Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (49 page)

L
ate in the day on December 12, 1979, the leaders of the Soviet Union met in a Kremlin conference room to decide what to do about Afghanistan. Who precisely attended the meeting, and what they said to each other, remains a subject of considerable speculation to this day.
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Those who attended are all dead, and none of them chose to write down his account of what took place. The only document the meeting produced was a brief memorandum titled “Concerning the Situation in ‘A.’” It spoke vaguely of “measures to be taken.” Konstantin Chernenko wrote out the text by hand, and then the other members of the Politburo signed their names across it. This bizarre memorandum provided the administrative and legal basis for the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. It was a craven beginning to an ignominious war.

Not everyone in the Kremlin was in favor of intervention. Prime Minister Kosygin, who had spent the year fending off Taraki’s requests for Soviet troops, did not attend that particular session of the Politburo—perhaps because of illness, perhaps by choice. He was known to be cool to the idea of dispatching a large force to the Hindu Kush. But there were those within the political elite who did not share his sense of restraint. Within the KGB, plans for taking out Amin were already well under way. In September 1979, the men in the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Soviet secret police, had devised a scenario for kidnapping Amin and bringing him back to the Soviet Union (where he likely faced liquidation). The Kremlin refrained,
at first, from issuing an order to proceed.
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By late November, however, KGB chief Yuri Andropov and Minister of Defense Dmitri Ustinov had decided that the only viable solution for Afghanistan was to remove Amin, to insert a large contingent of Soviet troops to calm the security situation, and to install a new government under the leadership of the more moderate Parchamis.

A number of factors pushed the Soviets toward direct involvement. For one thing, détente—the dominant dynamic in the Soviet-American relationship for most of the 1970s—was finally breaking down. Carter and Brezhnev had met in June 1979 to sign the SALT II treaty, but their summit offered little progress on other fronts and ended on a frosty note. The US Senate, skeptical of Moscow’s intentions, failed to ratify the treaty. Their reluctance mirrored the growing concern among NATO countries about the Soviet deployment of the SS-20, a new midrange, multiple-warhead missile, in Eastern Europe. On December 12, NATO agreed to approve the counterdeployment of comparable missiles unless the Warsaw Pact countries agreed to a treaty mutually limiting intermediate- and medium-range missiles in the European theater (the so-called double-track decision).
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The decision came just weeks before the Soviets sent their troops into Afghanistan. The announcement that NATO would soon deploy missiles within just a few minutes’ flight time of the western USSR contributed to a sense of siege mentality among the Soviet leaders.

The tension was aggravated by Washington’s rapprochement with China, which Moscow had seen as a contributing factor in Deng’s decision to invade Vietnam at the beginning of the year, as well as the continuing turmoil in Iran, which had prompted the Americans to dispatch more ships to the Persian Gulf. As Soviet leaders saw it, this was no time to go wobbly. The USSR had to show the Americans that it was capable of pushing back to defend its interests. Just to make things worse, the old men on the Politburo knew perfectly well that Brezhnev did not have long to live, and the maneuvering over who would succeed him had already begun. These were circumstances that favored hawkishness.

They also tended to inflame the sense of paranoia over Amin’s true loyalties. In early December, Andropov sent Brezhnev a handwritten letter that laid out the case for intervention:

