In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

CHAPTER ONE Descent into Violence

AFGHANISTAN’S STRATEGIC LOCATION, wedged between Persia, the weathered steppes of Central Asia, and the trade routes of the Indian Subcontinent, has long made it alluring to great powers. When Alexander the Great began his march into Afghanistan around 330 BC, locals witnessed a forbidding sight. Riding ahead of the invading force were scouts armed with sarisas—pikes up to twenty feet long, weighted at the base and projecting fifteen feet in front of the mounted cavalry. Agile soldiers armed with javelins surveyed the heights on both flanks. The core of Alexander’s army was a thick column of horsemen and foot soldiers that snaked along Afghanistan’s windswept roads. Some soldiers wore plumed helmets, purple tunics, and glistening armor. Alexander had begun his Asia campaign four years earlier, and the invasion of Afghanistan was a key part of his quest. His army had already swept through what is now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran before arriving at the edge of Afghanistan.¹

One of the most interesting accounts of the campaign was provided by the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus. He described Alexander gathering his soldiers together before their march into Afghanistan and addressing them with bravado:

In a new, and if we wish to confess the truth, insecure empire, to whose yoke the barbarians still submit with obdurate necks, there is need of time, my soldiers, until they are trained to milder dispositions, and until better habits appease their savage temper. Do you believe that so many nations accustomed to the rule and name of another, united with us neither by religion, nor customs, nor community of language, have been subdued in the same battle in which they were overcome?

It is by your arms alone that they are restrained, not by their dispositions, and those who fear us when we are present, in our absence will be enemies. We are dealing with savage beasts, which lapse of time only can tame, when they are caught and caged, because their own nature cannot tame them. Then you will hurry to recover what is yours, then you will take up arms. But how much better it is to crush him while he is still in fear and almost beside himself.²

Rufus wrote that the address was received with great enthusiasm by Alexander’s soldiers.³ The great Hellenic army entered Afghanistan from what is today Iran. They paused to found a garrison city, Alexandria-in-Areia, near Afghanistan’s western city of Herat, then marched south to the lower Helmand River Valley. The Helmand River, the longest in Afghanistan, stretches more than 700 miles from the Hindu Kush mountains in the north to the Helmand Valley in the south. Its waters, used by local farmers for irrigating crops, left behind rich soil to feed the orchards and date-palm groves that lined its banks. In this period, the valley was fertile and well populated, and Alexander’s army halted there to await the end of Afghanistan’s bitter winter before proceeding north. In the early spring, the army marched to the Kabul Valley, trekking across melting snow and ice, but the persistent, biting cold took its toll.

Rufus wrote: “The army, then, abandoned in this absence of all human civilization, endured all the evils that could be suffered, want, cold, fatigue, despair. The unusual cold of the snow caused the death of many, to many it brought frost-bite of the feet, to very many blindness of the eyes.”⁴

But in the Kabul Valley, the army finally found sustenance. Alexander’s Afghan campaign continued until the spring of 327 BC, when the army crossed the Hindu Kush into India. The Hindu Kush mountains form part of a vast alpine zone that stretches across South Asia. To the east, the mountains intersect with the Pamir range near the borders of China, Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and Afghanistan. They then continue southwest through Pakistan into Afghanistan, where they eventually descend into a series of minor ranges in western Afghanistan. Historically, the high passes of the Hindu Kush have been of great military significance, providing access to the northern plains of India for such conquerors as Alexander, as well as invaders such as Genghis Khan, Timur, and Babur. And they inspired the British travel writer Eric Newby, who wrote, during his trek through the Hindu Kush, “Here on the Arayu, one of the lonely places of the earth with all the winds of Asia droning over it, where the mountains seemed like the bones of the world breaking through, I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind.”⁵

Afghanistan was one of the most difficult campaigns that Alexander the Great ever fought. His adversaries were not conventional European armies but tribesmen and horse warriors who inhabited the steppes and mountains of the region. Both sides fought barbarously. Alexander’s army was technically superior to the local forces they faced, but it needed to clear and hold an expansive territory. The solution was to fight on multiple fronts in a constant war of attrition against the local Afghans, and to deal ruthlessly with the locals. The army sacked rebellious cities, killed or enslaved their inhabitants, and doled out savage reprisals. If not genocide, it was certainly mass killing. ⁶ Despite the bloodletting, his army failed to subjugate Afghanistan’s population, and his tenuous grasp on the region collapsed after his death in 323 BC.

