From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (144 page)

The Reagan Doctrine enjoyed major success in Afghanistan, the largest covert operation to that time, but even here the administration's noisy rhetoric belied its generally cautious actions. The role of U.S. aid was less decisive than the Reaganites have claimed. Carter had initiated limited, covert assistance to the Afghan and foreign mujahideen fighting the Soviet invaders. From the outset, Casey pushed to "bleed" the Soviets in Afghanistan, but the administration moved slowly for fear that direct U.S. involvement might provoke Moscow to escalate the Afghan war or even attack Pakistan. Responding to mounting pressure from Congress and public lobbying groups, the administration increased aid to the Afghan "freedom fighters" in 1983 and 1984. But it was only in March 1985, in response to a threat of Soviet escalation, that Reagan ordered his advisers to do "what's necessary to win."
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Aid jumped from $122 million in 1984 to $630 million in 1987. Working through Pakistani intelligence, the CIA provided rebel forces intelligence gathered from satellites and other sources, established training camps for Afghan fighters, and even helped plan some operations. In what is generally considered the decisive move, the administration in early 1986 provided the Afghans with lethal handheld Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The Stingers at first exacted a devastating toll on Soviet helicopters and have been labeled the "silver bullet" that drove the USSR from Afghanistan.
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The allegedly decisive significance of the Stingers has swelled into one of the great myths of the Cold War. After heavy early losses, the Soviets developed countermeasures to neutralize the missiles. In any event, the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, largely out of a need for U.S. trade and technology, had decided to withdraw from Afghanistan even
before the first Stingers arrived.
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Like most military victories, moreover, the Reagan Doctrine's success in Afghanistan bore hidden costs in the form of what the CIA calls "blowback." The need for Pakistan's support in Afghanistan led the United States to turn a blind eye toward its nuclear program. The cultivation of heroin financed much of the war in Afghanistan, undermining the simultaneous U.S. "war" on drugs. As the CIA had feared, large numbers of Stingers ended up on the shelves of the international arms bazaar. Some were purchased back at grossly inflated cost. United States aid also helped ensure the eventual triumph of the fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Islamic fighters the United States helped train would in time turn on their benefactors, launching deadly attacks against U.S. assets abroad and even the American homeland itself.
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The major Third World battleground was closer to home. Echoing John Kennedy twenty years earlier, ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick called Central America and the Caribbean the "most important place in the world for us." Reagan and Casey believed that the defeat of Communism in one area might cause the Soviet empire to crumble.
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Determined to roll back perceived Communist gains in its own backyard, the United States employed the Reagan Doctrine in Nicaragua and used old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy in Grenada in an effort to topple leftist governments. In El Salvador, it used conventional Cold War methods to bolster a right-wing government against leftist insurgents. Although it refrained from large-scale military intervention except in Grenada, the administration invested great energy and resources in the region. Central America became the political and emotional cause célèbre of the 1980s, a source of unrelenting and bitter dispute between conservatives and liberals over the nation's proper role in the world. The Reagan administration achieved none of its main goals, but its intervention had a huge impact on the region.
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By the time Reagan took office, U.S. dominance of a traditional sphere of influence was being challenged from without and within. America's traditional economic hegemony was threatened by competition from Japan

and Western Europe. Since the 1920s, the United States had relied on friendly military dictators such as Trujillo and Somoza to maintain order and protect its interests, but a half century later they too had come under fire. The worldwide economic crisis of the 1970s brought poverty and misery to the region and provoked mounting popular unrest. The Catholic Church had long been a bulwark of the established order, but in the 1970s, following principles set forth by Pope John XXIII, radical priests developed a liberation theology that encouraged the masses to assert themselves for democratic change.
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Carter's human rights policy highlighted the abuses perpetrated by military governments; by cutting off military aid, it undermined their legitimacy and hence their authority. Before Carter left office, a coalition of revolutionaries had toppled the despised Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. As Reagan entered the White House, another threatened the government of El Salvador.

The administration's Central American policies developed from a jumble of conflicting ideas and forces. Cuba and the Soviet Union naturally
expressed sympathy for the revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador and provided limited assistance. Although they professed commitment to a pluralist democracy and a mixed economy, the Sandinistas—befitting their name—often took vocal anti-U.S. positions. "We have to be against the United States in order to reaffirm ourselves as a nation," one leader asserted.
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Not surprisingly, therefore, Reagan and most of his top advisers expressed grave concern about a new "Soviet beachhead" in the hemisphere, "another Cuba." The president was also much taken with neo-conservative Kirkpatrick's 1980 article that attacked Carter's human rights policies for undermining friendly authoritarian governments that could evolve into democracies while indirectly encouraging totalitarian governments that would never change.
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Many U.S. officials saw Central America as a place where the United States could reestablish its credibility in the aftermath of Vietnam.

There were also powerful constraints against intervention. Especially in its first months, the White House staff was determined not to let foreign policy interfere with passage of the president's economic program. Reagan himself was wary of intervention. His military advisers, still rebuilding the forces crippled by one disastrous Third World entanglement, were not disposed toward another. Polls made quite clear the public's lack of enthusiasm for sending U.S. troops to Central America. The mention of such a possibility was guaranteed to unloose a free-for-all in Congress.
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Thus, while attaching rhetorical importance to the struggles in the Caribbean and Central America, the administration, except in Grenada, acted with some restraint. Even more than in the Middle East, moreover, Reagan's Central American policies reflected his administration's undisciplined managerial style.

