too much for the Soviets. In April 1978, Soviet toadies in the army killed him.

  Now the Afghan Communists, led by Nur Mohammed Taraki, took formal command of the country. He began im­mediately to create a cult of personality and insisted that the people call him the “Great Teacher.” To the shock of the Soviet leaders, Taraki took Russian propaganda seriously. He was not content to create a “Brezhnev-style” dictatorship of leaders brooding over a stagnant economy. Instead, he took Lenin’s most radical writings literally and began impris­oning and killing his political opponents. Caught by surprise that someone actually believed their own drivel, the Soviet leaders, especially KGB chief Yuri Andropov, cast about for a replacement.

  What really alarmed the Soviets was the rise in power of the Islamists. The precocious mountain rebels announced them­selves in February 1979 by kidnapping Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Taraki’s troops, aided by the always-helpful KGB, succeeded in rescuing him but then man­aged to get him killed in the same raid. The United States re­sponded by vigorously doing nothing. Taraki still didn’t get it. He was too focused on choosing which glorious pose should adorn posters extolling his greatness to realize the Islamic fun­damentalists represented his true threat. By early 1979 the Islamic leaders had started to revolt, and the Afghan army, more loyal to their tribal leaders than Taraki, slowly dissolved to join the rebels. Taraki responded by waging a fight against his fellow Communist goon Hafizullah Amin, the country’s prime minister, who contested Taraki for supremacy in the party. In September 1979 Taraki flew to Moscow for meetings with Soviet leaders. Upon his return Amin and his “elite guards” ambushed Taraki, took him prisoner, and had him executed.

  Amin, the third to violently take over the country in six years, became its shortest lived. Everyone hated him. The So­viets, perhaps believing their own rumors, thought he was a CIA agent who had successfully infiltrated the Afghan Com­munist Party. The Afghans saw him as another tool of the Soviets. Amin hated the United States because he failed his PhD exams while a graduate student at Columbia University. The Americans hated him because he hated the United States. Another prime example of knee jerk.

  Alarmed by the deteriorating condition of its Communist ally, the Soviets thought of ways to bail Amin out. A jolt of urgency hit their talks when radical students in Iran seized the U.S. embassy, taking fifty Americans as hostages. The Soviets saw the United States had now lost its most strategic ally on the southern rim of the USSR. The Soviets’ knee-jerk reaction was to believe the United States would take over Afghanistan as a replacement.

  With their usual dearth of planning, Andropov pulled out the KGB invasion template. It would be along the lines of Hungary and Czechoslovakia: some lightning strikes at key installations in the capital — key media posts, government min­istries, military bases — a quick change of leadership and long tank columns to enforce the new law and order. After a short time the Soviets would leave and their puppet would rule un­opposed. Pull out the old playbook and change the names. The Soviets, however, were not the first country to invade Afghanistan. Geographically, the country lies between the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, and throughout history it has served as an entry point for invading armies to pass through, looking for someplace better to conquer. First the Persians, and later the Greeks and Mongols swept through the country’s steep mountain passes while the hardy tribes­men remained unbowed.

  In 1838 the British invaded Afghanistan with an enormous army from India. The goal was to grab Afghanistan before the Russians could, and thereby create a buffer between the sprawling Russian empire and India, the crown jewel of the British Empire. The British quickly captured the major cities of Afghanistan and installed their man as the country’s new king. But the Afghans despised their new rulers; they buried their tribal feuds and hatched plans to oust the British in an eerie foreshadow of the Soviet invasion to come.

  The Afghans broke into open rebellion in 1841. They cut the British link to India and turned on the British in Kabul. Thousands of troops and civilians were pinned down in their fort and slowly slaughtered. At a conference with the Afghan leader, a deal was arranged allowing the British to leave during the first week of 1842. Immediately, the slow-moving caravan suffered grievously from the harsh cold and attacks by bands of Afghans. The dead mounted over the ensuing days as the Afghan attackers swooped down at them as they staggered through snow-covered mountain passes. The death march lasted a week. One solitary survivor reached the Brit­ish garrison at Jalalabad. Although the British army returned later that year to exact revenge on the Afghans, the British adventure in Afghanistan had arrived at a ruinous end.

