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

CHAPTER TWO The Mujahideen Era

IN 1979, the year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, who would play a key role in U.S. efforts in Afghanistan after the September 2001 attacks, finished his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. In 1974, he had arrived in Hyde Park, a racially diverse community situated along Lake Michigan on Chicago’s South Side. The university was founded there in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who described his role as “the best investment I ever made.” “Zal,” as Khalilzad was known to his colleagues, was a resident floor adviser at the International House, an oversize Gothic building where many of the university’s foreign students lived. A contemporary photograph of Khalilzad—which International House sent to him when he became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—shows a young man in his early twenties with shoulder-length hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a flowery Hawaiian shirt. Already one can see the relaxed, almost unassuming aura that would become his trademark during his years as a diplomat.

Khalilzad was born in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where his father worked in the Ministry of Finance for King Zahir Shah’s government. The setting for his childhood was appropriately grand. Mazar-e-Sharif means “noble shrine,” a reference to the magnificent blue-tiled mosque that dominates the city’s skyline and is said by some Muslims to house the tomb of the caliph Ali ibn Abu Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. Khalilzad’s mother, he told The New Yorker in an interview, “did not have a formal education yet she was very modern, always very informed. She could not read or write herself, but she would have the kids read the newspapers to her. I think if she had been born at a different time she would have been quite an established political figure.” He studied at the private Ghazi Lycée school in Kabul and spent a year in the United States as an exchange student, near Modesto, California. The year in California had a profound impact on him. “I had different values, greater interest in sports, a more pragmatic way of looking at things, and a broader horizon,” he recalled after finishing his time there. “I had a sense of how backward Afghanistan was. And I became more interested in how Afghanistan needed to change.”¹

Khalilzad went on to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the American University of Beirut before going to Chicago to pursue a doctorate in political science. There he studied with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter, a prominent international relations scholar who led groundbreaking work on nuclear deterrence. Wohlstetter influenced the design and deployment of U.S. strategic forces through his research, developed the “second-strike” theory for deterring nuclear war, and originated “fail safe” and other methods for reducing the probability of accidental nuclear war.² Wohlstetter served as a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, and, beginning in 1964, as a professor at the University of Chicago. He had a significant influence on Khalilzad and helped him make contacts in Washington. After leaving Chicago in 1979, Khalilzad moved to New York to become a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.³

The Brutal-Hearted Mountain Tribes

During his studies with Wohlstetter, Khalilzad continued to monitor events in Afghanistan and, with his academic training completed, he began writing articles on the invasion using a pseudonym to protect members of his family who were still there. Khalilzad observed a military operation that proved more costly in terms of blood or money than the Soviets had bargained for. Over the three previous decades, the Soviets had tried to prop up a range of Afghan governments, providing a total of $1.3 billion in economic aid and $1.3 billion in military aid between 1955 and 1978.⁴ But these costs skyrocketed in the 1980s, and the CIA estimated that the Soviet Union spent an annual average of $7 billion between 1980 and 1986.⁵ When the Soviets finally withdrew in February 1989, after ten harrowing years, the country was devastated. An estimated one million Afghans had been killed, more than five million had fled abroad, and as many as three million were internally displaced. Nearly 15,000 Soviet soldiers were dead and 35,000 wounded.⁶ The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, expressed the anger of the Soviet loss, as well as the vaunted defiance of the Afghan warriors, in a poem titled “On the Talks in Kabul” (“Kperegovoram v Kabule”). He referred to the “brutal-hearted” mountain tribes defined by their “long beards,” “handcrafted rugs,” and “loud guttural names.”⁷ But he was most scathing in a 1982 interview with the Paris Review, seven years after he was expelled from the Soviet Union. “When I saw the first footage from Afghanistan on the TV screen a year ago, it was very short. It was tanks rolling on the plateau,” he remarked. “What I saw was basically a violation of the elements—because that plateau never saw a plough before, let alone a tank. So, it was a kind of existential nightmare…. This is absolutely meaningless, like subtracting from zero. And it is vile in a primordial sense, partly because of tanks’ resemblance to dinosaurs. It simply shouldn’t be.”⁸

