In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

by Seth G. Jones

  On June 26, 1973, Zahir Shah was flown to London to be treated for hemorrhaging in one eye caused, one State Department assessment reported, “by a volleyball.”23 After receiving treatment, Zahir Shah then went to Italy for a short vacation. His “vacation” turned out to be far longer than anyone expected. His next trip back to Afghanistan would be in April 2002, three decades later, after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. On July 16, 1973, Daoud engineered a coup d’état with support from the Afghan Army. The United States reaction was mixed. In a report to Henry Kissinger, for example, the U.S. National Security Council concluded that Daoud had provided Afghanistan “with strong leadership” during his tenure in the 1950s, and had “made strenuous efforts to modernize the economy and armed forces.” However, it also noted that Daoud had turned to the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance and warned that he “may well lean a bit more toward the Soviets.”24

  At the time, Afghanistan was mostly a backwater of U.S. foreign policy. “There was little intrinsic U.S. interest in Afghanistan,” acknowledged Graham Fuller, who was the CIA station chief from 1975 to 1978. “But it was a rich opportunity for recruiting Soviet diplomats and KGB personnel, as well as Chinese officials.” Fuller had received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Russian and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University and had studied there with the respected Russian historian Richard Pipes and the future national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. While he had never worked in Moscow or behind the iron curtain, Fuller had become increasingly drawn to the vulnerability of the Soviet Union. “I was interested in understanding the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, which is why I wanted to serve in Afghanistan.” Indeed, over the course of the 1970s, the CIA grew more concerned about Daoud’s ties with the Soviet Union and the Afghan Communist parties. “We knew that Daoud had close connections to the Soviets,” said Fuller. “And Moscow’s involvement in Afghanistan would become progressively more acute.”25

  The Sawr Revolution

  Daoud’s coup was a turning point for Afghanistan. After fifty years of relatively stable Pashtun leadership, suddenly the national power structure had been shaken. Governance deteriorated over the next decade as Daoud attempted to impose strong central control, and Moscow, which had been providing military aid since at least 1955, grew increasingly alarmed about intelligence reports of instability in Afghanistan.26 In April 1978, a leading Communist activist, Mir Akbar Khyber, was assassinated. Some 15,000 demonstrators joined his funeral procession, demanding justice, and the security situation intensified. Daoud responded by arresting Marxist leaders, but his crackdown triggered a violent response. Army and air force officers engineered a bloody coup on April 27, 1978, in the Afghan lunar month of Sawr (Taurus); Daoud was assassinated during the coup. On April 30, military officers handed over power to a Revolutionary Council headed by Nur Mohammad Taraki, who promptly signed Decree No. 1 and proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.27 Moscow provided immediate aid to try to stabilize the situation, including armored personnel carriers, combat radios, Kalashnikov rifles, and Makarov pistols.28

  In the United States, there were mixed reactions to Daoud’s overthrow. “One of the first intelligence reports I sent back to Washington was to provide a background of the people who constituted the new government,” recalled the CIA’s Fuller. “They were members of the Communist party, and we had pretty good biographies on them. But the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development hit the roof,” because U.S. laws prohibited them from providing assistance to Communist parties. “They had to stop a lot of their funding to the Afghan government. But I was calling it as I saw it; the Soviets were on the march.”29

  Taraki was born to a poor peasant family in Ghazni Province in July 1917. In the mid-1940s, he founded the left-wing party Weesh Zalmayan (Awakened Youth). In 1953, he left Afghanistan for Washington, DC, where he served as press attaché in the Afghan Embassy. When Zahir Shah appointed Daoud as prime minister, Taraki publicly resigned his post and held a press conference accusing the Afghan government of being “a bunch of feudal lords.” According to one report, the former press attaché was soon called back, and, “upon his return to Kabul, he telephoned the despotic Daoud from the Kabul Cinema, telling him ‘I am Noor Mohammad Taraki. I have just arrived. Shall I go home or to the prison?’”30 Taraki was allowed to go home, but he was kept under police surveillance. In 1965, he helped found the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which split into two groups in 1967: Khalq (Masses), headed by Taraki; and Parcham (Banner), headed by Babrak Karmal.

  The Khalq faction advocated an immediate and violent overthrow of the government and the establishment of a Soviet-style Communist regime. The Parcham faction supported a gradual move toward socialism, arguing that Afghanistan was not industrialized enough to undergo a true proletarian revolution such as that called for in The Communist Manifesto. Bitter resentment between the Khalq and Parcham factions would later contribute to the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Sawr Revolution.