  The Soviets did not find this blazing example of defeat germane to their situation. Empire cruise control was turned on, the tanks were gassed up, and they were ready to roll.

  WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “MASSIVE REFLUX”

  The first week went perfectly. The next ten years were all downhill. In early December 1979, the Soviets infiltrated sol­diers into Afghanistan to scout out key locations in and around Kabul. They also snuck in their latest puppet, Babrak Karmal, as Amin’s successor and stashed him at an air base. Finally, on Christmas Eve the Soviets rolled. The Soviet For­tieth Army — yes, the Russians had lots of armies — crossed the Amu Darya River into Afghanistan as troops deplaned at the Kabul airport. By Christmas morning the army was racing forward. Two days later they entered Kabul, seized the radio and TV stations and key government ministries, and surrounded Amin in his palace. A siege raged over a few hours, but it ended as expected with Amin riddled with Soviet bullets. Another election Afghan-style, this one with Soviet monitors.

  As the Soviets clucked over their brilliant stroke, the Afghan warlords and tribal leaders watched in anger. The descendants of warriors who fought Alexander the Great and slaughtered thousands of British troops, sharpened their knives. Once again it became time for them to repel foreign invaders. They put aside their many differences and focused on one goal: kill Soviets. They called themselves mujahideen — soldiers of God.

  To the Americans, they were soldiers from heaven. Long before Amin was killed, U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski urged President Jimmy Carter to support the Afghan rebels and finally fight the Soviets. The final struggle of the Cold War was on.

  This secret war screamed out for one group, the CIA, to take command. Starting with the debacle of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the CIA had slowly lost credibility and power in the States, and by the late 1970s had fallen to its lowest level of prestige. Things got so bad even Congress was looking over their shoulder. Now opportunity knocked. Afghanistan would become their raison d’être. The CIA was stocked with bitter Vietnam vets who smiled at the thought of arming sol­diers to kill the Soviets, a main supplier to the North Viet­namese. And the war would give a flagging CIA a leg up in Washington. As long as day-in-and-day-out Soviets were dying, the CIA was back on its game. Guns for all became their rallying cry.

  The U.S. leaders had no illusion the rebels could actually defeat the Soviets. They were happy to just force the Soviets to fight — and die — in the barren mountains of Afghanistan. But the United States had a practical problem. To r
each Af­ghanistan, supplies had to cross Pakistan. Fortunately, the Pakistan dictator, Mohammed Zia-ul Haq shared the Ameri­can devotion to killing Soviets, as long as he could get a fat cut of the booty.

  Zia was a devout Muslim who declared Pakistan an Is­lamic state when he took command in 1977, but he tem­pered his religious zeal with heavy doses of political realism. During the struggles within Afghanistan between the Communists and Islamists, he sheltered Islamic leaders, such as Massoud. Once the Soviets invaded, Zia saw both the need and the opportunity to risk a fight. First, he feared getting squeezed between a powerful Soviet puppet on his western border and Pakistan’s traditional enemy India on his eastern flank. And by supporting the Islamic fighters he would gain serious street cred in the Muslim world. Once the Americans started tossing money around like drunken investment bankers at a strip club, Zia seized his golden opportunity. He would help the United States fight the Soviets and help himself to unlimited, unmarked CIA cash and military toys. It became a textbook case of doing well while doing good. As the Afghan resistance geared up with American hard­ware, the CIA station in Pakistan took control of the U.S. supply operation. It was a humble, mom-and-pop shop, con­fined to a handful of people who funneled about $30 million in cash and arms to the rebels. But to satisfy Zia, the United States had no direct contacts with the Afghan rebels. Instead, the money went directly to the Pakistan intelligence service, ISI, who doled it out as they wished to their favorites. The CIA didn’t know who got what, nor did they care. They were big-picture Russian killers, not micromanagers.

