by Norman Stone
The Turkish generals’ coup had happened at a moment of great turmoil in the Middle East. The Shah of Iran had fallen; oil prices had doubled; and the ruler of Iraq, the Stalin-worshipping Saddam Hussein, was planning to fall on Iran, to make himself master of the whole region. Meanwhile, the Americans, under the feeble Carter, seemed to be fair game, and their diplomatic staff in Teheran were taken hostage by a mob of angry students; in spring 1980 a pathetic attempt was made to rescue them by helicopter mission, which went wrong in classic Bay of Pigs style, with sand blocking the engines, and machines crashing into each other. Old men in Moscow chuckled, and moved into Afghanistan.
The last act of the USSR began very professionally, with a mixture of brute force and low cunning. On Christmas Eve, 1979, Soviet troops took over the airport at Kabul, and three days later six Soviet divisions crossed the border. The rulers of Afghanistan knew that power was precarious, and in 1979 the Tadj-Bek palace in Kabul was very well guarded — 2,500 special troops, dug-in tanks and a private guard consisting of relatives of the president. President Hafizullah Amin had himself seized power a few months before, in a coup, and had called in a special Soviet force of 500 men to complete the security system. It had been recruited among Central Asians wearing a uniform that made them resemble local, Afghan, forces. But they were in fact from the KGB and Spetsnaz, its ‘special purpose’ troops, men (Uzbeks and Tadzhiks) trained to the highest degree of physical fitness. Amin never thought that they would be a threat. He was quite wrong: there had been 343 flights into Kabul in forty-eight hours and their mission was in fact to overthrow him.
The affair was, militarily, very well prepared. The palace had been studied with a view to assault, but much care was taken to disguise the Soviet intent. The night before, the Soviet forces attended a banquet with the Afghan defenders. President Amin was extremely careful as to what he ate, but he did trust his own cooks, who were Soviet Uzbeks. On 26 December 1979, in the middle of the dinner, all who had touched the food began to roll around in extreme pain. Soviet doctors were summoned, and revived Amin with injections and a drip-feed. But they were soon followed by Soviet assault troops, who blasted their way, with foul language, through the defences, hurling grenades into the private rooms and even the lifts. Amin wrenched himself from his bed, and, in his underwear, with tubes dangling from his body, went down to the main hall to see what was happening. His five-year-old son, crying, rushed up to him, clutching his father’s legs. One of the Soviet doctors said, ‘I can’t look at this.’ Amin was killed shortly afterwards. The affair was all over by midnight, and at 12.30 a.m. on 28 December, a telephone call came through to the new Afghan leader, Babrak Karmal, from the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. Soviet troops were coming in to reinforce Karmal’s position. They were already in control of the airports and the main roads into Kabul, the capital. All very easy: but in the next twelve years Afghanistan was wrecked as a country, and so, too, was the Soviet Union itself. Almost no-one in a senior position in Moscow seems to have recognized that this would happen. On the contrary, the decision to invade Afghanistan was taken quite casually, and was hardly even minuted. Old Brezhnev, Andropov and the senior military simply went into ‘country A’, as it was called. Other Politburo signatures, willing or unwilling, were collected afterwards.
They thought that they had the measure, not just of Afghanistan, but of Central Asia in general. The whole area was very backward, and when the Russian Revolution happened, the Bolsheviks found that they could rely on some elements within the Islamic world, including even the Chechens in the northern part of the Caucasus. The USSR was progress. It freed the education system from obsolete nonsense — a teacher who did not know Arabic (let alone early medieval Arabic) forcing, with terrible punishments, rote-learning of the Koran on small boys who had no notion of what they were having to memorize. Women were emancipated, and local languages were given some encouragement; customs such as month-long fasting, or circumcision, were discouraged (or worse). It was true that, as time went by, Moscow found itself relying on local power-wielders. The tribal system was tenacious, and there were also religious orders (Sufi) with a leader, Sheikh, who exercised a great deal of informal authority. When, after Khrushchev, the Russians started to deal through locals rather than Russians, these informal networks came into their own, together with a corruption that oiled the wheels. When the USSR finally collapsed, the last generation of Communist bosses quite easily took on national dress, and religion, to become presidents of the new Central Asian republics. At any rate, no-one in Moscow seems to have thought that running Afghanistan would be especially difficult. As regards her foreign affairs, the country was a sort of Asiatic Finland. Her ruler had been grateful for support against the British, and had recognized the Bolsheviks early on. He then initiated a modernization drive not unlike Atatürk’s in Turkey, and since the USSR was also modernizing backward Central Asian tribal peoples, there was much over which to collaborate. In the sixties aid came from the USSR, the usual cement and chemical works, and a gas pipeline took two thirds of Afghan natural gas to the north.
