In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (6 page)

The king had summoned a
loya jirga
(grand assembly) in 1964, one of the freest and most influential ever convened by the Afghan state.
The
loya jirga
wrote a constitution that set up a bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary. It also established a system of checks and balances based on the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers. U.S. State Department reports lauded Zahir Shah’s “blueprint for democracy” and noted that he had effectively maintained stability throughout the country.
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While the central government was weak, Zahir Shah’s regime was nonetheless able to establish law and order by dividing up responsibilities. In urban areas, such as Kabul, the government provided security and services to the Afghan population. But in rural areas, tribes, subtribes, clans, and other local entities ensured order. In cases where major disputes arose in rural areas, the government’s security forces would sometimes intervene. Consequently, the formula for peace and stability involved a power-sharing arrangement between the center and the periphery.

By the early 1970s, however, there were signs of growing economic and political instability. In August 1971, Ambassador Robert Neumann held a tense meeting with Zahir Shah. Responding to rising tensions, Neumann “decided to hit him hard re lack of progress in country, particularly deteriorating economic conditions.” He warned Zahir Shah that the political environment was becoming venomous and Afghans were becoming restless. “In my four and one-half years here I had never heard so many exp ressions at all levels of society about a feeling of hopelessness that [the] new government could accomplish any thing.”
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There were also reports of corruption in the government and tribal unrest, which were undermining popular support.
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Public opinion began to turn against Zahir Shah, who was increasingly perceived as overly discrete and out of touch. In his end-of-tour memo, Ambassador Neumann reflected on the king:

In 1972, U.S. officials in Afghanistan and their intelligence contacts began hearing about a possible coup. In one meeting, Wahid Abdullah, director of information in the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asked Ambassador Neumann how the United States would respond to a takeover by Muhammad Daoud Khan. Daoud, who had been Afghanistan’s prime minister from 1953 to 1963, was known for his progressive policies, especially in regard to women’s rights. Wahid Abdullah was eager to gauge the U.S. reaction, and he remarked somewhat cryptically that “[Daoud] knows I am here.”
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A takeover seemed imminent. In April 1972, the State Department received word that a possible coup might occur within a “couple of weeks,” possibly led by Daoud.
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Throughout 1972 and 1973, both American and Soviet intelligence services collected information about a possible coup.
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On June 26, 1973, Zahir Shah was flown to London to be treated for hemorrhaging in one eye caused, one State Department assessment reported, “by a volleyball.”
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After receiving treatment, Zahir Shah then went to Italy for a short vacation. His “vacation” turned out to be far longer than anyone expected. His next trip back to Afghanistan would be in April 2002, three decades later, after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. On July 16, 1973, Daoud engineered a coup d’état with support from the Afghan Army. The United States reaction was mixed. In a report to Henry Kissinger, for example, the U.S. National Security Council concluded that Daoud had provided Afghanistan “with strong leadership” during his tenure in the 1950s, and had “made strenuous efforts to modernize the economy and armed forces.” However, it also noted that Daoud had turned to the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance and warned that he “may well lean a bit more toward the Soviets.”
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At the time, Afghanistan was mostly a backwater of U.S. foreign policy. “There was little intrinsic U.S. interest in Afghanistan,”
acknowledged Graham Fuller, who was the CIA station chief from 1975 to 1978. “But it was a rich opportunity for recruiting Soviet diplomats and KGB personnel, as well as Chinese officials.” Fuller had received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Russian and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University and had studied there with the respected Russian historian Richard Pipes and the future national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. While he had never worked in Moscow or behind the iron curtain, Fuller had become increasingly drawn to the vulnerability of the Soviet Union. “I was interested in understanding the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, which is why I wanted to serve in Afghanistan.” Indeed, over the course of the 1970s, the CIA grew more concerned about Daoud’s ties with the Soviet Union and the Afghan Communist parties. “We knew that Daoud had close connections to the Soviets,” said Fuller. “And Moscow’s involvement in Afghanistan would become progressively more acute.”
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The Sawr Revolution

Daoud’s coup was a turning point for Afghanistan. After fifty years of relatively stable Pashtun leadership, suddenly the national power structure had been shaken. Governance deteriorated over the next decade as Daoud attempted to impose strong central control, and Moscow, which had been providing military aid since at least 1955, grew increasingly alarmed about intelligence reports of instability in Afghanistan.
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In April 1978, a leading Communist activist, Mir Akbar Khyber, was assassinated. Some 15,000 demonstrators joined his funeral procession, demanding justice, and the security situation intensified. Daoud responded by arresting Marxist leaders, but his crackdown triggered a violent response. Army and air force officers engineered a bloody coup on April 27, 1978, in the Afghan lunar month of Sawr (Taurus); Daoud was assassinated during the coup. On April 30, military officers handed over power to a Revolutionary Council headed by Nur Mohammad Taraki, who promptly signed
Decree No. 1 and proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
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Moscow provided immediate aid to try to stabilize the situation, including armored personnel carriers, combat radios, Kalashnikov rifles, and Makarov pistols.
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In the United States, there were mixed reactions to Daoud’s overthrow. “One of the first intelligence reports I sent back to Washington was to provide a background of the people who constituted the new government,” recalled the CIA’s Fuller. “They were members of the Communist party, and we had pretty good biographies on them. But the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development hit the roof,” because U.S. laws prohibited them from providing assistance to Communist parties. “They had to stop a lot of their funding to the Afghan government. But I was calling it as I saw it; the Soviets were on the march.”
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Taraki was born to a poor peasant family in Ghazni Province in July 1917. In the mid-1940s, he founded the left-wing party
Weesh Zalmayan
(Awakened Youth). In 1953, he left Afghanistan for Washington, DC, where he served as press attaché in the Afghan Embassy. When Zahir Shah appointed Daoud as prime minister, Taraki publicly resigned his post and held a press conference accusing the Afghan government of being “a bunch of feudal lords.” According to one report, the former press attaché was soon called back, and, “upon his return to Kabul, he telephoned the despotic Daoud from the Kabul Cinema, telling him ‘I am Noor Mohammad Taraki. I have just arrived. Shall I go home or to the prison?’”
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Taraki was allowed to go home, but he was kept under police surveillance. In 1965, he helped found the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which split into two groups in 1967:
Khalq
(Masses), headed by Taraki; and
Parcham
(Banner), headed by Babrak Karmal.