After the Soviet invasion, Babrak Karmal’s Soviet-backed government tried desperately to increase its power and legitimacy. It released thousands of prisoners, declared its allegiance to Islam, restored the Islamic green stripe to Afghanistan’s flag, proclaimed an amnesty for refugees and those misguided citizens it termed “deceived compatriots,” and appointed several non-Party individuals to posts as advisers. Moscow and Kabul began to devise a state-building strategy based on a long-term Soviet commitment to the country, even if they envisioned a limited stay for Soviet troops.⁹

But neither Karmal nor the Kremlin could create a strong Afghan state. In 1980, the CIA found that “a vast gulf” separated the Karmal regime from the Afghan population.¹⁰ Karmal depended on Soviet forces and aid for survival. A Soviet security detail helped protect him in the Presidential Palace, and most major policies were approved by Soviet advisers, who even helped write some of Karmal’s speeches. The Soviet invasion also triggered a significant decline in the gross national product. “The effect of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,” a Defense Intelligence Agency analysis concluded, “has been catastrophic for the development of the Afghan economy.”¹¹ The migration of displaced Afghans to major cities resulted in substantial farm-labor losses in many rural areas. The disruption of health-care and sanitary facilities caused infant mortality and serious illnesses to rise. And skilled and educated workers left the country en masse.

Intent on increasing the Afghan state’s capacity to establish law and order, the Soviets concentrated their efforts in two institutions: the military and the secret police. The secret police, officially known as the Khadamat-e Etela’at-e Dawlati (KhAD), relied on KGB advisers, while the Afghan military relied on the direct participation of Soviet troops.¹² Throughout the war, the Afghan Army was weak, divided, and frequently unreliable. It failed to conscript a sufficient number of soldiers and retain their allegiance. Factionalism within the Afghan government hindered the development of military cohesion and smothered the emergence of competent, dependable commanders. Morale was low. The army lost an average of 20,000 soldiers a year to desertion, and there were chronic shortages of equipment. What gear they did have was often unfit for serious combat.¹³ Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who headed the Afghan Bureau of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) from 1983 to 1987 and was responsible for working with the Afghan mujahideen, argued: “This was the force that the Soviets had expected to go out and fight the guerrillas; more often it had to be locked in to prevent its men joining [the mujahideen].”¹⁴ The Afghan Army that the Soviets supported was ambivalent in its loyalties, and the bulk of it quickly melted away. By the mid-1980s, it had shrunk from 90,000 to about 30,000 men.¹⁵

To help establish law and order throughout the country, the Soviet invasion plan called for troops to secure the country’s major cities, airfields, and roads. Motorized troops poured into Afghanistan from Kushka and Termez, secured the main highway that circled the Hindu Kush, and took control of urban centers. Soviet forces in the west targeted the strategic cities of Herat, Farah, and Kandahar, and the Soviet air force secured bases at Bagram, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Shindand, and Herat. In rural Afghanistan, the Soviets attempted to clear and hold a few strategic areas of the countryside and tried without success to seal the borders with Pakistan and Iran.¹⁶ Above all, they did not want to occupy large tracts of territory, which suggests they were adopting a fairly static and defensive posture.¹⁷

Instead of stabilizing the situation, however, the Soviets triggered one of the most successful insurgencies in modern times. In February 1980, an anti-Soviet demonstration in the capital turned into a riot in which 300 people were killed. Kabul’s shops closed down for a week. The Soviets finally restored order with a massive display of force, which included Soviet fighters and helicopter gunships. During 1980 and 1981, the Soviets focused on securing the essential road network and setting up base camps adjacent to airfields. They also built fortified outposts along their communication lines, often manned by Afghan government troops. The Soviets’ biggest challenge was establishing control in the rural areas. Reports to the Soviet Politburo in late 1981 indicated that the Afghan government controlled less than 15 percent of all villages in the country, even after two years of war.

FIGURE 2.1 Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 1979¹⁸

“The rural areas,” admitted one Soviet report, were “controlled by the rebels.” Even if Soviet and Afghan forces could clear territory, they would “as a rule return to their bases and the regions fall back under the control of the rebels.”¹⁹ The rural nature of the insurgency foreshadowed the U.S. experience after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. A Soviet report to Defense Minister Ustinov in 1981 concluded: “The poor functioning of government bodies in the provinces negatively influences the stabilization of the situation in the country.”²⁰