  Zia, seeing the value in his position, turned down a $400 million aid package from the Carter administration. Peanuts! When Reagan took office in 1981, the money became seri­ous, and Zia got a tidy $3.2 billion package to bolster his own military and fledgling nuclear weapons program.

  On the ground in Afghanistan, the situation quickly turned bad for the Soviets. Babrak Karmal’s army dissolved further when deserters brought their weapons over to the rebels. Most of the soldiers had more loyalty to the various tribes and warlords they were fighting than to Karmal or his foreign supporters. Uprisings that sprang up in the streets of Kabul were quieted down by Soviet machine-gun fire. But like the British 150 years earlier, the Soviets never succeeded in controlling the harsh mountainous countryside — and that, as it has throughout Afghan history, is where the resis­tance thrived.

  By the spring of 1980, rebel fighters were ambushing Soviet army units and honing their hit-and-run tactics. The Soviets responded by destroying villages and killing civilians, the knee-jerk superpower plan to win over the local hearts and minds, as perfected by the United States in Vietnam.

  To help the rebels, the CIA scoured the world for weapons that would not reveal their source. CIA buyers fanned out to purchase thousands of Soviet-made rifles from Egypt and Poland, chuckling to themselves over the irony of Soviet weapons killing Soviets. Even better, China proved a major ally in the cause, and the CIA secretly bought thousands of guns from them too, providing the Chinese with a handsome profit. In a war against Communists, a Communist country was engaging in aggressive capitalism to kill other Commu­nists, natch. Oh, the biting irony of clandestine war.

  To help the mujahideen, Zia set up training camps along the Afghan border. As the war grew, the entire region became dedicated to the fight with packed camps, warehouses, hos­pitals, and a road network. The CIA money flowed, and the Pakistan army and ISI partook handsomely from the Ameri­can swag.

  The U.S. involvement increased when President Reagan appointed William Casey to head the CIA in 1981. Casey first joined the spy business during World War II when he commanded the operation by the OSS — the predecessor of the CIA — to run spies into Nazi Germany. Casey deployed a secret weapon to achieve success within the Washington bu­reaucracy: mumbling. Few could understand him. Tired of asking Casey to repeat himself, people would simply politely nod and agree with him. Reagan himself would give up and just tell Casey to go ahead with whatever mumbled plot he had just hatched. Casey always maintained total deniability that he mumbled. The problem was with the listeners, he thought, all thousands of them.

  Casey repeatedly flew to Pakistan to meet with Zia and the head of ISI to take the fight to the enemy. He not only supported the Islamic fighters but, as a devout Catholic, be­lieved a combined squad of Christian/Islamic militants were a sure bet to take down the godless Soviets.

  By 1984 Casey ratcheted up U.S. contributions to $200 million, with a matching contribution pledged from the Saudis. Zia funneled the money — after taking his cut — to the Islamic fighters, virtually excluding the moderates and non-religious elements. One of those excluded was Ahmed Shah Massoud, perhaps the most successful and famous of the Afghan fighters. He came from the Panjshir Valley, a narrow strip north of Kabul along the Panjshir River. A religious Muslim, he fled to Pakistan when the pro-Communist Afghan government cracked down on the fundamentalists in the early 1970s. But unlike other Afghan fundamentalists, he held a more moderate line.

  Shortly after the Soviet invasion, the twenty-seven-year-old Massoud took thirty supporters, a handful of rifles, and pocket change into the valley to fight the Reds. The Panjshir Valley occupies an important strategic position in Afghani­stan. Along either side stand steep, high mountains where rebels can hide with impunity. From their mountain hide­outs they can sweep down and attack Soviet convoys along the Salang Highway, the only route from Kabul to the Soviet Union in the north. This lifeline of the Soviet occupation was laid bare to the crafty Massoud. He captured weapons for his growing army and raided Soviet columns without retribution.

  To rid themselves of this pesky rebel, starting in 1980 the Soviets threw attack after attack against Massoud. Each time they had him seriously outgunned; he not only survived but also became stronger. Rebels flocked to him as his reputation as a fighter grew. With his battlefield successes he acquired the very cool nickname of “Lion of the Panjshir.”