Alexander’s march was eventually followed by the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan, which began around 652 AD, two decades after the death of the prophet Muhammad in Medina, when Arab armies from the Middle East captured Herat. But they failed to convert the recalcitrant mountain tribes, and their revolt preserved the loose conglomerate of Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and others that had dominated before the rise of the Caliphate. In 122 AD, Genghis Khan and his Mongol army swept through Afghanistan and northern India, leaving behind a trail of devastation and creating an empire that stretched from China to the Caucasus. They depopulated territory, slaughtering civilians in an attempt to eliminate the possibility of rebellion, and they decimated cities such as Herat.

Marco Polo, the Venetian trader and explorer, trekked across Afghan mountains later in the century, remarking that “this kingdom has many narrow passes and natural fortresses, so that the inhabitants are not afraid of any invader breaking in to molest them. Their cities and towns are built on mountain tops or sites of great natural strength. It is a characteristic of these mountains that they are of immense height.”⁷ In 1383, the conqueror Timur began his Afghan conquest, again with the capture of Herat. He was the last of the mighty Mongol rulers to achieve a vast empire with territory stretching from present-day India to the Mediterranean Sea. The poverty, bloodshed, and desolation caused by his campaigns gave rise to haunting legends that inspired such works as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. Early in the sixteenth century, the Mughal emperor Babur left present-day Iran and crossed the Amu Darya River, which would later serve as the border between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan, captured Kabul in 1504 at the age of twenty-one. In 1522, he captured Kandahar and repeatedly tried to invade India, but he was never able to establish a firm foothold. He left behind traces of Persian culture—from language to music, painting, and poetry—that one can still see in Afghanistan.

In the nineteenth century, the British fought three brutal wars in Afghanistan to balance Russian influence in the region. Britain had drawn the line against Russia at the Amu Darya River, and its leaders made clear they would contest any Russian move to the south. But Britain paid a heavy price for its interest in Afghanistan. The first Anglo-Afghan War, which lasted from 1839 to 1842, ended in a humiliating British defeat. The departing British force, numbering 16,000 soldiers, was systematically reduced to one as British forces were ambushed in biting cold and knee-deep snow. William Brydon, the lone survivor, later recalled: “This was a terrible march, the fire of the enemy incessant, and numbers of officers and men, not knowing where they were going from snow-blindness, were cut up.”⁸

In 1878, the British invaded again, launching the second Anglo-Afghan War. Roughly 33, 500 British troops began a swift assault on three fronts, but cholera shredded the British ranks and many were felled by heat; daytime temperatures in the shade rose to over one hundred degrees. Some British commanders did not even visit their soldiers in the hospital to avoid the utter shock of what they would see.⁹ On July 27, 1880, Afghans loyal to Ayub Khan defeated the British army during the Battle of Maiwand. Despite a decisive victory at the Battle of Kandahar in September 1880, however, the British pulled out of the country following intense domestic opposition to the war. After the fighting ended, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Roberts remarked: “It may not be very flattering to our amour propre, but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to reconquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.”¹⁰ His words were prophetic.

In 1917, however, the Russian civil war triggered the collapse of Nicholas II’s regime, ensuring that Russia would pose no strategic threat for the foreseeable future. British leaders began the third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919 and later that year signed the Treaty of Rawalpindi, which recognized Afghan independence on August 8, 1919. British policymakers had long seen Afghanistan as a strategically important buffer state to protect British interests in India from Russian expansion. During the eighty years of hostility, the British had grappled with a growing revolt from Pashtuns in southern and eastern Afghanistan, who took power once Afghanistan became independent. Characterized by their own language (Pashto) and the practice of Pashtunwali—a legal and moral code that determines social order and responsibilities and governs such key components as honor, solidarity, hospitality, mutual support, shame, and revenge—the Pashtuns would play a major role in Afghan history in the twentieth century.

