On the Grand Trunk Road (41 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
“You are in a progressive and industrialized country—for you, it is not possible to imagine,” he replied. “In our program, instead of reality, we put the ideals. But it was impossible because the reality was something else.... We have a saying in Pushtu: ‘The fire must be extinguished, even by urine.’ People said, This despotism must be overthrown, even by these pathological revolutionaries. The Soviet Union, compared to Afghanistan, seemed a more progressive and industrialized society. It was several things—the mood of the time, the spread of liberation movements, and the moral feeling against the monarchy. Plus, there was this model which seemed so much further along.”
The disaster these Kabul revolutionaries produced accelerated at blurry speed. In April 1978, a conspirator in Layec’s party shot the current prime minister in the head and declared that socialism had arrived. But as soon as the party tried to implement its revolutionary reforms, the Afghan countryside revolted. This exacerbated rivalries within the party, and the first revolutionary president was suffocated with a pillow by thugs working for the second revolutionary president. The second revolutionary president was poisoned and shot to death by thugs working for the third revolutionary president. This was Babrak Karmal, who backed up his claim to be the lawful arbiter of socialism and progressive thought with several divisions of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet army, dispatched in furtherance of the “Brezhnev Doctrine” of ever-expanding bolshevism. The war was on. In the decade that followed, an estimated one million Afghans died in fighting between Soviet and Afghan revolutionary troops on one side and the CIA-backed mujaheddin rebels on the other. Another five million fled across mountains and deserts into exile in Pakistan and Iran. The greatest number settled in and around Peshawar, which became the principal staging ground for the mujaheddin as well as the forward logistics command post for the $2 billion “Reagan Doctrine” covert war program funded by U.S. taxpayers, supervised by the CIA from its station at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, and managed day to day by Pakistan’s ISI.
By the time I reached Peshawar in 1989, the place had the feel of a once-flowering city-state in a period of disillusioned, angry decline. The Soviet troops had left Afghanistan by then, retreating under mujaheddin pressure to the seat of a disintegrating empire. But the war across the Khyber was still grinding on, now pitting Afghans against Afghans in conflicts defined less by cold war ideology than by the old codes of tribalism, ethnicity, family, and faction. The causes were sometimes old and obscure but the armaments supplied by the CIA and the Soviets were new and exceptionally lethal. For this reason and others, the cold war images of Afghanistan propagated during the 1980s in the West, which portrayed the conflict as a kind of large-scale
Jonny Quest
cartoon, no longer seemed plausible. This had a demoralizing effect on everybody, including the Afghan mujaheddin leaders, who now tended to blame the CIA for conspiring to deprive them of final victory over their evil Communist enemies in Kabul. For their part, many of the official Americans involved were in a mood to take their toys and go home, but they were divided about whether this was tactically or morally correct in the circumstances. To questions about why the mujaheddin had not united in military triumph, as Western spies and policymakers had long predicted, the Americans tended to mumble clichés about ancient Afghan tribal feuds and said that while they hoped for the best, with the Soviets gone it was now up to the Afghans to sort things out for themselves. As the spies and diplomats squabbled, the committed flocks of Western philanthropists and freelance adventurers who once enlivened Peshawar with a strange pluralism began to disperse to more promising locations, such as Cambodia or Somalia. Attention in Peshawar now focused on problems that had been present all along but generally ignored. These included the oppressive puritanism of the Islamic radicals, the intolerant tendency of mujaheddin leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to order assassinations of political rivals, the enthusiasm of some rebels and Pakistani government officials for heroin trafficking, the way the secret war had undermined Pakistan’s fragile political economy by producing a million new heroin addicts and a subculture based on automatic weapons, and the way CIA-ISI manipulations had exacerbated divisions among the Afghans, producing an ineffective Peshawar-based mujaheddin leadership of Islamic hard-liners and royalist car dealers—a group often despised by the Afghan rebel soldiers who did the actual fighting and dying in the field. “Donor burnout” and “the Lebanonization of Afghanistan” became the new clichés of bar talk down at the American Club, a sunny watering hole outfitted with painted lawn chairs and a clay tennis court, situated near the walled suburban compounds of Peshawar’s upscale University Town.
