KGB special forces disguised in Afghan uniforms assaulted the presidential palace. Hafizullah Amin’s guards fought back for several hours, but they were ultimately overcome, and KGB forces assassinated Amin.56 Babrak Karmal arrived from the airport to take over the government and addressed the country on Radio Kabul:
Today the torture machine of Amin and his henchmen, savage butchers, usurpers and murderers of tens of thousands of our compatriots…has been broken…. The great April revolution, accomplished through the indestructible will of the heroic Afghan people…has entered a new stage. The bastions of the despotism of the bloody dynasty of Amin and his supporters—those watchdogs of the sirdars of Nadir Shah, Zahir Shah, and Daoud Shah, the hirelings of world imperialism, headed by American imperialism—have been destroyed. Not one stone of these bastions remains.57
The Soviets were right to worry about possible U.S. involvement. In early 1979, the Carter administration began looking at the possibility of covert assistance to Afghanistan. By the spring, Zbigniew Brzezinski had come up with ways to undermine the Soviets in their own backyard. He convinced President Carter to sanction some initial aid to the Afghan rebels. The shipment consisted of old British .303 Lee-Enfield rifles.58 On March 30, 1979, Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron chaired a mini-session of the Special Coordination Committee on Afghanistan at the White House. At the meeting, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Newsom argued that the United States should counter the growing Soviet presence in Afghanistan, and Pentagon official Walter Slocombe asked whether there might be a benefit in “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.”
Aaron concluded by asking the group: “Is there interest in maintaining and assisting the [Afghan] insurgency, or is the risk that we will provoke the Soviets too great?”59
Over the next few weeks, senior government officials continued discussions on possible action in Afghanistan. At the CIA, National Intelligence Officer Arnold Horelick sent Director Stansfield Turner a paper examining possible Soviet reactions to U.S. assistance. Horelick argued that covert action to help Afghan opposition leaders would hurt the Soviets. On April 6, the Special Coordination Committee, chaired by Brzezinski, met to discuss several U.S. options. The scenarios ranged from weapons and training to more benign nonlethal assistance.
After much debate, the group recommended that the CIA provide nonlethal assistance to opposition groups, and on July 3, 1979, President Carter signed the first finding to help support the mujahideen in Afghanistan. It authorized covert support for insurgent propaganda, the establishment of radio access to the Afghan population through third-country facilities, and the provision of cash and nonmilitary supplies to opposition groups.60 Brzezinski, who was particularly concerned about Soviet designs on the region, told Carter that the Soviets might not stop at Afghanistan: “I warned the President that the Soviets would be in a position, if they came to dominate Afghanistan, to promote a separate Baluchistan, which would give them access to the Indian Ocean while dismembering Pakistan and Iran.”61
But there were substantial disagreements about Soviet intentions. The CIA sent an Eyes Only memo to President Carter and other members of the National Security Council, concluding that it was “unlikely that the Soviet occupation is a preplanned first step in the implementation of a highly articulated grand design for the rapid establishment of hegemonic control over all of southwest Asia.” Rather, it explained that the Soviets were mainly concerned about the collapse of a state in its sphere of influence. Arnold Horelick tried to split the difference. In a paper for Brzezinski, he wrote that the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan represented a “qualitative turn in Soviet foreign policy in the region and toward the third world.” Stansfield Turner included a personal cover note to Brzezinski when he forwarded the memo:
I would only add a personal comment that I would be a bit more categoric than the paper in stating that the Soviets’ behavior in Afghanistan was not an aberration. I agree we do not have the evidence that the Soviets are firmly committed to continuing as aggressive a policy in the third world…. Yet, I do believe that the Soviet track record over the past five or six years indicates a definitely greater willingness to probe the limits of our tolerance. “Détente” was not a bar to this greater assertiveness in Angola, Ethiopia, Kampuchea and Yemen. It need not be so again, even if we return to détente. As the paper concludes, how assertive the Soviets will be in the future will very likely depend upon how “successful” the Soviet leadership views their intervention in Afghanistan to have been.62
Despite the conflicting assessments, there is little credible evidence that Soviet leaders wanted to expand their reach into Pakistan and Iran and to the Indian Ocean. Rather, they were concerned by the collapse of governance in Afghanistan and suspicious that the United States and Afghanistan’s neighbors would try to move into the vacuum.