Even its considerable internal problems were familiar, in the sense that, with every Islamic society, you feel you are dealing with the same pack of cards, though the distribution of suits and honour cards greatly varies. Here, in a population of 15 million, modernization brought about the usual troubles. There was a Persian-speaking upper class, which was eroded by population growth and the de — localization of politics. Women’s emancipation in a Sunni Islam context of, in places, considerable conservatism was not straightforward: in Herat the men used henna as make-up (the Turkish slang for ‘homosexual’ is pusht, from ‘Pushtun’, the more accurate version of the English ‘Pathan’, the dominant group) and the women had to wear the clumsy burka, which hardly showed even their eyes. There were troubles between Pathans, semi-Iranian Baluchis and Turkic Uzbeks of the north, each with a different language; tribal matters counted as well, and even divided the Communists (the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set up in 1965) into two rival groups. There were also secular army officers who sympathized with Moscow, where many of them had been trained, and despised the native traditions. The party in effect depended upon university students, the intelligentsia and some administrators for its membership, and these, vain and isolated from society at large, split. On top of everything else, the Pathans were not confined to Afghanistan. In 1947, when Pakistan was established, 6 million of them lived there, and accounted for several Pakistani leaders; there was agitation for a ‘Pushtunistan’ that would have caused secession, and the Pakistanis tried to control their neighbour’s affairs. Militarily speaking, Afghanistan was so mountainous that only a genius could conquer it; the northern and southern parts were even cut off from each other until a great tunnel was driven through, at 12,000 feet, in 1964, with Soviet aid, to connect them in winter.
Once this happened, politics became less local, and factions contended for central power. A famine in 1972, and a supposedly shameful treaty with Iran, brought discontent, and while the monarch was abroad, he was overthrown, by a ‘modernizer’, Mohammed Dowd, with help from two factions of Communists in the wings. Dowd proceeded with modernization, on the whole leaning towards the USSR in much the same way as other ‘Third World’ leaders of the era. As happened in Iran, Islamists began to surface as political opposition in the 1970s, and were driven abroad. To lessen his dependence on the Communists, Dowd took a loan from Iran, and this prompted Moscow to connive in his overthrow. One of the Communist factions, led by Nur Mohammed Taraki, a writer, seized power in 1978 and launched what was described as the ‘April [‘Saur’] revolution’. It was strongly anti-religious, and there was cruel persecution; the prisons, hideous, were full, with 27,000 deaths, by official figures, in one of them alone (the governor said that, in order to set up socialism, he would leave, if necessary, only a million Afghanis alive, as that number would suffice for its construction). Agrarian reform was launched, and neglected the
all-important matter of access to water, which was controlled by the village elders. It also took land from religious foundations (as the Shah had done) and tribal chieftains.
The party itself split, and, true to form, the rival Communist leader, Babrak Karmal, much grander in social origin, and from a different clan, was packed off to Prague as ambassador (where he was kept in waiting as Moscow’s man). In the short term, a Communist regime could indeed manage to suppress Islam, because Islam lacked an international organization (such as the Vatican) and would only manage a united front of resistance if forced to. It was forced to. Herat rebelled, despite savage repression and 100,000 killings. Meanwhile, the Pakistanis were giving training in guerrilla warfare to Islamists who had taken refuge there: that way, they could control ‘Pushtunistan’ agitation. In other words, complications within complications, and not a place to invade.