The Khalq faction advocated an immediate and violent overthrow of the government and the establishment of a Soviet-style Communist regime. The Parcham faction supported a gradual move toward socialism, arguing that Afghanistan was not industrialized enough to undergo a true proletarian revolution such as that called for in
The
Communist Manifesto.
Bitter resentment between the Khalq and Parcham factions would later contribute to the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Sawr Revolution.

In many ways, Babrak Karmal was the antithesis of Taraki. He was born into a wealthy family in a small village outside of Kabul, and his father was a well-connected army general. He attended law school at Kabul University and quickly gained a reputation as an activist in the university’s student union. A Soviet dossier on Karmal hinted that he was sometimes more show than substance. “He is a skilled orator, emotional, and inclined to abstraction to the detriment of a specific analysis,” but he had “a poor grasp of economic issues which interest him at a general level.”
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Karmal became increasingly involved in Marxist political activities, which led to his imprisonment for five years. His pro-Moscow leftist views strengthened while in prison through interaction with several other inmates, such as Mir Muhammad Siddiq Farhang. After his release, he ran for office and was elected to a seat in the lower house of the National Assembly, where he would be a controversial figure for many years. When he died in 1996 at the age of sixty-seven, the Afghan radio station Voice of Sharia summarized his life with little affection: “Babrak Karmal committed all kinds of crimes during his illegitimate rule. God inflicted on him various kinds of hardship and pain. Eventually he died of cancer in a hospital belonging to his paymasters, the Russians.”
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Violence between the rival factions continued in the fall of 1978, with revolts in rural areas by Islamist opponents of the regime. Taraki conducted mass arrests, tortured prisoners, and held secret executions on a scale Afghanistan had not seen in nearly a century. At a government rally in October 1978 in Kabul, for instance, government leaders unveiled a new Afghan flag, jettisoning the traditional design, which had combined deep black, green, and red. Demonstrating their Marxist pedigree, Afghan leaders unfurled a red flag with a wreath of wheat and a yellow star at the top. Revolts broke out across the country. Pashtun tribesmen in the eastern mountains grabbed their rifles to fight the government, and several areas of the east—such as Kunar
Province, the Hindu Kush, and Badakshan Province—became anti-government strongholds. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan responded with widespread oppression and even more arrests and executions, but soldiers deserted by the thousands and the Afghan Army began to melt away. Concerned by the rising violence, Soviet leaders sent additional KGB agents into Afghanistan.
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In 1979, the situation grew worse. In February, U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs was kidnapped by armed Islamists posing as police. His captors barricaded themselves in a room in the Kabul Hotel and tried to bargain with the Afghan government. After two hours, Afghan security forces stormed the room, and Dubs was killed in the melee. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, lamented that Dubs’s death was “a tragic event which involved either Soviet ineptitude or collusion.”
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The next month, violent demonstrations erupted in Herat. The Afghan Army’s 17th Division, which was ordered to quell the riots, mutinied en masse. As a Top Secret Soviet assessment concluded, the 17th Division “has essentially collapsed. An artillery regiment and one infantry regiment comprising that division have gone over to the side of the insurgents.” The assessment also reported that insurgent leaders were “religious fanatics” motivated by ideology, and it was “under the banner of Islam that the soldiers are turning against the governmen”
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Prime Minister Taraki begged the Soviets for emergency military assistance, and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin promised to send weapons, ammunition, and military advisers.
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But the Soviets were hesitant to send troops. Kosygin told Taraki: “If our troops were introduced, the situation in your country would not only not improve, but would worsen.” Somewhat ironically, Kosygin noted that the local Afghan population would probably rise up against Soviet forces, as might Afghanistan’s neighbors, such as Pakistan and China, who would receive help from the United States.
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The Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) sent a Top Secret memo to Alexander Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador in Afghanistan, contending that while the deployment of Soviet troops “was considered in much detail,” it “would be
used by hostile forces first of all to the detriment of the interests of the [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan]”
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Politburo member and future Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko noted that if the Soviets deployed troops and “beat down the Afghan people then we will be accused of aggression for sure. There’s no getting around it here.”
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For three days the rebels held Herat, plundering weapons stockpiles and hunting down government officials. Taraki ordered Afghan forces from Kandahar to cordon off the city while he dispatched two armored brigades from Kabul. He then struck parts of Herat and 17th Division headquarters with IL-28 bombers from Shindand Air Base. By the time the rebellion was finally crushed, as many as 5,000 people had died, including one hundred Soviet advisers and their families, whose heads were mounted on poles and paraded around the city by the insurgents. News of the events in Herat accelerated desertions and mutinies in the Afghan military. In May, for example, a motorized column from the 7th Division went over to the rebels in Paktia Province, located along the Pakistan border in eastern Afghanistan.
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