            
We have been receiving information about Amin’s behind-the-scenes activities which may mean his political reorientation to the West. He keeps his contacts with the American chargé d’affaires secret from us. He promised tribal leaders to distance himself from the Soviet Union. . . . In closed
meetings he attacked Soviet policy and the activities of our specialists. Our ambassador was practically expelled from Kabul. These developments have created, on the one hand, a danger of losing the domestic achievements of the Afghan revolution, and, on the other hand, a threat to our positions in Afghanistan. Now there is no guarantee that Amin, in order to secure his personal power, would not turn to the West.
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Andropov had minimal evidence to back up this claim. We know little about his motivations, but it appears that he was simply using every means at his disposal to prod Brezhnev into action. Andropov and Ustinov soon brought the NATO deliberations on medium-range missiles into play as well. They began suggesting—a truly farfetched argument considering the realities—that a lack of Kremlin resolve could soon result in the Americans having the chance to station short-range missiles in Afghanistan, right up against the Soviet border.
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By now the Kremlin was set on direct military intervention in Afghanistan. Two days after the Politburo members signed their memo, Red Army staff troops arrived to set up an operational headquarters just inside the Soviet side of the border with Afghanistan. KGB special forces in Kabul had already started their own preparations for the invasion in early December. At three in the afternoon on Christmas Day—a date presumably chosen to ensure minimal attention in the West—the 40th Army began to send troop convoys across the border. Two days later, KGB commandos launched an assault on the presidential palace on the outskirts of Kabul.
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What happened there remains the subject of considerable dispute, and given the lack of reliable documentation and the chaos that reigned, we may never receive a fully objective account. But certain details emerge clearly. Amin was already virtually incapacitated by the time the Soviets began their storming of the presidential residence. The KGB had already tried to kill him a few days earlier by slipping poison into his Coca-Cola; unfortunately for the Russians, the imperialist beverage had somehow neutralized the toxins, and Amin survived the attack, though it did make him seriously ill. Ironically, it was his Soviet-supplied doctor, unaware of the plot, who tried to nurse him back to health. When the KGB troops burst into the palace—having suffered high casualties as a result of the unexpectedly stiff resistance put up by Amin’s guards—they found the leader of the glorious Afghan revolution wandering the hallways in a haze. One of them tossed a grenade in his direction, killing Amin and his five-year-old son.
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Babrak Karmal, still inside the Soviet Union at this point, was pronounced his successor.

The Soviet invasion marked a turning point in the guerrilla war. For those Afghans who had been sitting on the fence, considering their options for collaboration with the homegrown Communist government, the Soviet move dramatically clarified matters. Now there was no need for the Islamic guerrillas to argue the case that the government leaders in Kabul were the puppets of their atheist masters in faraway Moscow; now the
shuravi
(Soviets) had arrived in person, and you could see them with your own eyes. The number of mujahideen operations had actually tapered off after the summer of 1979, when a harsh government counteroffensive had exposed the guerrillas’ relative weakness, including the scarcity of arms and secure logistics. But the arrival of Soviet troops galvanized the resistance. It was no longer a matter of defending Afghanistan from misguided Afghans; now the guerrillas were fighting to save the country from outsiders who were trying to take it for themselves.
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The visible presence of a large foreign military contingent was only part of the challenge that the occupiers faced. The Red Army’s commanders and their political bosses back in the Kremlin made matters even worse by seemingly doing everything they could to stoke the anger caused by the invasion. From the very beginning, the operations conducted by the Soviet troops and their Afghan allies violated every tenet of sound counterinsurgency warfare. In retrospect, this seems rather odd, given the effectiveness of the guerrilla war that the Russians had conducted against the Nazi invaders in the USSR during World War II. But militaries, with their rigid command structures, often find it difficult to adapt to changing circumstances, and the 40th Army, the core of the Soviet force that now found itself in Afghanistan, included motorized regiments shaped by planning for a modern mechanized war against NATO in Central Europe. The military doctrine that they stood for bore little resemblance to the war that the Soviet troops now found themselves fighting.

Counterinsurgency is an approach to warfare that requires well-disciplined troops who are at least somewhat sensitive to the political context of their mission. This was far from the case in Afghanistan. According to most accounts, morale among the Red Army’s conscript troops—regaled with official talk of the warm reception they would meet in their sunny and exotic destination—was relatively good at the beginning. It soon plummeted, though, as soldiers’ encounters with Afghan reality demonstrated that the locals despised them as occupiers. Poorly supplied with food and creature comforts, and subjected to brutal hazing by their officers, Soviet troops took to plundering homes whenever they got the chance. Many succumbed to the lure of drugs and alcohol, exacerbating problems with discipline.