Nevertheless, Soviet clients were in trouble, and the problem landed on Brezhnev’s desk. Taraki appealed for help to Moscow. To start with, he met reluctance, and was told on the telephone that direct intervention was not possible. Kosygin showed how much the Politburo understood the situation when he said, ‘Could you not recruit from among the working class?’ and had the apposite answer, ‘I am afraid that there is not much of a working class in Afghanistan.’ Taraki was sent a hundred barrels of incendiary liquid. However, the men of experience, Andropov for the KGB and Gromyko for the foreign ministry, warned against any direct intervention. Without intervention, Taraki himself soon lost control, and was overthrown after barely a year, in September 1978, by Hafizullah Amin, a rival who had been trained in the USA, latterly at Columbia. Taraki was tied down to a bed and suffocated with a cushion; Brezhnev is said to have broken down in tears when he heard. But in any event Amin had been rebellious not just locally, but as far as the USSR was concerned: he had defied the advisers, and four of Taraki’s men had even had to be smuggled out via the Soviet embassy, in nailed-down boxes. Soon, Amin was sending ‘frantic’ messages for Pakistan to offer some support, as he knew that the Soviets were suspicious of him. That made them more suspicious still, since Pakistan entertained good relations with China. More atrocities followed — 12,000 of the most qualified people, under Taraki and then again under Amin. Amin then tried to mend fences with Islam, which Taraki had treated with contempt.
Moscow’s ‘Third World’ expansionism, very promising after the Americans’ defeat in Vietnam, was in any case considerable. There was now Soviet emplacement in Africa, particularly in Ethopia, on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula. The Americans’ ally, the Shah, had fallen early in 1979, as had Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua a little later; there was even a proto-Cuba forming up in tiny Grenada. Besides, the Carter administration in Washington generally invited contempt. It had lost the way over ‘human rights’, denouncing South Africa and Chile rather than the Soviet Union; its economic performance was woeful; the German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, looked on Carter with derision. American Intelligence did not even notice Soviet troop concentrations a month before the invasion; nor did it understand the significance of the occupation specialist General Ivan Pavlovsky’s transfer to Kabul. From Moscow’s viewpoint, it was an obvious opportunity — get rid of a few obscurantist clerics, as had been done before in Communist history, and show who was boss. There was the usual puppet for such occasions — Babrak Karmal (a pseudonym, meaning ‘people’s flag’, though he was of tribal leadership stock), who was prepared for some kind of accommodation with Islam, though himself a whisky drinker. After the Christmas slaughter in the Tadj-Bek palace, he was installed as president, with instructions to behave with moderation.
It was the start of a long nightmare, a war that, for the Soviets, turned out to be unwinnable. In the first place, the American reaction was much harsher than Moscow had supposed: not just sanctions of various sorts, including a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, which Brezhnev had planned as a showcase of Soviet professionalism, but non-ratification of SALT II, a resumption of the arms race, and the adoption of a strategic partnership with Pakistan. This was dangerous territory. Pakistan was pioneering a nuclear bomb, in pursuit of her troubles with India, Moscow’s ally in the area. But there were also Islamic elements, some of which had even burned down the American embassy just before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Saudis (and various other Islamic states) condemned the USSR, and sent help to Pakistan; to its subsequent regret, the USA then gave training and help to the Islamic element. The USSR was isolated, and could not even sway the UN, which, apart from Greece and a few other countries, offered overwhelming condemnation. A few Europeans demurred, saying that militant Islam was worse than Communism, but Brezhnev’s blundering meant that they had no real influence.
There was unquestionably much to be said for what the Soviets were trying to do: the dead, irrational world of small-town and tribal Islam, with its endless children, its terrible oppression of women, and its hostility to minorities, needed to be escaped from. However, the battling had already caused disruption, and in the Amin period there had been devastating disruption — 100,000 deaths and 500,000 refugees. History showed decisively that Afghans united against foreign invasion, if on nothing else. Maybe if the country had been isolated, resistance would have been destroyed, as had happened in Central Asia. But Afghanistan bordered on Iran and Pakistan, and mountains made connections over the border impossible for the Soviets — they had 100,000 men only — to control. Seven Sunni Islam resistance groups supported from Pakistan emerged, and so did eight separate Shia Islamic ones based on Iran — forces numbering up to 200,000 men. In the old days, Islamic resistance to European empires had been hopelessly weak (except in the case of Turkey) because it had no base at all in technology. Now, technology was well within reach. Trotsky had said that Stalin had been ‘Genghiz Khan with a telephone’. Communism came to an end, at least in part, because the real modern-day Genghiz Khans had an understanding of surface-to-air missiles.
