On the Grand Trunk Road (44 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
My traveling companion, Mark Fineman, set up a meeting for us with Babrak Karmal, the Afghan leftist who rode the Red Army tanks into Kabul in 1979. Karmal was being held at the time under house arrest, and we found, in the parking lot of his Stalinist apartment block out toward the airport, a large olive army truck with radar wings and eavesdropping gear poking out of the top, pointed at Karmal’s window. “I am very happy to see you in our motherland, our fatherland, our heroic Afghanistan,” Karmal said at the door in a deep, serious voice as he greeted us with traditional hugs and kisses. For a man widely held responsible for the deaths of more than a million of his own people, he looked serene and fashionable. He wore a white pullover and a gray cardigan against the cold, and his silver hair was combed straight back. He ushered us into his library, which overflowed with books in Russian, Pushtu, Persian, and English. There were tomes on Marxism and the theory and practice of revolution, and a neatly bound set of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet,
and
Hamlet.
Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet,
and
Hamlet.
Karmal sat in a cushioned armchair, smoked Kent cigarettes, and lectured for two hours about the meaning of the cold war’s final act in Afghanistan. Sometimes he banged the table with his hand and made the teacups rattle. (A revolution may not be a tea party, but apparently its deconstruction can be.) This banging Karmal usually performed while arguing that none of the wreckage of war, revolution, and counterrevolution surrounding him in Kabul was his fault. He had simply been overwhelmed, he said, by what he called the “force majeure” of the East-West conflict.
“The tragedy of Afghanistan—it was difficult to forecast,” he explained. “These tragedies that happened in Afghanistan do not belong to any party, any person in Afghanistan—it was a rivalry, an antagonism.”
But didn’t he think that he, personally, made a very serious mistake?
“Do you know anybody in the world, in the history of the world, who has not made a mistake?” Karmal asked whether his enemies in Washington wished to suggest that, at the time he rolled into power in Afghanistan with the backing of the Red Army, “the Soviet Union was not a fact? Communism was not a fact? Socialism was not a fact? To think like this, in German there is a very good word—
Dummkopf
, stupid.” The ideological struggle between communism and capitalism, he said, “is a heritage of the history of human beings. Who believed, who did not believe, it is another thing. But it is history.”
Dummkopf
, stupid.” The ideological struggle between communism and capitalism, he said, “is a heritage of the history of human beings. Who believed, who did not believe, it is another thing. But it is history.”
The afternoon leaked on. Karmal kept banging the table, rattling the teacups.
“This was not Afghanistan’s war. We have sacrificed Afghan people because of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. If you kill me, I say this to you.... I don’t want power. I think sometimes a man becomes evil when he gets power. An angel becomes Satan.”
Did that happen to you, Mr. Karmal, during the cold war?
“Actually, I was very sick and weak at that time,” he replied. “Now I feel strong and powerful, and to go to the jail or the gallows is all the same to me.”
You don’t hear a lot of anguished reflection in Washington these days about the costs of the cold war. Righteous certitude belongs to the victors. But in Kabul, as the mujaheddin massed in the surrounding mountains in preparation for their victories and their reckonings, you could find the Eastern bloc losers—zealots, professionals, cynics, time-servers—who gave the best years of their lives to a cause now discredited. They sat in the sprawling Soviet compound and the overlarge East European embassies that once provided the external resources for the Afghan war’s prosecution. At night, they listened to the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America on shortwave radio for word of the capitalist revolutions back home. In the old days, most of them were members of the Communist party, privileged apparatchiks. Now they were redefining themselves for what remained of their careers and lives. And a few of them, at least, reflected soberly on the ideological enterprise they witnessed and in some cases directed in Kabul.
There was a distancing that occurred in these reflections, a spinning of abstractions, a need to balance the blame. One afternoon I sat for a couple of hours with Valentin Gratsinsky, Bulgaria’s ambassador to Afghanistan. Gratsinsky spent most of the late 1970s and the 1980s in and out of Afghanistan as the director of his foreign ministry’s Asia desk and as a diplomat in Kabul. He traveled with the Soviet troops during the war and helped produce documentaries for East European television about the great socialist transformation under way in Afghanistan.
“First, professionally speaking, it was, it has always been, exciting,” he said. “But still, you have these psychological scars. I have seen the beginning actually myself. It was by chance. A TV team of Bulgarians came here and I traveled with them. There were these illusions of a vague, bright future, whatever that means. I never thought what a mess Afghanistan would be, within months only. It was my friend, the TV commentator at that time, who looked around and told me as he was flying out of Kabul, No chance without Soviet troops.’ I still respect him for that.”
I asked him whether he felt guilty.
“As bystanders, sidewalkers, you cannot see very much difference in terms of the guilt or guiltiness [of] either side involved. What depressed us most was the human suffering. I traveled a lot in the countryside and saw what war is like, saw the false events, the illusions, and the claims in newspapers on both sides. Even at that time, people were telling me they were fed up and they just wanted to take care of their crops and families, not more.” And yet, Gratsinsky said, he felt “great respect for both fanatics and cynics among the Soviets. Great respect. Because their fanaticism springs from those [Bolshevik] generations and decades of this system. Not a single person individually can be blamed.”