Secretary of State Haig pushed Central America to the top of the foreign policy agenda before the Reaganites had settled into their offices. Viewing the region strictly in East-West terms, the hyper-energetic and volatile former Kissinger aide fired the department's Central American experts in the biggest purge since John Foster Dulles, replacing them with old Vietnam hands—the gang who couldn't shoot straight, they came to be called. He informed Reagan that tiny, impoverished El Salvador was "one you can win." Certain he had been given complete control over foreign policy, he
pushed for going to the source of the problem: Cuba. "You just give me the word," he bragged to the president in early 1981, "and I'll turn that fucking island into a parking lot." In February, the department released a white paper purporting to contain "definitive evidence" that Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union were making El Salvador a key Cold War battleground.
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Although it stopped well short of Haig's recommendations, the administration made a substantial commitment in El Salvador. Haig's Cuban venture "scared the shit" out of even the hard-core anti-Communists around Reagan. His out-of-control, nationally televised statement that
he
was in control after a March 1981 assassination attempt on the president sealed his fate in the cabinet. The White House was also determined not to let Central America get in the way of the president's domestic program.
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Still, the administration refused to leave El Salvador to its own devices. To support its regional anti-Communist offensive, it launched a major military buildup in neighboring Honduras and conducted much-publicized maneuvers in Central America. It increased military aid to El Salvador to $25 million and the number of U.S. military advisers to fifty-four. The goal shifted from ending the bloodshed and arranging a political settlement to defeating the insurgency, thus giving encouragement to the Salvadorean right, especially the notorious death squads who targeted even church leaders. Even these limited measures stirred memories of Vietnam, arousing sufficient protest in Congress and the country to underscore the difficulties of implementing a truly aggressive policy in Central America.
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Haig's "one you can win" brought much frustration for the United States and more misery for El Salvador. Throughout the first term, the administration engaged in a running battle with Congress over El Salvador, all the while implementing its policies, in former senator Sam Ervin's words, on the "windy side of the law."
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The White House employed various subterfuges to adhere to its self-imposed limit of fifty-four advisers and increase military aid without congressional approval. Military assistance grew to more than $196 million in 1984. Massive economic aid helped cover the deficit caused by the government's military spending. Even with enormous U.S. support, the Salvadorean military could gain no more than a bloody stalemate. To appease Congress, the administration pushed for elections in El Salvador. In time, a crude, hybrid
form of democracy emerged there. The United States pinned its hopes on centrist José Napoleon Duarte, but the well-intentioned leader could neither control his military nor curb right-wing human rights abuses. He had little success implementing domestic reforms. Indeed, the austerity program Washington pushed on him in the mid-1980s imposed additional hardships on already impoverished people. The White House managed to get El Salvador off the front pages in the second term and could claim it had denied the insurgents victory. Without approval from the United States or his own military, however, Duarte could not end the war by negotiating with the insurgents. El Salvador remained wracked by violence, its economy in shambles.
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The administration's high-tech version of old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy in tiny Grenada in the fall of 1983 was more successful. With Cuban aid, the Marxist government of Maurice Bishop had built a twelve-thousand-foot jet runway on the 133-square-mile eastern Caribbean island and granted the Soviets permission to use it. Already nervous about a Cuba-Grenada-Nicaragua axis in the hemisphere, jittery U.S. officials were further alarmed in mid-October when extremists in the ruling party placed the government under house arrest and executed Bishop. Although Cuba had backed Bishop against those who killed him, an administration already obsessed with Grenada feared yet another "Soviet beachhead" in the Caribbean. Haunted by memories of Iran in 1979, the president worried that the eight hundred American medical students on the island might be taken hostage. Grenada also provided a much sought-after opportunity following the Lebanon debacle to burnish U.S. military credibility. Thus on October 25, Reagan dispatched a seven-thousand-man force to rescue the American students and "restore democracy" on Grenada.
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America's "lovely little war" (a phrase coined by a journalist) in Grenada did not come easily.
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The United States lacked adequate intelligence, even accurate maps, for what was dubbed Operation Urgent Fury. Each of the military services insisted on a role. Coordination was poor at best, and the operation went off with anything but surgical precision. The landing force met stiff resistance from a small force of Cubans armed with obsolete weapons. Nine U.S. helicopters were lost; twenty-nine U.S. servicemen were killed, many from friendly fire and accidents, and more than one hundred wounded. The clumsy manner in which the mission was executed for a time left the students in harm's way. Ultimately, the operation succeeded
because it had to.
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The vastly superior invading force rescued the students and took control of the island. Whatever the military flaws, Grenada was a huge political success. Reagan skillfully exploited the intervention to erase memories of Beirut. The administration exulted in what the president later called a "textbook success," reveled in this first rollback of Communism, and proclaimed that Grenada would send a clear message to Moscow, Havana, and especially Managua.
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Indeed, by the time of the Grenada operation, Nicaragua had become the focus of U.S. concern in Central America, a major test case for the Reagan Doctrine. In December 1981, at Casey's urging, Reagan authorized $20 million for a covert operation to organize and train in Honduras a five-hundred-man army of Nicaraguan "contras" (for counterrevolutionary). The stated purpose was to interdict Sandinista assistance for the Salvadoran insurgents, but top U.S. officials had more ambitious motives. The State Department hoped that a military threat might encourage the Sandinistas to negotiate, about what it was not entirely clear. Casey and the hawks wanted to "make the [Sandinista] bastards sweat."
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For the president and many of his top advisers, the real aim was to overthrow the Sandinista government.