With their troop level holding steady at around 85,000 men, the Soviets vastly increased their numbers of helicopters and jet fighters. Helicopter strength rose from 60 in mid-1980 to more than 300 in 1981.²¹ In 1981, the Soviets launched two offensives into the Panjshir Valley, a geologically dramatic area, surrounded by sheer rock, 100 miles northeast of Kabul. The Panjshir River, which cuts through it, has a fertile flood plain and attracts visitors during the mulberry, grape, and apricot harvests. From this valley, Ahmed Shah Massoud had been orchestrating attacks against Soviet troops in Bagram and Charikar and along the Salang Highway. Massoud, an ethnic Tajik, had undergone guerrilla training in Egypt and Lebanon with Palestinian groups. He became known as the “Lion of Panjshir” for his brazen attacks against Soviet forces and his defense of the Panjshir Valley.²² In 2001, journalist Sebastian Junger embedded with Massoud in the Panjshir, shortly before the military commander’s death, and described him as “a genius guerrilla leader, last hope of the shattered Afghan government.”²³

Twice the Soviets attacked Massoud’s forces in the Panjshir, but they withdrew after two weeks, leaving behind the wreckage of scores of armored vehicles and newly devastated villages along the valley floor. To the extent that the Soviets penetrated into rural areas, it was with airpower, and the Afghans particularly loathed the Mi-24 Hind attack helicopter. Designed for battlefield assault and equipped with four pods for rockets or bombs under its auxiliary wings, the Mi-24 could carry 128 rockets with a full load, as well as four napalm or high-explosive bombs. Its machine guns could fire 1,000 rounds per minute, and its thick armor made it largely immune to medium or heavy machine guns. It could strafe the ground with impunity and, by staying above 5,000 feet, remain out of reach of the mujahideen’s SA-7 surface-to-air missiles.²⁴

In 1984, Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko escalated the high-altitude carpet bombing and ordered more helicopter gunship attacks to accelerate the process of depopulating some rural regions that remained outside Soviet control. Hundreds of thousands of “butterfly” mines—equipped with fins to float down gently—poured out of Soviet aircraft. Once on the ground, they maimed insurgents by blowing off their legs or feet. By mid-1984, 3.5 million Afghans had fled to Pakistan and more than a million others had fled to Iran. Hundreds of thousands more were displaced internally. Kabul’s population swelled from a prewar 750,000 to two million as frightened Afghans streamed in from the countryside.²⁵ Insurgents responded by increasing attacks on airfields, garrisons, and other military targets, and they harassed Soviet ground convoys, making road travel perilous.²⁶

The ISI’s War

The Soviet invasion had an enormous impact on Pakistan. Deeply troubled by the incursion of Soviet troops, President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq asked for an intelligence assessment from Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan, the director-general of the ISI. Major General William Cawthorne, a British Army officer who served as army deputy chief of staff for the new state of Pakistan, had formed the ISI in 1948.²⁷ Cawthorne had created the ISI within the Pakistan Army to help address the lack of intelligence and military cooperation, which had proven disastrous for Pakistan in the 1947 India-Pakistan War.

Akhtar argued that the Soviet invasion threatened Pakistani security: if the Soviet army conquered Afghanistan, it would only be a short step to Pakistan. Akhtar recommended backing the Afghan resistance and turning Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Zia agreed, but only up to a point. He did not want to goad the Soviets into a direct confrontation with Pakistan. This meant keeping Pakistani support covert and prohibiting Pakistani forces from engaging in direct combat in Afghanistan. Over the course of the war, however, Pakistani soldiers did accompany mujahideen during special operations. They acted as advisers and helped the mujahideen blow up pipelines and mount rocket attacks on airfields. Akhtar selected ISI Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf to coordinate training, strategy, and operational planning for the mujahideen inside Afghanistan—and later inside the Soviet Union.²⁸

The ISI had been a relatively small organization throughout the previous three decades. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan transformed the ISI into a powerful intelligence organization.²⁹ Led by key individuals, including Akhtar and Mohammad Yousaf, the ISI was involved in all aspects of the anti-Soviet conflict. Virtually all foreign assistance—including that from the CIA—went through the ISI. The Soviets were well aware of the ISI’s role, and one Soviet military-intelligence assessment indicates that they also knew of Western involvement: “A working group has been created in Islamabad which includes officials of the General Staff and military intelligence of Pakistan and representatives of the U.S., British, and Egyptian embassies. At a meeting of the group they discuss specific operations to conduct subversive operations and the participation of individual countries in organizing the rebel movement on [Afghan] territory.”³⁰