In 1919, King Amanullah Khan tried to modernize the country, but he was overthrown in 1929 by Habibullah Kalakani, a Tajik. Kalakani was ousted a few months later after Pashtuns rebelled, and members of the Pashtun Musahiban family then founded a dynasty that would rule Afghanistan for nearly five decades, from 1929 to 1978. The first of their leaders was Muhammad Nadir Shah, who had grown up in British India, served as a general in the army, and spent part of his adult years living in southern France before becoming king. But he was assassinated in 1933, and his son, Muhammad Zahir Shah, took his place at the age of nineteen. For several years Zahir Shah remained in the background while his relatives ran the government. One of the most prominent was Daoud Khan, a cousin and brother-in-law of Zahir Shah, who was educated in France and became prime minister in 1953. Daoud Khan was an advocate of Pashtun irredentism, including the creation of a greater “Pashtunistan” in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Zahir Shah eventually took control of the government in 1963 and catapulted the country into a new era of modernity and democratic freedom.

Collapse of the State

In 1967, Ronald Neumann left the University of California-Riverside with a master’s degree in political science and headed to Afghanistan, where his father, Robert Neumann, was the U.S. ambassador. The elder Neumann had been a tenured professor at the University of California when President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated him to the post. “My father had a profound impact on my interest in foreign affairs,” Ronald Neumann later recalled. “Because of him, I made up my mind in the tenth grade to go into the Foreign Service.”¹¹

It was Ronald Neumann’s first trip to Afghanistan, and the last he would take before following in his father’s footsteps as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan nearly four decades later. With his wife, Neumann traveled the country. They drove from Herat to Kabul, along part of the same route that Rory Stewart would later memorialize in his 2001 best seller The Places in Between.¹² Neumann went on a hunting expedition for the famous Marco Polo sheep in Badakhshan, Afghanistan’s mountainous northeast in the heart of the Hindu Kush. After returning from his trek across the region in the late thirteenth century, the Italian explorer had described these 300-pound beasts as “wild sheep of enormous size” with horns “as much as six palms in length.”¹³ “It was an exotic adventure, a throwback in time,” said Neumann.¹⁴

He also drove through the Salang Tunnel, linking northern and southern Afghanistan through the Hindu Kush mountains. In 1955, the Afghan government and the Soviet Union signed an agreement to build the tunnel, which was opened in 1964. The tunnel was the highest road tunnel in the world until 1973, when the United States built the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel—just slightly higher and slightly longer—in the Rocky Mountains. For travelers at this time, the tunnel was one of the marvels of the country, if not all of Central Asia.

The country that Ronald Neumann toured in 1967 had enjoyed several decades of stability and a relatively strong government. American and European tourists poured into Kabul each year. The Afghan capital was the Central Asian hotspot for young backpackers, who flocked to the city’s coffee and carpet shops. King Zahir Shah had introduced a representative form of government, for which he received mostly high marks from the U.S. government. In a secret Eyes Only 1970 memo to President Richard Nixon after meeting with the king, Vice President Spiro Agnew described him as “a quiet, rather intense person, with great dedication to his country” who “appears to be very well versed in world affairs.”¹⁵ He was in his mid-fifties, and mostly bald, with a neatly trimmed mustache, and he often felt more comfortable donning a pressed Western suit rather than wearing traditional Afghan clothes.

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.¹⁶ 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.”¹⁷ There were also reports of corruption in the government and tribal unrest, which were undermining popular support.¹⁸ 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:

The adjectives—indirect, cautious, furtive, clever, et al—which come to mind when one thinks of the King well represent the difficulty which observers here, both Afghan and foreign, face in trying to assess both the man and his creature. He has written no memoirs or autobiography, his public pronouncements are infrequent and generally anodyne, and in his contacts with a wide cross section of Afghan society, he prefers to listen rather than to declaim, a preference which frequently leads to confusion about his views.¹⁹

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.”²⁰ 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.²¹ Throughout 1972 and 1973, both American and Soviet intelligence services collected information about a possible coup.²²