  In many ways, Babrak Karmal was the antithesis of Taraki. He was born into a wealthy family in a small village outside of Kabul, and his father was a well-connected army general. He attended law school at Kabul University and quickly gained a reputation as an activist in the university’s student union. A Soviet dossier on Karmal hinted that he was sometimes more show than substance. “He is a skilled orator, emotional, and inclined to abstraction to the detriment of a specific analysis,” but he had “a poor grasp of economic issues which interest him at a general level.”31 Karmal became increasingly involved in Marxist political activities, which led to his imprisonment for five years. His pro-Moscow leftist views strengthened while in prison through interaction with several other inmates, such as Mir Muhammad Siddiq Farhang. After his release, he ran for office and was elected to a seat in the lower house of the National Assembly, where he would be a controversial figure for many years. When he died in 1996 at the age of sixty-seven, the Afghan radio station Voice of Sharia summarized his life with little affection: “Babrak Karmal committed all kinds of crimes during his illegitimate rule. God inflicted on him various kinds of hardship and pain. Eventually he died of cancer in a hospital belonging to his paymasters, the Russians.”32

  Violence between the rival factions continued in the fall of 1978, with revolts in rural areas by Islamist opponents of the regime. Taraki conducted mass arrests, tortured prisoners, and held secret executions on a scale Afghanistan had not seen in nearly a century. At a government rally in October 1978 in Kabul, for instance, government leaders unveiled a new Afghan flag, jettisoning the traditional design, which had combined deep black, green, and red. Demonstrating their Marxist pedigree, Afghan leaders unfurled a red flag with a wreath of wheat and a yellow star at the top. Revolts broke out across the country. Pashtun tribesmen in the eastern mountains grabbed their rifles to fight the government, and several areas of the east—such as Kunar Province, the Hindu Kush, and Badakshan Province—became anti-government strongholds. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan responded with widespread oppression and even more arrests and executions, but soldiers deserted by the thousands and the Afghan Army began to melt away. Concerned by the rising violence, Soviet leaders sent additional KGB agents into Afghanistan.33

  In 1979, the situation grew worse. In February, U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs was kidnapped by armed Islamists posing as police. His captors barricaded themselves in a room in the Kabul Hotel and tried to bargain with the Afghan government. After two hours, Afghan security forces stormed the room, and Dubs was killed in the melee. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, lamented that Dubs’s death was “a tragic event which involved either Soviet ineptitude or collusion.”34 The next month, violent demonstrations erupted in Herat. The Afghan Army’s 17th Division, which was ordered to quell the riots, mutinied en masse. As a Top Secret Soviet assessment concluded, the 17th Division
“has essentially collapsed. An artillery regiment and one infantry regiment comprising that division have gone over to the side of the insurgents.” The assessment also reported that insurgent leaders were “religious fanatics” motivated by ideology, and it was “under the banner of Islam that the soldiers are turning against the governmen”35 Prime Minister Taraki begged the Soviets for emergency military assistance, and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin promised to send weapons, ammunition, and military advisers.36

  But the Soviets were hesitant to send troops. Kosygin told Taraki: “If our troops were introduced, the situation in your country would not only not improve, but would worsen.” Somewhat ironically, Kosygin noted that the local Afghan population would probably rise up against Soviet forces, as might Afghanistan’s neighbors, such as Pakistan and China, who would receive help from the United States.37 The Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) sent a Top Secret memo to Alexander Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador in Afghanistan, contending that while the deployment of Soviet troops “was considered in much detail,” it “would be used by hostile forces first of all to the detriment of the interests of the [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan]”38 Politburo member and future Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko noted that if the Soviets deployed troops and “beat down the Afghan people then we will be accused of aggression for sure. There’s no getting around it here.”39

  For three days the rebels held Herat, plundering weapons stockpiles and hunting down government officials. Taraki ordered Afghan forces from Kandahar to cordon off the city while he dispatched two armored brigades from Kabul. He then struck parts of Herat and 17th Division headquarters with IL-28 bombers from Shindand Air Base. By the time the rebellion was finally crushed, as many as 5,000 people had died, including one hundred Soviet advisers and their families, whose heads were mounted on poles and paraded around the city by the insurgents. News of the events in Herat accelerated desertions and mutinies in the Afghan military. In May, for example, a motorized column from the 7th Division went over to the rebels in Paktia Province, located along the Pakistan border in eastern Afghanistan.40

  Governance was collapsing in Afghanistan. In June 1979, fearful of an all-out civil war, the Soviet leadership deployed a special detachment of KGB paramilitary officers disguised as service personnel to defend the Soviet Embassy in Kabul.41 Revolts continued, and in September Taraki was summoned to Moscow for consultations. On his return to Kabul, he was arrested by his deputy, Hafizullah Amin, and executed.

  Amin, a Pashtun from the town of Paghman, not far from Kabul, had a master’s degree in education from Columbia University in New York. According to his Soviet intelligence dossier, Amin was “marked by great energy, a businesslike nature, a desire to get to the heart of the issue, and firmness in his views and actions. He also has the talent of attracting people to him who have subordinated themselves to his influence.”42 Soviet leaders felt that Amin was too close to the United States, and they believed that Amin wanted a more “balanced policy” with the West. A Top Secret analysis warned Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev: “It is known, in particular, that representatives of the USA, on the basis of their contacts with the Afghans, are coming to a conclusion about the possibility of a change in the political line of Afghanistan in a direction which is pleasing to Washington.”43 A series of KGB reports to the Politburo expressed concern that Amin would likely turn to the Americans for help.44 But CIA officials strongly denied having any such contacts. “It was total nonsense,” said the CIA’s Graham Fuller. “I would have been thrilled to have those kinds of contacts with Amin, but they didn’t exist.”45