In early 1984, Zia, Akhtar, Yousaf, and other key ISI figures called a meeting with seven of the most powerful Afghan mujahideen leaders to better coordinate the insurgency. One of the great challenges for the Pakistan government, including the ISI, was the haphazard nature of the Afghan resistance, which consisted of a disorganized network of mujahideen constantly roiled by personal rivalries and grievances. In 1984, Zia’s patience finally snapped, and he issued a directive that the insurgents were to form a seven-party alliance, what some CIA operatives called the “Peshawar Seven.” He did not say what he would do if they failed to follow his order, but they seemed to understand that support from Pakistan was hanging in the balance. “Every Commander must belong to one of the seven Parties, otherwise he got nothing from us at ISI,” recalled Yousaf, “no arms, no ammunition and no training.”³¹

Just as Americans know it today, Soviet leaders were aware how important a motivation Islamic fundamentalism was for insurgent leaders.³² Indeed, four of the seven parties were composed of Muslim fundamentalists: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami; Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Islamic Society of Afghanistan; Abdul Rasul Sayyaf’s Islamic Union for the Freedom of Afghanistan; and Yunus Khalis’s breakaway wing of Hezb-i-Islami. The moderate parties included Mawlawi Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi’s Movement of the Islamic Revolution; Pir Sayyid Ahmad Gailani’s National Islamic Front of Afghanistan; and Sibghatullah Mujadiddi’s Afghanistan National Liberation Front. Cooperation was not easy, but the ISI tried to minimize infighting. Between 1983 and 1987, the ISI trained roughly 80,000 mujahideen in Pakistan. Their distinctive battle cry became “Allah o Akbar. Mordabad Shuravi” (God is Great. Death to the Soviets).³³

One of the most ruthless of these leaders was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The youngest of seven children, he had a thick black beard and penetrating eyes. Hekmatyar, who spoke excellent English, was renowned for his staunch Islamic views and a disdain for the United States that was surpassed only by his hatred of the Soviets. In 1985, on a visit to the United States, he had refused to meet with President Ronald Reagan—despite repeated requests from Pakistan’s leaders—out of concern that he would be viewed as a U.S. puppet. During the Afghan War, the KGB established a special disinformation team to split apart the seven mujahideen leaders, and Hekmatyar was one of its prime targets.

Milton Bearden, who served as the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989 and worked with the mujahideen, described Hekmatyar as “the darkest of the Afghan leaders, the most Stalinist of the Peshawar Seven, insofar as he thought nothing of ordering an execution for a slight breach of party discipline.” Reflecting on his visits with Hekmatyar, Bearden acknowledged that “it would only be Gulbuddin Hekmatyar whom I would have to count as an enemy, and a dangerous one. And, ironically, I would never be able to shake the allegations that the CIA had chosen this paranoid radical as its favorite, that we were providing this man who had directly insulted the President of the United States with more than his share of the means to fight the Soviets.”³⁴ William Piekney, the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan before Bearden, similarly recalled: “I would put my arms around Gulbuddin and we’d hug, you know, like brothers in combat and stuff, and his coal black eyes would look back at you, and you just knew that there was only one thing holding this team together and that was the Soviet Union.”³⁵

Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami was built on the Ikhwan model of Islamic revolution. Hekmatyar, a Ghilzai Pashtun, entered the College of Engineering at Kabul University but failed to complete his studies, instead spending the majority of his time on political activism and Islam. He became a disciple of Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood movement, and advocated a pure Islamic State. He was radicalized during his studies at the university, where, according to legend, his zealousness began to show its face: one story claims he sprayed acid on several female students for refusing to wear the veil. Others, however, have chalked up this story to black KGB propaganda. ³⁶ After a brief period of involvement with Afghan Communists, Hekmatyar became a disciple of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamic scholar and leading intellectual of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s who inspired Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden.³⁷ Hekmatyar’s followers addressed him as “Engineer Hekmatyar,” even though he failed to complete his degree because he was imprisoned in 1972 for criticizing the monarchy.