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.”²³ 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.”²⁴

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.”²⁵

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.²⁶ 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.²⁷ Moscow provided immediate aid to try to stabilize the situation, including armored personnel carriers, combat radios, Kalashnikov rifles, and Makarov pistols.²⁸

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.”²⁹

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?’”³⁰ 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.”³¹ 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.”³²

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.³³

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.”³⁴ 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”³⁵ Prime Minister Taraki begged the Soviets for emergency military assistance, and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin promised to send weapons, ammunition, and military advisers.³⁶

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.³⁷ 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]”³⁸ 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.”³⁹

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.⁴⁰

Governance was collapsing in Afghanistan. In June 1979, fearful of an all-out civil war, the Soviet leadership deployed a special detachment of KGB paramilitary officers disguised as service personnel to defend the Soviet Embassy in Kabul.⁴¹ Revolts continued, and in September Taraki was summoned to Moscow for consultations. On his return to Kabul, he was arrested by his deputy, Hafizullah Amin, and executed.

Amin, a Pashtun from the town of Paghman, not far from Kabul, had a master’s degree in education from Columbia University in New York. According to his Soviet intelligence dossier, Amin was “marked by great energy, a businesslike nature, a desire to get to the heart of the issue, and firmness in his views and actions. He also has the talent of attracting people to him who have subordinated themselves to his influence.”⁴² Soviet leaders felt that Amin was too close to the United States, and they believed that Amin wanted a more “balanced policy” with the West. A Top Secret analysis warned Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev: “It is known, in particular, that representatives of the USA, on the basis of their contacts with the Afghans, are coming to a conclusion about the possibility of a change in the political line of Afghanistan in a direction which is pleasing to Washington.”⁴³ A series of KGB reports to the Politburo expressed concern that Amin would likely turn to the Americans for help.⁴⁴ But CIA officials strongly denied having any such contacts. “It was total nonsense,” said the CIA’s Graham Fuller. “I would have been thrilled to have those kinds of contacts with Amin, but they didn’t exist.”⁴⁵

On December 8, 1979, Brezhnev held a meeting in his private office with a narrow circle of senior Politburo members: ideologue Mikhail Suslov, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Andropov and Ustinov expressed grave concerns that the United States was trying to increase its role in Afghanistan and that Pakistan would try to annex Pashtun areas of Afghanistan. By the end of the meeting, the group had tentatively decided to move on two fronts. The first was to have the KGB remove Amin and replace him with Babrak Karmal; the second was to seriously consider sending Soviet troops to Afghanistan to stabilize the country.⁴⁶

On December 10, 1979, Ustinov gave an oral order to the General Staff to start preparations for deployment of one division of paratroopers and five divisions of military-transport aviation. He also ordered increased readiness of two motorized rifle divisions in the Turkestan Military District and an increase in the staff of a pontoon regiment.⁴⁷ Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the General Staff, was outraged by the decision, responding that the troops would not be able to stabilize the situation and calling the decision “reckless.”

Ustinov cut him off harshly: “Are you going to teach the Politburo? Your only duty is to carry out the orders.”

Ogarkov replied that the Afghan problem should be decided by political means, instead of through military force, and pointed out that the Afghan people had never reacted favorably to foreign occupation.⁴⁸

The final decision to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan appears to have been made on the afternoon of December 12 by a small group of Soviet officials, including Brezhnev, Suslov, Andropov, Ustinov, and Gromyko. They issued a directive to “send several contingents of Soviet troops…into the territory of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan for the purposes of rendering internationalist assistance to the friendly Afghan people” and to “create favorable conditions to prevent possible anti-Afghan actions on the part of the bordering states.”⁴⁹ The group agreed that the situation in Afghanistan seriously threatened the security of the Soviet Union’s southern borders, and the United States, China, and Iran could take advantage of this through support to the Afghan regime. In particular, Afghanistan could become a future U.S. forward operating base against the Soviet Union, lying right against their “soft underbelly” in Central Asia. Ideology also played an important role.⁵⁰ Suslov and Boris Ponomarev, head of the Communist Party’s international department, argued that the Soviet Union needed to counter the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism. Ustinov was convinced that military operations could be accomplished quickly, perhaps in a few weeks or months. So was Brezhnev.⁵¹