Jonny Quest
cartoon, no longer seemed plausible. This had a demoralizing effect on everybody, including the Afghan mujaheddin leaders, who now tended to blame the CIA for conspiring to deprive them of final victory over their evil Communist enemies in Kabul. For their part, many of the official Americans involved were in a mood to take their toys and go home, but they were divided about whether this was tactically or morally correct in the circumstances. To questions about why the mujaheddin had not united in military triumph, as Western spies and policymakers had long predicted, the Americans tended to mumble clichés about ancient Afghan tribal feuds and said that while they hoped for the best, with the Soviets gone it was now up to the Afghans to sort things out for themselves. As the spies and diplomats squabbled, the committed flocks of Western philanthropists and freelance adventurers who once enlivened Peshawar with a strange pluralism began to disperse to more promising locations, such as Cambodia or Somalia. Attention in Peshawar now focused on problems that had been present all along but generally ignored. These included the oppressive puritanism of the Islamic radicals, the intolerant tendency of mujaheddin leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to order assassinations of political rivals, the enthusiasm of some rebels and Pakistani government officials for heroin trafficking, the way the secret war had undermined Pakistan’s fragile political economy by producing a million new heroin addicts and a subculture based on automatic weapons, and the way CIA-ISI manipulations had exacerbated divisions among the Afghans, producing an ineffective Peshawar-based mujaheddin leadership of Islamic hard-liners and royalist car dealers—a group often despised by the Afghan rebel soldiers who did the actual fighting and dying in the field. “Donor burnout” and “the Lebanonization of Afghanistan” became the new clichés of bar talk down at the American Club, a sunny watering hole outfitted with painted lawn chairs and a clay tennis court, situated near the walled suburban compounds of Peshawar’s upscale University Town.
One visible effect of the secret war was the incongruous presence of late twentieth-century Western technology in a town that looked otherwise enveloped in nineteenth-century frontier ruggedness. That such technology was being imported in large quantities was no secret, since the CIA’s covert aid program was debated openly in the U.S. Congress and many of its details were disclosed regularly by journalists quoting proud but anonymous U.S. government officials. But the scale of the technology involved, and how it was selected and employed, was not well known. In Peshawar you got startling glimpses of it. If you drove out rutted roads through mud-walled slums to interview a celebrated mujaheddin commander such as Abdul Haq, who had a CBS-affiliated television cameraman to handle much of his public relations, you were likely to spend as much time talking about the comparative features of Japanese and American lap-top computers as about the conduct of an anti-Communist insurgency. Every major mujaheddin party, and some minor ones, acquired from the CIA television and radio studios, which they installed in dilapidated Peshawar compounds and used to produce videotapes or audiocassettes advertising imminent victory. In these places, you would tromp up barren stairwells at the heels of a rebel in muddy boots and then be ushered with a sort of whoosh into a carpeted, dustless digital studio blinking with mixers, dubbers, and stacks of amplifiers. Young Afghan men with long beards, Islamic caps, and duty-free watches sat at the controls exuding the confident air of spaceship commanders.
Among the mujaheddin, ancient imperatives of status and prestige congealed around the new technologies. A commander was not a commander unless he controlled a stash of the most impressive stuff, such as the shoulder-fired, heat-seaking Stinger missiles, or the mortars that could be targeted on enemy positions through a computer uplink to a U.S. Navy satellite. As with everything else, the Afghans insisted that they do things their own way, so their relationship with the technology seemed at times stubbornly idiosyncratic. They were often, not to put too fine a point on it, a little casual. The enduring image of a mujaheddin rocket attack on a government-held city was not of disciplined cadres studying targets through laser scopes but of a lone guerrilla nestled in a pile of rocks with his weapon pointed vaguely at the horizon, who then lit the fuse with the glowing ember of his hashish joint. This was the great charm of the mujaheddin. Their courage and determination—the qualities that defeated the Soviet Red Army—seemed innate, unpolluted by the savage, imposed disciplines of cult-revolutionary ideology or modern professional military doctrine.
Perhaps the best example of this was how the mujaheddin did not take the CIA anywhere near as seriously as the CIA took itself. Once I drove through the mountains from Peshawar into Afghanistan with a young mujaheddin who narrated casually how he had worked for a time as a CIA spy. The agency invited him up to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, provided him with a briefcase-sized coded “burst communications” set, and asked him to send back reports from inside Afghanistan, on a salary of about one hundred dollars per month. My friend described how much fun he had learning to use the English keyboard, typing out his reports, hiding his communications aerial so that fellow mujaheddin would not see it, and then hooking up with the CIA’s Islamabad embassy computer to dump his information. He typed up reports about battles, heroin trafficking, Afghan politics, whatever he came across. Later, as the CIA’s budget for the covert war shrank and then disappeared, my friend was laid off. He talked about being a CIA spy the way a young American might talk about a job he once had flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s—it was just one of those things you did for a living, and when it was over you moved on to the next. In his mind, it seemed to have nothing much to do with Western ideas of country, ideology, or treason. Those were matters that would be reconciled by the Afghans in their own time, in their own way.