In 1973, when Zahir Shah’s government was overthrown by Daoud Khan, Hekmatyar was freed from prison and took refuge in Pakistan’s border city of Peshawar with Rabbani, Qazi Muhammad Amin Waqad, and other budding jihadi leaders.³⁸ During that period, he developed a close relationship with Pakistan. “We had good information that he was being directly funded by Pakistan,” acknowledged Graham Fuller, the CIA station chief. “This was critical because the Soviets had provided a range of assistance to individuals such as Daoud. Hekmatyar was Pakistan’s answer to Daoud.”³⁹

According to ISI agent Mohammad Yousaf, Hekmatyar’s organization was dependable and merciless: “One could rely on them blindly. By giving them the weapons you were sure that weapons will not be sold in Pakistan because he was strict to the extent of being ruthless…. Once you join his party it was difficult to leave.”⁴⁰ From the 1980s to the early 1990s, Hezb-i-Islami received more funds than any other mujahideen faction from Pakistan intelligence. The power base of Hezb-i-Islami did not extend much beyond the network of the Islamists, but its approach to politics was that of a true political party.

Hezb-i-Islami had suffered a major split in 1979. Yunus Khalis broke away from Hekmatyar and ostensibly accused him of avoiding combat, though he kept the title of Hezb-i-Islami for his section of the organization.⁴¹ The accusation was ironic, since Hekmatyar would eventually become the most cold-blooded of the mujahideen leaders and would go on to fight the United States after its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Khalis was born in 1919 in the Khogyani district of Nangarhar Province. Although he never acquired a university theological education, he became the mullah of a mosque in Kabul and was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Afghanistan. At the beginning, Khalis’s organization was little more than a regional schism comprising the Khogyani of Nangarhar Province and the Pashtun from Paktia Province and south of Kabul. But he later developed a somewhat broader following.

War of a Thousand Cuts

The mujahideen, with ISI assistance, relied on two of the oldest tactics of warfare: the raid and the ambush. Soviet conscripts referred to the Afghan mujahideen as dukhi, or ghosts.⁴² Since the Soviets were vulnerable to guerrilla warfare, the local troops slowly picked them apart in rural areas through a campaign of sabotage, assassinations, targeted raids, and stand-off rocket attacks. As Mohammad Yousaf acknowledged, “Death by a thousand cuts—this is the time-honoured tactic of the guerrilla army against a large conventional force. In Afghanistan it was the only way to bring the Soviet bear to its knees; the only way to defeat a superpower on the battlefield with ill-trained, ill-disciplined and ill-equipped tribesmen, whose only asset was an unconquerable fighting spirit welded to a warrior tradition.”⁴³

In rural areas, the situation worsened over time for the Soviets as mujahideen forces gained popular support and control.⁴⁴ The Soviets never committed the forces needed for a purely military conquest of the mujahideen, and, according to one assessment, they would have needed more than 300,000 troops to attain even a small chance of controlling the mujahideen.⁴⁵ The Red Army managed to occupy some areas temporarily, such as Panjshir in April 1984, and they pulverized other areas. But they were never able to clear and hold territory. More important, the Soviet troops alienated local Afghans, failing to win their support or respect. A CIA assessment concluded: “The Soviets have had little success in reducing the insurgency or winning acceptance by the Afghan people, and the Afghan resistance continues to grow stronger and to command widespread popular support. Fighting has gradually spread to all parts of Afghanistan.”⁴⁶

Initial Soviet assessments of the war were optimistic, but by 1985, Soviet leaders had become increasingly concerned.⁴⁷ At a Politburo session on October 17, 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev read letters from Soviet citizens expressing growing dissatisfaction with the war in Afghanistan. At that same session, Gorbachev also described his meeting with Babrak Karmal in which he said the Soviet Union would pull its troops from Afghanistan.

“Karmal was dumbfounded,” Gorbachev noted. “He had expected anything but this from us, he was sure we needed Afghanistan even more than he did, he’s been counting on us to stay there for a long time—if not forever.”

