On the Grand Trunk Road (42 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
The rush of technology encouraged farcical speculations about what might actually be accomplished on the Afghan battlefield. Yousaf and his CIA counterparts, for example, spent months trying to figure out how they might blow up the Salang Tunnel, a strategic link in the mountains north of Kabul through which many of the Soviet military and civilian supplies passed. They concocted elaborate plans for mujaheddin to pack an empty fuel tanker with plastic explosives, send it into the tunnel, fake a mechanical breakdown, escape on waiting motorcycles, and then detonate the truck with a remote-control device. Among other difficulties, Yousaf discovered that this was “not the sort of operation popular with the mujaheddin, who preferred the glamour and glory of the battlefield to clandestine sabotage activities.... Several times commanders agreed they would do it, but always after a few months I would get word that it was impossible to find the men.” Aside from their preferences for noise and loot in war, the mujaheddin often frustrated Pakistani and CIA strategists with their reluctance to destroy what little infrastructure Afghanistan possessed, in part because the rebels did not want civilian clansmen in the government-controlled cities to suffer. Although there were plenty of mujaheddin who thought nothing of lobbing long-range rockets into heavily populated civilian areas of Kabul, there were others who were highly discriminating. Their idea of sabotage—an idea Yousaf said was once implemented in Jalalabad—was to load a camel with plastic explosives, let it wander into a military compound, and then detonate the animal, killing a few enemy soldiers and also spraying fresh camel steaks around for the survivors.
During the mid-1980s, CIA and Pentagon specialists helped ISI establish and supply two secret guerrilla-warfare training schools, including one that concentrated on urban-sabotage techniques. Pakistani instructors trained by the CIA taught Afghans how to build and conceal bombs with C-4 plastic explosives and what Yousaf estimated were more than one thousand chemical and electronic-delay bomb timers supplied by the CIA. The schools were erected in remote desert areas of western Pakistan and were protected by gauze roofings meant to deceive Soviet spy satellites. Mujaheddin students were bused in and out in darkness so they would not know where the schools were. If a camp was compromised by a local villager’s wandering through, the ISI officers would break it down the same afternoon and move it elsewhere. Thousands of mujaheddin were trained at these schools; some used the materials and training supplied by the CIA and ISI to carry out car bombings and other assassination attacks in Kabul under ISI direction. By Yousaf’s account, a graduate of the urban-sabotage school nearly blew up future Afghan president Najibullah in downtown Kabul in late 1985. Another time, rebels placed a briefcase bomb loaded with plastic explosives beneath the dinner table of a group of Soviet professors at Kabul University; when it went off, at least several of the teachers were killed. Peter Juvenal, a British television cameraman who traveled extensively in Afghanistan during the mid-1980s, said he once watched guerrillas working for a graduate of the CIA training school prepare bicycle bombs with plastic explosives for use in Kabul. Soviet and Western news reports from the Afghan capital during this period report dozens of unexplained sabotage attacks, car and briefcase bombings around the capital.
“One looks at the war from two different angles,” Yousaf explained one afternoon in a small hotel in Düsseldorf, Germany, where I tracked him down in the early summer of 1992 and spent two days talking with him about the secret war. “An act of terrorism may be a question of survival. To my mind, any attempt deliberately made against any civilian—this ... must be condemned all over the world. Any attempt which is made against a military target is not to be condemned. Neither we nor the mujaheddin ever tried to flaunt anything or any operation in which there was deliberate planning where civilians could have been killed. Never.... If you get your own innocent people killed, it would have recoiled back against the mujaheddin.”
What, then, explained the seemingly random barrages of mujaheddin rockets that fell on civilians in Kabul throughout the late 1980s, killing hundreds, if not thousands, of Afghan noncombatants?
“If some rocket had gone astray, or they miscalculated, misjudged the distance, the elevation, the angle, and all civilians had been killed, probably it is the war,” he answered. “You have to accept. You have to accept.”
For Washington’s cold warriors, such questions of wartime morality often were viewed as subservient to the greater good of defeating the Evil Empire. At one point late in 1984, CIA director William Casey flew secretly into Rawalpindi in his specially equipped C-141 Starlifter transport for a tour of the guerrilla training schools. After a dinner with General Zia, Casey rode out to the ISI compound on the Grand Trunk Road and sat in a conference room with the Pakistani spy service’s senior generals. Casey shocked the Pakistanis with a proposal that they carry the Afghan war directly into Soviet territory by staging guerrilla attacks north of the Amu River, which divided the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Yousaf recalled: “He said, ‘There’s a lot of Muslim population living across the Amu in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and I personally feel that if we exploit the emotion and sentiment—and they being Muslim and all—we can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union’ ... roughly words to that effect.” Zia feared that a large-scale arms-smuggling program would bring violent reprisals from Moscow, but ISI agreed that it would be a good idea to ship propaganda across the border. Yousaf was already sending trained teams of mujaheddin into Soviet territory to stage small-scale attacks. After Casey’s visit, he ordered thousands of Holy Korans in the Turkic language from the CIA. When a sample copy arrived in Rawalpindi, Yousaf shipped it over to an Uzbek acquaintance at one of the mujaheddin radio stations in Peshawar. The Uzbek reported that the CIA translator had made a host of mistakes and had, as it were, put words into the mouth of the Holy Prophet Mohammed. ISI ordered the mistakes corrected and soon the books—along with CIA propaganda tracts about heros of Uzbek nationalism and past Soviet atrocities against religious minorities—were being shipped by mule and camel into the Soviet Union. Casey, Yousaf recalled, “was ruthless in his approach and he had a built-in hatred for the Soviets.”