The Soviets could only really control about one fifth of the country, and the Afghan army was unreliable, to the point not just of mass desertion, but of having to be deprived of weapons that might be sold to the resistance. Karmal tried through amnesties, licensing of private trade and greater tolerance for religion to make himself popular, but the regime remained as ever divided, and some of its members (including the foreign minister) were identified as Soviet agents: most things were done by the thousands of Soviet advisers attached in this or that capacity. The Soviets themselves became involved in smuggling of the Western goods that were available in Kabul, and the corruption affected the PDPA. The Soviet forces were hated, and there were atrocities (a captured prisoner might be ‘under-shirted’, i.e. his skin slit around the middle of his body, and then lifted off, over his head). The troops could only move about in large numbers. They responded to resistance with tremendous and unscrupulous force — a hundred peasants routinely burned in an irrigation channel where they were taking refuge, and the like; air-dropped landmines caused mayhem; 12,000 corpses were discovered in mass graves in the main prison, Pol-e-Charki. The Soviet 100,000 became 600,000, and the war caused 80 per cent of the educated Afghans to flee the country, by 1982. Kabul itself trebled in population, and by 1989 over two thirds of children admitted to hospital were suffering from malnutrition. Even in 1980 there were a million refugees, and by 1984 4 million, with perhaps another 2 million who had been uprooted in their own country, quite apart from the perhaps 2 million who were killed — out of a population of 15 million. There had been a supposed Afghan army on the Soviet side, perhaps 80,000 men, but 50,000 deserted in 1980. An atmosphere of sheer hatred developed, with the sort of self-sacrificial attitude that had animated the Vietcong, and it began to affect the Central Asians (Tadzhiks) whom the Soviets used: they were replaced by young men from the Baltic republics, whose enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was not increased thereby. In this atmosphere, the Soviets could control Kabul but hardly anywhere else, beyond highways that needed to be very intensively pa
trolled. They got rid of Karmal in 1986, not long after the 27th Moscow Congress, replacing him with a Mohammed Najibullah, who had been head of the Afghan equivalent of the KGB, the KHAD (his brother boasted that he had signed 90,000 death warrants), and, in a strange echo of the Greek civil war, 30,000 children aged between six and fourteen were sent to Moscow.
But the Afghan resistance did not diminish. Rather, it grew more difficult, more anarchic, more inclined, even, to fight among itself. It was based on Pakistan and Iran, the latter maintaining Shia rebels, while in Pakistan there were 380 ‘refugee tented villages’ which maybe had the highest birth rate in the world. The seven resistance groups did not easily collaborate, and the fiercest, Hezb (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar), did not co-operate at all: it was, especially, at odds with the other chief resistance group, Massoud’s Jamiat in the Panjshir valley, and religious or tribal emphases played their part, Pakistan insisting on some sort of alliance. The Shias, with Iranian support, were not involved, and themselves were divided. But money was involved: opium from Afghanistan and the frontier areas of Pakistan supplied, in 1981-2, half of the heroin reaching the West. This is a dimension yet to be explored — or, rather, there is a serious question, as to how far the Americans were encouraging both what they later called ‘fundamentalist Islam’ and the drug trade. The CIA had been prevented, by Congress, from getting what it thought to be proper money. Why not do drugs, through Islamists who did not mind corrupting further a Christian youth whom they already regarded with contempt? At any rate, the Afghan resistance flourished, and in 1986 the Americans were giving it Stinger missiles — missiles that enabled men on mountainsides to knock out Soviet helicopters. They were brought in through Pakistan, and there was almost nothing that Moscow could do against this. The president of Pakistan himself was murdered, no doubt at Soviet behest, but this made no difference. The USSR had met its match. Thirty thousand Soviet soldiers were killed out of some 600,000 combatants — nothing, in comparison with what had happened on the Afghan side, but a vast amount, in terms of Soviet prestige.