The elusive and confusing nature of guerrilla warfare complicated matters. Uneducated young Russian troopers found it impossible to distinguish friend from foe—a problem intensified by the speed with which their Afghan government allies tended to desert upon contact with the enemy. The notion of “protecting the population” seemed to be completely alien to the 40th Army’s commanders, who responded to attacks on their troops with massed artillery and airpower. It was a tactic that usually killed more civilians than guerrillas, thus fanning popular support for the rebels. The mujahideen, for their part, were not above terrorizing their enemies whenever they had occasion to do so, and Soviet troops who were taken prisoner rarely survived, invariably enraging the brothers-in-arms who happened across their elaborately mutilated bodies.

There were other ways, though, in which the mujahideen bore a disconcerting resemblance to their Afghan Communist opponents. The holy warriors were also prey to internecine feuding. The two Islamist parties of Rabbani and Hekmatyar, based in Peshawar since the midseventies, soon found themselves competing with five other groups representing various tribal and religious constituencies. At times the fighting among the rebels approached the ferociousness of their attacks on the Soviets. Gun battles and assassinations were all too frequent on both sides of the borders.

The one thing that unified them, however, came into ever-sharper focus as the war went on: commitment to the cause of Islam. A number of factors contributed to this. Religion proved to be a much more powerful motivating force than, say, allegiance to the old king or the model of the secular republic embodied by the much-maligned Daoud, who had discredited the very notion through his dalliances with the Communists. The seductive notion of an “Islamic state” was one of the few political designs on offer that could compete, in clarity and emotional power, with the Communist vision.

Foreign sponsorship of the seven exile parties tended to aggravate the differences among them. General Zia insisted that Pakistan should have the final say over which Afghan factions received the money and weapons that came from the Americans and the Saudis and various other outside powers. The group that he tended to favor above all else was Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami, which had shown itself amenable to close cooperation with Pakistani military intelligence since many of the Afghan Islamists had gone into exile in 1973–1974. There were several reasons for this preference. Hekmatyar hewed closely to an Islamist vision that Zia and his fellow generals, who were trying to bolster Islam as a political factor at home, found appealing. In contrast to some of the more disorganized Afghan groups, the
Hezbis were under tight control and could be relied upon to carry out the orders of their leader. Finally, they were overwhelmingly Pashtun, like most of the Pakistanis who inhabited the tribal areas around Peshawar. This offered, at least in theory, the advantage of diverting potential separatist sentiments among Pashtun Pakistanis to the cause of the “holy war” in Afghanistan.

A group that received far less in the way of foreign largesse was the branch of Jamiat-e Islami that had established itself in the Panjshir Valley under the ethnic Tajik Ahmed Shah Massoud, the man who had gained notoriety with his ill-fated rebellion in the Panjshir in the summer of 1979. By that action and many others, Massoud showed that he was determined to avoid taking orders from any outside forces—particularly the Pakistanis. They reciprocated by cutting him off from the flow of resources from Washington and Riyadh.

Yet, somewhat paradoxically, it was Massoud who soon gained a reputation as one of the most effective mujahideen field commanders. Having returned to the strategically vital Panjshir soon after the invasion, he forged his men into a highly effective guerrilla force that consistently threatened Soviet supply lines and repeatedly withstood large-scale attacks. And while he, too, declared his aim to be the establishment of an Islamic state, he eschewed the dictatorial powers of an emir in favor of a comparatively democratic mechanism of consultation throughout the areas under his control that determined everything from education to tax policy.

As their casualties mounted and the political situation continued to deteriorate, the Soviets desperately tried to learn from their mistakes. Some Red Army commanders gradually implemented policies to lessen the impact of the occupation, including civil affairs projects designed to improve the lot of ordinary people. But the efforts were piecemeal, and they were almost always outweighed by the heavy-handedness of the Russians’ efforts to defeat the mujahideen. Air strikes and artillery barrages directed against the guerrilla fighters invariably caused civilian casualties, increasing resentment and driving more and more people into the arms of the rebels. And then, as always, there was the atheistic nature of the Soviet system, which made it hard to convince the locals that the invaders sincerely respected Islam.