If the CIA specialists were certain about the righteousness of their cause, they did worry about American law, since if this was violated they might well end up in jail, a possibility that hardly seemed remote at Langley headquarters in the late 1980s, as the Iran-contra scandal unfolded. At one stage the CIA’s station chief at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, a young Ivy League graduate who later left the clandestine service for the equally murky world of Wall Street, transmitted a cable to headquarters requesting on behalf of ISI “packages” of long-range sniper rifles, sophisticated sighting scopes, and—by some accounts—high-technology night-vision goggles. The Pakistanis intended to supply the sniper packages to mujaheddin so they could infiltrate Kabul and kill senior Soviet generals stationed there. As part of the great wave of proposed technological solutions in Afghanistan after 1985, U.S. intelligence pinpointed the residences of leading Soviet generals in Kabul and regularly tracked their movements, as well as those of visiting commanders from Moscow and Tashkent. One of the American specialists involved told me that he once traveled to Kabul and drove over to the Soviet military headquarters with a pair of binoculars. He said you could see the generals just standing in their apartments: how easy it would be to knock them dead with a sophisticated rifle! The trouble was, though, that under a 1970s U.S. law the CIA was prohibited from aiding or carrying out “assassinations” abroad. Particularly in the atmosphere generated by the Iran-contra scandal, there was no shortage of lawyers looking over the shoulders of CIA operations specialists. The debate that ensued about the sniper packages seemed a little half-baked. One official involved told me that Reagan administration lawyers argued that if the CIA station chief in Islamabad provided the rifles to ISI “with the intent to kill specific Soviet generals,” then “he will go to jail.” The question then arose, “How about if he does it without knowing what they’re going to be used for?” But CIA lawyers responded that it was “too late” because the plan to kill specific Soviet generals had been consigned to writing in CIA cables between Washington and Pakistan.
To some involved, such as Cannistraro, the CIA operations officer then posted as director of intelligence at the National Security Council, shooting Soviet generals dead in their Kabul apartments did not seem much different from encouraging mujaheddin to kill Soviet officers in helicopters with antiaircraft missiles. Assassination is “really not a relevant question in a wartime scenario,” he said. An additional problem was that President Carter’s original “finding,” or classified legal authorization for the CIA’s covert war, described the purpose of U.S. aid as “harassment” of Soviet forces. Although the Carter finding had been augmented by Reagan’s National Security Decision Directive 166, the language in the original finding remained a key legal basis of the covert program. “We came down to, is ‘harassment’ assassination of Soviet generals?” said an official. “The phrase ’shooting ducks in a barrel’ was used,” another American recalled of the discussions. Those who favored providing the sniper packages “thought there was no better way to carry out harassment than to ‘off’ Russian generals in series.” Ultimately, a decision was made to provide the sniper rifles requested by the Pakistanis—but without night-vision goggles or intelligence information that would permit effective assassination of Soviet generals. Yousaf remembered receiving more than thirty but fewer than one hundred rifles. He set up a CIA-ASSISTED two-day training course at one of his mobile, camouflaged mujaheddin camps to teach selected rebels how to use the sniper rifles against “military targets.”
Not only the weaponry but the doctrinal theories of the CIA-supplied secret Afghan war spilled steadily into the rest of South Asia during the late 1980s. India today accuses Pakistan of plotting covert “proxy wars” in Kashmir, Punjab, and India’s northeast. Pakistan accuses India of conducting a secret war with secret commando squads in Sind. Some of these charges are certainly true, but it is difficult to know exactly which ones. In Islamabad during the 1980s, the ISI’s involvement in a sprawling $2 billion, CIA-backed conspiracy against the Afghan government seemed to promote the capital’s general susceptibility to conspiracy thinking, whether the topic was Zia’s death or Benazir Bhutto’s political comeback. It became obvious that anybody with money could have a go at secret war. Pakistani markets brimmed with cheap AK-47S, land mines, pistols, and plastic explosives. Sikh and Kashmiri guerrillas crossed the border to scoop up what they could afford, or what the Afghans and ISI were willing to give away.
The U.S. intelligence community believes, despite Indian claims to the contrary, that ISI has not systematically aided Kashmir’s anti-Indian Islamic rebels, but that the Kashmir guerrillas have instead hooked up on their own with Afghan mujaheddin and through them obtained training and weapons. As a sweeping assertion, this seemed to me implausible, but ISI has not yet been caught red-handed in Kashmir, and in any event, the distinction U.S. analysts draw may be more semantic than substantive. One time in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, I saw a “sterile” CIA-SUPPLIED sniper rifle of the kind ISI and some in the CIA once hoped would be used to kill Soviet generals cradled instead in the proud hands of a Kashmiri guerrilla with the anti-Indian Hizbul Mujaheddin. The guerrilla said vaguely that he acquired it in Afghanistan. Similar sightings of sniper rifles on the Indian side of the Kashmir line recently put the U.S. embassy in New Delhi in the embarrassing position of having to brief the Indian government privately about just how far and how accurately these rifles can be fired by a guerrilla who knows what he is doing. Expertise useful in the covert promotion of insurgency can be useful as well in the covert promotion of counterinsurgency.
This, unfortunately, was a lesson the Afghan mujaheddin learned anew for themselves in April and May of 1992, when after fourteen years and a million dead—with the cold war officially buried and eulogized in Washington, Moscow, and a dozen European capitals in between—their forgotten mud-rock capital of Kabul at last teetered and fell.
STATES OF PROGRESS
14
A Shadow Lifts, a Shadow Falls
You said that the Cold War was a kind of shadow. I think of it that
way. I think that I was in a nightmare. It was a bad dream that has
passed.
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