But to many of the spies and bureaucrats who managed the war by remote control from Washington and Moscow, Afghanistan during the years of the Soviet occupation was an urgent abstraction. For a generation of Washington spies and planners, Kabul was the nexus of the final struggle with the Soviet Union. Analysts and covert-operations specialists at the CIA in Langley, career diplomats at the State Department in Foggy Bottom, information and propaganda specialists at the U.S. Information Agency, and grand geostrategic thinkers at the National Security Council and the Pentagon devoted themselves to defeating the Soviet thrust into Afghanistan. Few of them actually saw Afghanistan, but as a place on a map, they knew it well. I remember sitting with a senior U.S. diplomat when he first arrived in Pakistan to help prosecute the drive for Kabul. To illustrate his points, he pulled out a colored, highly detailed Pentagon map of the Afghan capital and began sliding his fingertips across it—here’s the airport, here’s where the rebels are going to drive in from the east, here’s the defense ministry, the presidential palace—and it was as if he were speaking of a city he had lived in for decades.
Western and Pakistani liberals frequently expressed contempt for the CIA’s role in the secret war, sometimes on general principles and sometimes based on specific contentions that the agency’s work produced more harm than good for the Afghans by promoting factionalism and Islamic radicalism. Some of this criticism seemed to me justified, and I spent much of my time in Afghanistan attempting to report on how the war no longer resembled a frontier cartoon, if it ever had. But it also seemed to me a little ridiculous to hold Washington spies and bureaucrats responsible for the historical Afghan inclination to divide and disagree. More than that, it seemed to me absurd to suggest there was moral equivalency between Washington and Moscow in the cold war’s descent on Afghanistan. If you agreed that the spontaneous rebellion of a clear majority of ordinary Afghans against the tyranny of an occupying foreign army and its thuggish ideological agents in Kabul was justified and even righteous, then how could you be opposed in principle to providing the mujaheddin with the means to win, even if the effort required, as deputy ISI chief Yousaf said, double edges?
Initially, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter signed a secret presidential “finding” authorizing low-grade CIA assistance to the mujaheddin, mainly rifles and light weapons dating to the Korean War or earlier. The purpose of this aid was to promote “harassment” of Soviet troops by the Afghan rebels, reflecting the CIA’s assessment that the mujaheddin could never win a war against the Red Army. This approach may have seemed pragmatic at the time, but in retrospect it looks deeply cynical. By the mid-1980s, as the Soviets unleashed the full force of their arsenal in Afghanistan—including teams of specially trained Spetsnaz special forces, helicopter gunships, and “Omsk Vans,” battlefield communications centers that intercepted mujaheddin radios and walkie-talkies and ordered immediate, violent air strikes in reprisal—the Afghan rebels were badly bloodied. As Vince Cannistraro, a CIA operations officer, put it to me as I was researching the history of the CIA’s covert Afghan program, the earlier aid was “just enough to get a very brave people killed” because it encouraged the mujaheddin to fight but did not provide them with the means to win.
That began to change in 1985 when President Ronald Reagan, at the urging of a clan of politically appointed New Right activists in his administration, signed National Security Decision Directive 166, which authorized among other things “all necessary means” to aid the Afghan rebels against the Soviets. This led a team of Pentagon and CIA guerrilla-war specialists in Washington to unleash on the Afghan battlefield much of the U.S. military’s high-technology arsenal and operational expertise. What Yousaf described as a “ceaseless stream” of CIA and Pentagon specialists flew to Pakistan’s military airfield in Rawalpindi, parked their suitcases at U.S. embassy guest quarters and CIA safe houses in Islamabad, and then drove in civilian cars to the ISI compound on the Grand Trunk Road, from which the unmarked supply trucks departed each morning. The Americans brought with them detailed satellite photographs and ink maps of Soviet targets around Afghanistan. Soon the walls of Yousaf’s office were covered with sketches of Soviet-run airfields, armories, and military barracks. The maps came with CIA assessments of how best to approach a given target, possible routes of withdrawal, and analysis of how Soviet troops might respond to an attack. Yousaf and his colleagues were dazzled by the details. “They would say there are the vehicles, and there is the [riverbank] and there is the tank,” Yousaf recalled. The new efforts focused on strategic targets such as the Termez Bridge between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. “We got the information like current speed of the water, current depth of the water, the width of the pillars, which would be the best way to demolish,” Yousaf said. Pakistani majors and colonels assigned to ISI, which was determined to handle direct training of the Afghans itself, flew off to the United States to learn how to train rebels on new weapons systems such as the Stinger. In the summer of 1986, the CIA set up at ISI headquarters a secret Stinger training facility, complete with an electronic simulator made in the United States. The simulator allowed mujaheddin trainees to aim and fire at imaginary helicopters and jets tracking across a large screen—without actually firing any expensive missiles. The screen marked the missile’s track and calculated whether the trainee would have hit his target. This video missile arcade was enormously popular among the mujaheddin; commanders squabbled among themselves to gain entry.
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