It seems unlikely that the Soviets would have gotten involved had the Afghan state not collapsed in the first place. As Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin argues in his book The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, “In the end, the persistence of revolt and the concomitant breakdown of the state resulted from its own internal weaknesses.” He continues: “The main reason the revolt spread so widely was that the army disintegrated in a series of insurrections, from unrecorded defections of small posts to mutinies in nearly all the major garrisons.”63 The uprising engulfed Afghan cities, including Herat in the west, Jalalabad in the east, and eventually Kabul itself. Some of the Afghan leaders who mutinied—such as Ismail Khan and Abdul Rauf—escaped and joined the resistance. Indeed, the dissolution of the Afghan Army in the late 1970s, rather than the strength of the insurgents, allowed the resistance to spread.64 The Afghan state had failed to establish basic law and order and to deliver basic services. The Soviet Union stepped in to help fill this void.
CHAPTER TWO The Mujahideen Era
IN 1979, the year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, who would play a key role in U.S. efforts in Afghanistan after the September 2001 attacks, finished his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. In 1974, he had arrived in Hyde Park, a racially diverse community situated along Lake Michigan on Chicago’s South Side. The university was founded there in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who described his role as “the best investment I ever made.” “Zal,” as Khalilzad was known to his colleagues, was a resident floor adviser at the International House, an oversize Gothic building where many of the university’s foreign students lived. A contemporary photograph of Khalilzad—which International House sent to him when he became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—shows a young man in his early twenties with shoulder-length hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a flowery Hawaiian shirt. Already one can see the relaxed, almost unassuming aura that would become his trademark during his years as a diplomat.
Khalilzad was born in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where his father worked in the Ministry of Finance for King Zahir Shah’s government. The setting for his childhood was appropriately grand. Mazar-e-Sharif means “noble shrine,” a reference to the magnificent blue-tiled mosque that dominates the city’s skyline and is said by some Muslims to house the tomb of the caliph Ali ibn Abu Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. Khalilzad’s mother, he told The New Yorker in an interview, “did not have a formal education yet she was very modern, always very informed. She could not read or write herself, but she would have the kids read the newspapers to her. I think if she had been born at a different time she would have been quite an established political figure.” He studied at the private Ghazi Lycée school in Kabul and spent a year in the United States as an exchange student, near Modesto, California. The year in California had a profound impact on him. “I had different values, greater interest in sports, a more pragmatic way of looking at things, and a broader horizon,” he recalled after finishing his time there. “I had a sense of how backward Afghanistan was. And I became more interested in
how Afghanistan needed to change.”1
Khalilzad went on to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the American University of Beirut before going to Chicago to pursue a doctorate in political science. There he studied with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter, a prominent international relations scholar who led groundbreaking work on nuclear deterrence. Wohlstetter influenced the design and deployment of U.S. strategic forces through his research, developed the “second-strike” theory for deterring nuclear war, and originated “fail safe” and other methods for reducing the probability of accidental nuclear war.2 Wohlstetter served as a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, and, beginning in 1964, as a professor at the University of Chicago. He had a significant influence on Khalilzad and helped him make contacts in Washington. After leaving Chicago in 1979, Khalilzad moved to New York to become a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.3
The Brutal-Hearted Mountain Tribes
During his studies with Wohlstetter, Khalilzad continued to monitor events in Afghanistan and, with his academic training completed, he began writing articles on the invasion using a pseudonym to protect members of his family who were still there. Khalilzad observed a military operation that proved more costly in terms of blood or money than the Soviets had bargained for. Over the three previous decades, the Soviets had tried to prop up a range of Afghan governments, providing a total of $1.3 billion in economic aid and $1.3 billion in military aid between 1955 and 1978.4 But these costs skyrocketed in the 1980s, and the CIA estimated that the Soviet Union spent an annual average of $7 billion between 1980 and 1986.5 When the Soviets finally withdrew in February 1989, after ten harrowing years, the country was devastated. An estimated one million Afghans had been killed, more than five million had fled abroad, and as many as three million were internally displaced. Nearly 15,000 Soviet soldiers were dead and 35,000 wounded.6 The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, expressed