“It’ll be over in three to four weeks,” Brezhnev told Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to the United States.⁵²

There was some opposition to the invasion, especially in the Soviet General Staff. Generals Nikolai Ogarkov, Sergei Akhromeyev, and Valentin Varennikov, who were charged with preparing the invasion plan, filed a dissenting report to Ustinov. They warned him of the strong possibility of a protracted insurgency, especially in a country blessed with mountainous terrain and inhabited by warring tribes.⁵³

The Soviet Invasion

Ronald Neumann monitored the Soviet invasion from afar. In 1970, he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the U.S. Department of State as a foreign service officer. After an initial posting in Senegal, he began to specialize in the Middle East. In 1973, he served as principal officer in Tabriz, Iran. He subsequently became desk officer for Jordan, deputy chief of mission in Yemen, deputy director of the Office of Arabian Peninsula Affairs, and deputy chief of mission in the United Arab Emirates.

“I talked about Afghanistan on and off with my father until he died,” he told me. The elder Neumann was a longtime member of the Dartmouth Conference, which was established as a high-level forum for discussing Soviet-American relations. It was cochaired by Yevgeny Primakov, who went on to become the Russian prime minister, and Harold Saunders, a CIA analyst who later served on the National Security Council. From 1960 until 1981, the conference met thirteen times—alternately in the Soviet Union and the United States—and involved a number of other influential experts. It became even more active during the Soviet War in Afghanistan, meeting nearly every six months. “The Dartmouth Conference kept my father informed about developments in Afghanistan, which he passed on to me during our conversations,” Ronald Neumann recalled.⁵⁴

On Christmas Eve 1979, elite Soviet forces began flying into Kabul Airport and the military air base at Bagram. The 357th and 66th Motorized Rifle Divisions of the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan from Kushka in Turkmenistan and began advancing south along the main highway. The 360th and 201st Motorized Rifle Divisions crossed the Amu Darya River on pontoon bridges from Termez in Uzbekistan. Dividing Afghanistan from the Soviet Union, the river flows more than 1,500 miles through Central Asia. Because Afghanistan has almost no railways, the Amu Darya played a critical transport role for the Soviet invasion, since it could be used for barge traffic.

The 360th Motorized Rifle Division reached Kabul on Christmas Day, securing the crucial Salang Pass and its tunnel en route, while the 201st moved toward Kunduz and east to Badakshan and Baghlan Provinces. ⁵⁵ By December 27, 1979, there were 50,000 Soviet forces in Afghanistan, with 5,000 troops and Spetsnaz, the Soviet Union’s elite special forces, in positions around Kabul. The Soviets destroyed Kabul’s main telephone exchanges and took over the radio station and the Ministry of Interior. Soviet paratroopers also took control of the post office, ammunition depots, and other government buildings.

KGB special forces disguised in Afghan uniforms assaulted the presidential palace. Hafizullah Amin’s guards fought back for several hours, but they were ultimately overcome, and KGB forces assassinated Amin.⁵⁶ Babrak Karmal arrived from the airport to take over the government and addressed the country on Radio Kabul:

Today the torture machine of Amin and his henchmen, savage butchers, usurpers and murderers of tens of thousands of our compatriots…has been broken…. The great April revolution, accomplished through the indestructible will of the heroic Afghan people…has entered a new stage. The bastions of the despotism of the bloody dynasty of Amin and his supporters—those watchdogs of the sirdars of Nadir Shah, Zahir Shah, and Daoud Shah, the hirelings of world imperialism, headed by American imperialism—have been destroyed. Not one stone of these bastions remains.⁵⁷

The Soviets were right to worry about possible U.S. involvement. In early 1979, the Carter administration began looking at the possibility of covert assistance to Afghanistan. By the spring, Zbigniew Brzezinski had come up with ways to undermine the Soviets in their own backyard. He convinced President Carter to sanction some initial aid to the Afghan rebels. The shipment consisted of old British .303 Lee-Enfield rifles.⁵⁸ On March 30, 1979, Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron chaired a mini-session of the Special Coordination Committee on Afghanistan at the White House. At the meeting, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Newsom argued that the United States should counter the growing Soviet presence in Afghanistan, and Pentagon official Walter Slocombe asked whether there might be a benefit in “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.”