He went on to tell a story about traveling at the height of the war with Soviet advisers to a distant outpost manned by Russian troops. “While talking, I asked about their mixed feelings and backgrounds and how they feel about this war and all that stuff. And one of them produced the following sentence: ‘We are Soviets, and every generation must have its own Spain,’ which was the great Communist struggle against fascism.... Ideologically, it was explained to them that they will defend the great idea. I was astonished. ‘Every generation must have its own Spain.’ ”
I asked what he thought the cold war added up to in Afghanistan. There was a very long pause.
“I find myself wrestling with the proportions of international interest here. You see how unfair and unjust the consequences and the heritage of the war here is. Afghanistan was the baby of the cold war, and I [sometimes] think the superpowers have washed their hands, they don’t care. ‘We’re out.’ I hope this is not the case.... My feelings now are a mixture of human feelings linked to the destiny of this poor, ruined people and the direct connection between the situation here and the changes in the rest of the world, the effort to extinguish the fire, to find a new code of conduct. It’s very difficult. I still cannot formulate it for myself. It’s not because I do not have the feelings—just the opposite. I do too much thinking.”
After the mujaheddin takeover of the capital, when the heavy shelling began, Gratsinsky retreated to the basement bunker of the Bulgarian embassy. There he hosted a generous, flowing pub-salon for what remained of the city’s dwindling tribe of foreigners. Later in the summer, he was wounded by shrapnel. A convoy of vehicles escorted by Dostam’s Uzbek militia carried Gratsinsky and dozens of other diplomats, including the by now desperate Russians, north through the treeless mountains, out of Kabul.
The cold war decimated Afghanistan, but its effects across the rest of South Asia were more insidious, and so to the east of the Hindu Kush it was possible at the turn of the 1990s to watch the shadow lift and not feel immediately the chill of a new shadow’s descent.
South Asian historical writing about the cold war is complex and to me it seemed in many ways untrustworthy. So often factions of the Pakistani and Indian political classes invoked attributed predilections and manipulations of the superpowers to justify and explain arrangements that reflected in large part domestic political, social, and economic competition, or else the reckonings of pre-cold war history. In this way the cold war was described as an enormous, active, shifting series of specific conspiracies directed against South Asia’s political centers. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto convinced himself and many of his followers that Jimmy Carter’s CIA conspired to overthrow him in 1977 because he was determined to construct nuclear weapons. A decade later his daughter saw the CIA in league with Pakistan’s generals to deprive the country of democracy, while some of the generals saw the CIA in league with Benazir to thwart the spread of politicized Islam. Indira Gandhi saw all sorts of “foreign hands” groping beneath Mother India’s political clothing. A few such conspiracies did in fact exist. The archives of the dismantled KGB show steady payments to one of India’s Communist parties and to some members of the Congress Party. It would be reasonable to assume that the CIA made similar payments on the margins and even occasionally at the center of Indian politics. In this, both sides would have been competing with all of the domestic industrialists, landlords, mafia leaders, and foreign manufacturers who have since independence made the attainment of political office in South Asia so lucrative. No evidence has so far come to light, despite the contrary convictions of many Pakistanis, that the CIA participated in any of Pakistan’s recent coups d’état. Without unfettered access to the facts, it is impossible to be entirely dismissive about such cold war conspiracies, but it is useful to remember that, the Afghan war excepted, the primary purpose of intelligence agencies was and is to gather information, not to shape events. And it is difficult to imagine that the attempted purchase of ideological adherence in South Asia by either Washington or Moscow was anywhere near as large an enterprise as the ordinary domestic purchases of political favors in the state-dominated economies. Both the CIA and the KGB certainly wasted a lot of money on propaganda pamphlets and ideological front organizations to which few Indians or Pakistanis paid any attention. In New Delhi and Islamabad, the rivals also invested enormous sums of money in the narrowest, most incestuous sorts of spy-versus-spy games, pointing elaborate electronic interception equipment across the street at each other’s embassy and following each other’s deep-cover diplomats around town.
Describing the cold war’s importance on the subcontinent in terms of conspiracies, as Indians and Pakistanis frequently do, seems to me a case of missing the forest for the trees. Its greater importance, I think, was that it created an ideologically competitive but structurally uniform system of large-scale financial subsidies that enriched specific South Asian factions and supported corrupt, obstructive political economies on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani border. This, with the East-West conflict’s passing, has now changed. In the early 1990s, the overall amount of the subsidies from Washington and Moscow to South Asia fell drastically. At the same time, the green-eyeshade men who controlled the remaining subsidies—primarily at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and in the government of Japan—demanded, as a condition for continuing grants and loans, not geopolitical fealty but the further integration of India and Pakistan into the international market economy. If you believe that the national interest and integrity of India and Pakistan depend on their prosperity—and on their ability to distribute rising income through an egalitarian, expanding middle class—then you have to see this change as of potential benefit, and in the case of India at least, of possibly epochal importance.
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