the anger of the Soviet loss, as well as the vaunted defiance of the Afghan warriors, in a poem titled “On the Talks in Kabul” (“Kperegovoram v Kabule”). He referred to the “brutal-hearted” mountain tribes defined by their “long beards,” “handcrafted rugs,” and “loud guttural names.”7 But he was most scathing in a 1982 interview with the Paris Review, seven years after he was expelled from the Soviet Union. “When I saw the first footage from Afghanistan on the TV screen a year ago, it was very short. It was tanks rolling on the plateau,” he remarked. “What I saw was basically a violation of the elements—because that plateau never saw a plough before, let alone a tank. So, it was a kind of existential nightmare…. This is absolutely meaningless, like subtracting from zero. And it is vile in a primordial sense, partly because of tanks’ resemblance to dinosaurs. It simply shouldn’t be.”8
After the Soviet invasion, Babrak Karmal’s Soviet-backed government tried desperately to increase its power and legitimacy. It released thousands of prisoners, declared its allegiance to Islam, restored the Islamic green stripe to Afghanistan’s flag, proclaimed an amnesty for refugees and those misguided citizens it termed “deceived compatriots,” and appointed several non-Party individuals to posts as advisers. Moscow and Kabul began to devise a state-building strategy based on a long-term Soviet commitment to the country, even if they envisioned a limited stay for Soviet troops.9
But neither Karmal nor the Kremlin could create a strong Afghan state. In 1980, the CIA found that “a vast gulf” separated the Karmal regime from the Afghan population.10 Karmal depended on Soviet forces and aid for survival. A Soviet security detail helped protect him in the Presidential Palace, and most major policies were approved by Soviet advisers, who even helped write some of Karmal’s speeches. The Soviet invasion also triggered a significant decline in the gross national product. “The effect of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,” a Defense Intelligence Agency analysis concluded, “has been catastrophic for the development of the Afghan economy.”11 The migration of displaced Afghans to major cities resulted in substantial farm-labor losses in many rural areas. The disruption of health-care and sanitary facilities caused infant mortality and serious illnesses to rise. And skilled and educated workers left the country en masse.
Intent on increasing the Afghan state’s capacity to establish law and order, the Soviets concentrated their efforts in two institutions: the military and the secret police. The secret police, officially known as the Khadamat-e Etela’at-e Dawlati (KhAD), relied on KGB advisers, while the Afghan military relied on the direct participation of Soviet troops.12 Throughout the war, the Afghan Army was weak, divided, and frequently unreliable. It failed to conscript a sufficient number of soldiers and retain their allegiance. Factionalism within the Afghan government hindered the development of military cohesion and smothered the emergence of competent, dependable commanders. Morale was low. The army lost an average of 20,000 soldiers a year to desertion, and there were chronic shortages of equipment. What gear they did have was often unfit for serious combat.13 Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who headed the Afghan Bureau of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) from 1983 to 1987 and was responsible for working with the Afghan mujahideen, argued: “This was the force that the Soviets had expected to go out and fight the guerrillas; more often it had to be locked in to prevent its men joining [the mujahideen].”14 The Afghan Army that the Soviets supported was ambivalent in its loyalties, and the bulk of it quickly melted away. By the mid-1980s, it had shrunk from 90,000 to about 30,000 men.15
To help establish law and order throughout the country, the Soviet invasion plan called for troops to secure the country’s major cities, airfields, and roads. Motorized troops poured into Afghanistan from Kushka and Termez, secured the main highway that circled the Hindu Kush, and took control of urban centers. Soviet forces in the west targeted the strategic cities of Herat, Farah, and Kandahar, and the Soviet air force secured bases at Bagram, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Shindand, and Herat. In rural Afghanistan, the Soviets attempted to clear and hold a few strategic areas of the countryside and tried without success to seal the borders with Pakistan and Iran.16 Above all, they did not want to occupy large tracts of territory, which suggests they were adopting a fairly static and defensive posture.17
Instead of stabilizing the situation, however, the Soviets triggered one of the most successful insurgencies in modern times. In February 1980, an anti-Soviet demonstration in the capital turned into a riot in which 300 people were killed. Kabul’s shops closed down for a week. The Soviets finally restored order with a massive display of force, which included Soviet fighters and helicopter gunships. During 1980 and 1981, the Soviets focused on securing the essential road network and setting up base camps adjacent to airfields. They also built fortified outposts along their communication lines, often manned by Afghan government troops. The Soviets’ biggest challenge was establishing control in the rural areas. Reports to the Soviet Politburo in late 1981 indicated that the Afghan government controlled less than 15 percent of all villages in the country, even after two years of war.