  Frustrated, in 1982 the Soviets launched a massive push and threw 10,000 Soviet troops, 4,000 Afghan troops, tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets at the Lion. But Massoud, tipped off by informants in the Afghan army, hid his fighters in the mountains and swept down on the Soviet column in the narrow valley, slicing them to pieces and capturing tons of equipment. Once again, the defeated Soviets slouched back to the safety of Kabul where they resumed their scorched-earth policy in an already scorched country.

  A huge Soviet offensive in 1984 punished Massoud, after he broke off a short-lived truce. The Russians introduced two new weapons: thousands of special forces troops with the skill and dedication to take on Massoud’s men in the mountains, and attack helicopters that could withstand anti­aircraft fire. Now it looked as if the Soviets might actually win the war. Massoud barely hung on. By this time the Soviet price for propping up their puppet was more than steep. A CIA report stated the Soviets had suffered 17,000 soldiers killed or wounded, and lost up to 400 aircraft, 2,750 tanks, and 8,000 other vehicles.

  The new Soviet weapons forced Casey to push more chips to the middle of the table. More money than ever flowed, with Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson as chief war booster from his perch on the committee that controlled the budget. Casey also sent in sophisticated communications equipment along with experts on explosives and commando warfare. What had started as a mom-and-pop operation had mush­roomed into a full-fledged U.S. government agency. It also became impossible to pretend to the Soviets that the United States was not involved. Congressmen inspected training camps in Pakistan, journalists spent weeks with the rebels, and President Reagan, in his best “win one for the Gipper” voice even pronounced the mujahideen “Freedom Fighters.” Casey and Zia glowed.

  As the war ground on, life for the Soviet soldiers became intolerable. Their enemy were ghost soldiers who appeared from nowhere and just as quickly vanished. Armed with U.S.-supplied sniper rifles, rebels picked off Soviet officers by the dozens in Kabul. Death hung around every corner for the Soviets. Clever bomb make
rs fashioned plastic explosives into ordinary objects — pens, cigarette lighters, thermoses — and sold them to the Soviets. Many died while writing letters home; others were poisoned in restaurants. Soviet morale plummeted as despair and drug abuse swept the ranks. Word of the failure seeped into the Soviet press, and the citizens back home began to notice that their country was fighting a disastrous foreign war. To stop the slide, the Soviets pushed Babrak Karmal into retirement and replaced him with head of the Afghan secret police, Najibullah, the one-named tor­turer.

  As the war expanded, it grew from a Soviet/Afghan fight into one embraced by the entire Islamic world. Afghan lead­ers flew to Saudi Arabia for fund-raising tours at mosques and returned flush with cash. But more important, the Arab countries sent their young men. Spirited with dreams of fighting the godless invaders, these young men flooded to U.S.-financed terror camps along the Pakistan/Afghan border ready to take up arms against the hated Soviets. These rebels studied the tricks of guerrilla and terrorist warfare from Pakistani trainers, and absorbed the credo that Islamic fight­ers should fight all nonbelievers. One of the newcomers was a tall, very rich Saudi named Osama bin Laden.

  As the seventh year of the war sped along, what had been a secret CIA operation to fund a small group of Afghan fighters had blossomed into a U.S.-financed effort to equip, house, and train Islamic fundamentalist warriors without any concern where these thousands of soldiers would end up and who they would fight. Blowback hung in the air.

  But the Soviet dream of empire died hard. Seeing that the rebels needed a more potent weapon capable of destroying Soviet helicopters and aircraft, the United States began sup­plying Stinger missiles to the Afghans in the fall of 1986. Few weapons altered the war as much as the Stinger. Once the cheap, lightweight, shoulder-fired weapon entered the fray, they immediately turned the tide against the Russians as the rebels knocked down hundreds of Russian helicopters and aircraft. Missile-fear forced the Soviets to keep their aircraft above the missile’s 12,500-foot ceiling, meaning they had minimal impact on ground operations. The Soviets never de­veloped a way to counter the Stingers.