Aaron concluded by asking the group: “Is there interest in maintaining and assisting the [Afghan] insurgency, or is the risk that we will provoke the Soviets too great?”⁵⁹

Over the next few weeks, senior government officials continued discussions on possible action in Afghanistan. At the CIA, National Intelligence Officer Arnold Horelick sent Director Stansfield Turner a paper examining possible Soviet reactions to U.S. assistance. Horelick argued that covert action to help Afghan opposition leaders would hurt the Soviets. On April 6, the Special Coordination Committee, chaired by Brzezinski, met to discuss several U.S. options. The scenarios ranged from weapons and training to more benign nonlethal assistance.

After much debate, the group recommended that the CIA provide nonlethal assistance to opposition groups, and on July 3, 1979, President Carter signed the first finding to help support the mujahideen in Afghanistan. It authorized covert support for insurgent propaganda, the establishment of radio access to the Afghan population through third-country facilities, and the provision of cash and nonmilitary supplies to opposition groups.⁶⁰ Brzezinski, who was particularly concerned about Soviet designs on the region, told Carter that the Soviets might not stop at Afghanistan: “I warned the President that the Soviets would be in a position, if they came to dominate Afghanistan, to promote a separate Baluchistan, which would give them access to the Indian Ocean while dismembering Pakistan and Iran.”⁶¹

But there were substantial disagreements about Soviet intentions. The CIA sent an Eyes Only memo to President Carter and other members of the National Security Council, concluding that it was “unlikely that the Soviet occupation is a preplanned first step in the implementation of a highly articulated grand design for the rapid establishment of hegemonic control over all of southwest Asia.” Rather, it explained that the Soviets were mainly concerned about the collapse of a state in its sphere of influence. Arnold Horelick tried to split the difference. In a paper for Brzezinski, he wrote that the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan represented a “qualitative turn in Soviet foreign policy in the region and toward the third world.” Stansfield Turner included a personal cover note to Brzezinski when he forwarded the memo:

I would only add a personal comment that I would be a bit more categoric than the paper in stating that the Soviets’ behavior in Afghanistan was not an aberration. I agree we do not have the evidence that the Soviets are firmly committed to continuing as aggressive a policy in the third world…. Yet, I do believe that the Soviet track record over the past five or six years indicates a definitely greater willingness to probe the limits of our tolerance. “Détente” was not a bar to this greater assertiveness in Angola, Ethiopia, Kampuchea and Yemen. It need not be so again, even if we return to détente. As the paper concludes, how assertive the Soviets will be in the future will very likely depend upon how “successful” the Soviet leadership views their intervention in Afghanistan to have been.⁶²

Despite the conflicting assessments, there is little credible evidence that Soviet leaders wanted to expand their reach into Pakistan and Iran and to the Indian Ocean. Rather, they were concerned by the collapse of governance in Afghanistan and suspicious that the United States and Afghanistan’s neighbors would try to move into the vacuum.

It seems unlikely that the Soviets would have gotten involved had the Afghan state not collapsed in the first place. As Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin argues in his book The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, “In the end, the persistence of revolt and the concomitant breakdown of the state resulted from its own internal weaknesses.” He continues: “The main reason the revolt spread so widely was that the army disintegrated in a series of insurrections, from unrecorded defections of small posts to mutinies in nearly all the major garrisons.”⁶³ The uprising engulfed Afghan cities, including Herat in the west, Jalalabad in the east, and eventually Kabul itself. Some of the Afghan leaders who mutinied—such as Ismail Khan and Abdul Rauf—escaped and joined the resistance. Indeed, the dissolution of the Afghan Army in the late 1970s, rather than the strength of the insurgents, allowed the resistance to spread.⁶⁴ The Afghan state had failed to establish basic law and order and to deliver basic services. The Soviet Union stepped in to help fill this void.