FIGURE 2.1 Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 197918
“The rural areas,” admitted one Soviet report, were “controlled by the rebels.” Even if Soviet and Afghan forces could clear territory, they would “as a rule return to their bases and the regions fall back under the control of the rebels.”19 The rural nature of the insurgency foreshadowed the U.S. experience after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. A Soviet report to Defense Minister Ustinov in 1981 concluded: “The poor functioning of government bodies in the provinces negatively influences the stabilization of the situation in the country.”20
With their troop level holding steady at around 85,000 men, the Soviets vastly increased their numbers of helicopters and jet fighters. Helicopter strength rose from 60 in mid-1980 to more than 300 in 1981.21 In 1981, the Soviets launched two offensives into the Panjshir Valley, a g
eologically dramatic area, surrounded by sheer rock, 100 miles northeast of Kabul. The Panjshir River, which cuts through it, has a fertile flood plain and attracts visitors during the mulberry, grape, and apricot harvests. From this valley, Ahmed Shah Massoud had been orchestrating attacks against Soviet troops in Bagram and Charikar and along the Salang Highway. Massoud, an ethnic Tajik, had undergone guerrilla training in Egypt and Lebanon with Palestinian groups. He became known as the “Lion of Panjshir” for his brazen attacks against Soviet forces and his defense of the Panjshir Valley.22 In 2001, journalist Sebastian Junger embedded with Massoud in the Panjshir, shortly before the military commander’s death, and described him as “a genius guerrilla leader, last hope of the shattered Afghan government.”23
Twice the Soviets attacked Massoud’s forces in the Panjshir, but they withdrew after two weeks, leaving behind the wreckage of scores of armored vehicles and newly devastated villages along the valley floor. To the extent that the Soviets penetrated into rural areas, it was with airpower, and the Afghans particularly loathed the Mi-24 Hind attack helicopter. Designed for battlefield assault and equipped with four pods for rockets or bombs under its auxiliary wings, the Mi-24 could carry 128 rockets with a full load, as well as four napalm or high-explosive bombs. Its machine guns could fire 1,000 rounds per minute, and its thick armor made it largely immune to medium or heavy machine guns. It could strafe the ground with impunity and, by staying above 5,000 feet, remain out of reach of the mujahideen’s SA-7 surface-to-air missiles.24
In 1984, Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko escalated the high-altitude carpet bombing and ordered more helicopter gunship attacks to accelerate the process of depopulating some rural regions that remained outside Soviet control. Hundreds of thousands of “butterfly” mines—equipped with fins to float down gently—poured out of Soviet aircraft. Once on the ground, they maimed insurgents by blowing off their legs or feet. By mid-1984, 3.5 million Afghans had fled to Pakistan and more than a million others had fled to Iran. Hundreds of thousands more were displaced internally. Kabul’s population swelled from a prewar 750,000 to two million as frightened Afghans streamed in from the countryside.25 Insurgents responded by increasing attacks on airfields, garrisons, and other military targets, and they harassed Soviet ground convoys, making road travel perilous.26
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