  On December 8, 1979, Brezhnev held a meeting in his private office with a narrow circle of senior Politburo members: ideologue Mikhail Suslov, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Andropov and Ustinov expressed grave concerns that the United States was trying to increase its role in Afghanistan and that Pakistan would try to annex Pashtun areas of Afghanistan. By the end of the meeting, the group had tentatively decided to move on two fronts. The first was to have the KGB remove Amin and replace him with Babrak Karmal; the second was to seriously consider sending Soviet troops to Afghanistan to stabilize the country.46

  On December 10, 1979, Ustinov gave an oral order to the General Staff to start preparations for deployment of one division of paratroopers and five divisions of military-transport aviation. He also ordered increased readiness of two motorized rifle divisions in the Turkestan Military District and an increase in the staff of a pontoon regiment.47 Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the General Staff, was outraged by the decision, responding that the troops would not be able to stabilize the situation and calling the decision “reckless.”

  Ustinov cut him off harshly: “Are you going to teach the Politburo? Your only duty is to carry out the orders.”

  Ogarkov replied that the Afghan problem should be decided by political means, instead of through military force, and pointed out that the Afghan people had never reacted favorably to foreign occupation.48

  The final decision to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan appears to have been made on the afternoon of December 12 by a small group of Soviet officials, including Brezhnev, Suslov, Andropov, Ustinov, and Gromyko. They issued a directive to “send several contingents of Soviet troops…into the territory of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan for the purposes of rendering internationalist assistance to the friendly Afghan people” and to “create favorable conditions to prevent possible anti-Afghan actions on the part of the bordering states.”49 The group agreed that the situation in Afghanistan seriously threatened the security of the Soviet Union’s southern borders, and the United States, China, and Iran could take advantage of this through support to the Afghan regime. In particular, Afghanistan could become a future U.S. forward operating base against the Soviet Union, lying right against their “soft underbelly” in Central Asia. Ideology also played an important role.50 Suslov and Boris Ponomarev, head of the Communist Party’s international department, argued that the Soviet Union needed to counter the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism. Ustinov was convinced that military operations could be accomplished quickly, perhaps in a few weeks or months. So was Brezhnev.51

  “It’ll be over in three to four weeks,” Brezhnev told Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to the United States.52

  There was some opposition to the invasion, especially in the Soviet General Staff. Generals Nikolai Ogarkov, Sergei Akhromeyev, and Valentin Varennikov, who were charged with preparing the invasion plan, filed a dissenting report to Ustinov. They warned him of the strong possibility of a protracted insurgency, especially in a country blessed with mountainous terrain and inhabited by warring tribes.53

  The Soviet Invasion

  Ronald Neumann monitored the Soviet invasion from afar. In 1970, he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the U.S. Department of State as a foreign service officer. After an initial posting in Senegal, he began to specialize in the Middle East. In 1973, he served as principal officer in Tabriz, Iran. He subsequently became desk officer for Jordan, deputy chief of mission in Yemen, deputy director of the Office of Arabian Peninsula Affairs, and deputy chief of mission in the United Arab Emirates.

  “I talked about Afghanistan on and off with my father until he died,” he told me. The elder Neumann was a longtime member of the Dartmouth Conference, which was established as a high-level forum for discussing Soviet-American relations. It was cochaired by Yevgeny Primakov, who went on to become the Russian prime minister, and Harold Saunders, a CIA analyst who later served on the National Security Council. From 1960 until 1981, the conference met thirteen times—alternately in the Soviet Union and the United States—and involved a number of other influential experts. It became even more active during the Soviet War in Afghanistan, meeting nearly every six months. “The Dartmouth Conference kept my father informed about developments in Afghanistan, which he passed on to me during our conversations,” Ro
nald Neumann recalled.54

  On Christmas Eve 1979, elite Soviet forces began flying into Kabul Airport and the military air base at Bagram. The 357th and 66th Motorized Rifle Divisions of the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan from Kushka in Turkmenistan and began advancing south along the main highway. The 360th and 201st Motorized Rifle Divisions crossed the Amu Darya River on pontoon bridges from Termez in Uzbekistan. Dividing Afghanistan from the Soviet Union, the river flows more than 1,500 miles through Central Asia. Because Afghanistan has almost no railways, the Amu Darya played a critical transport role for the Soviet invasion, since it could be used for barge traffic.

  The 360th Motorized Rifle Division reached Kabul on Christmas Day, securing the crucial Salang Pass and its tunnel en route, while the 201st moved toward Kunduz and east to Badakshan and Baghlan Provinces. 55 By December 27, 1979, there were 50,000 Soviet forces in Afghanistan, with 5,000 troops and Spetsnaz, the Soviet Union’s elite special forces, in positions around Kabul. The Soviets destroyed Kabul’s main telephone exchanges and took over the radio station and the Ministry of Interior. Soviet paratroopers also took control of the post office, ammunition depots, and other government buildings.