This is why Gorbachev believed it was essential to repeat his message. “By the summer of 1986 you’ll have to have figured out how to defend your cause on your own,” Gorbachev continued to Karmal, who was beside himself with shock. “We’ll help you, but with arms only, not troops. And if you want to survive you’ll have to broaden the base of the regime, forget socialism, make a deal with truly influential forces, including the Mujahideen commanders and leaders of now-hostile organizations.”⁴⁸

Gorbachev’s ultimatum was grounded in good intelligence, and Soviet military assessments were bleak. Sergei Akhromeyev, the Soviet deputy minister of defense, told the Politburo: “At the center there is authority; in the provinces there is not. We control Kabul and provincial centers, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority. We have lost the battle for the Afghan people.”⁴⁹ At the Party Congress in February 1986, Gorbachev referred to the war as a bleeding wound. The Soviet military, he said, “should be told that they are learning badly from this war” and that “we need to finish this process as soon as possible.”⁵⁰ Criticism of the Afghan War also increased from within the Soviet Union’s military establishment. Colonel Kim Tsagolov, for example, sent an open letter to Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov complaining that the Soviet military had failed to stabilize Afghanistan and the Soviet Union had paid too heavy a price in blood and treasure.⁵¹

There was some resistance to withdrawal. Several Soviet politicians believed that withdrawal would be a serious blow to Soviet legitimacy and pride both domestically and internationally, but it was too late.⁵² In 1986, Gorbachev announced a partial withdrawal of 6,000 troops from a force that had risen to 115,000.⁵³ In November of that year, Soviet officials finally lost faith in Babrak Karmal as leader of Afghanistan and replaced him with Muhammad Najibullah, a Ghilzai Pashtun born in Kabul who was known for his cold brutality and intimidation of political opponents. The KGB had appointed him head of KhAD, the secret police, in 1980, and had given him the code name POTOMOK. Najibullah, apparently embarrassed about the reference to Allah in his last name, asked to be called “Comrade Najib.” Under Najibullah’s control, KhAD arrested, tortured, and executed thousands of Afghans, and Amnesty International assembled evidence of “widespread and systematic torture of men, women and children.”⁵⁴

In December 1986, Najibullah was summoned to Moscow and told to strengthen his position at home because Soviet troops would be withdrawn within two years. He attempted to introduce a national reconciliation program, but with little success. On April 14, 1988, the Soviet Union signed the Geneva Accords, along with the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Designed to “promote good-neighborliness and co-operation as well as to strengthen international peace and security in the region,” the accords covered issues ranging from refugee return to the normalization of relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. As part of the accords, the Soviets agreed to withdraw their forces within nine months, beginning in May.⁵⁵ On February 15, 1989, the last Red Army units rolled across the Termez Bridge toward the USSR. General Boris Gromov, who commanded the Soviet 40th Army, was the last soldier in his column to cross the Amu Darya River.⁵⁶

A Flamboyant Congressman from Texas

Outside support was critical in undermining Afghan governance and defeating the Red Army. We have already seen the role of Pakistan’s ISI in providing tactical and strategic support. The CIA had known for years that the Red Army did “not have enough troops to maintain control in much of the countryside as long as the insurgents have access to strong external support and open borders.”⁵⁷ The Soviets saw the support flowing across the border from Pakistan, and the United States encouraged it. As it became clear that the Afghan War was hurting the Soviets, the United States began to covertly support the Afghan insurgents. U.S. aid to the mujahideen began at a relatively low level but then increased as the prospect of a Soviet defeat appeared more likely, totaling between $4 billion and $5 billion between 1980 and 1992.⁵⁸ The CIA had provided about $60 million per year to the Afghan mujahideen between 1981 and 1983, which was matched by assistance from the Saudi government. But everything changed in 1984.

The major catalyst was Charlie Wilson, a flamboyant congressman from Texas, who saw the war as a chance to punish the Soviet Union for Vietnam. His congressional district lay in the heart of the Bible Belt in Trinity, Texas, about eighty miles north of Houston. Like many in his district, Wilson did not see much of a distinction between hellfire and Communism; the Soviet Union had nearly replaced Lucifer himself as the epitome of evil in Wilson’s mind. As a senior Democrat on the Defense Appropriations Committee, he was well placed to increase U.S. assistance, and he pushed for an additional $40 million in aid to the mujahideen. “By this time I had everyone in Congress convinced that the mujahideen were a cause only slightly below Christianity,” Wilson boasted. “Everyone on the subcommittee was enthusiastic. I gave them the sense they could lead the way on a just cause.”

“The U.S. had nothing whatsoever to do with these people’s decision to fight,” he continued. “The Afghans made this decision on Christmas and they’re going to fight to the last, even if they have to fight with stones. But we’ll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones.”⁵⁹

Beginning in 1985, the United States increased its support to the Afghans to $250 million per year, thanks to Wilson, CIA Director William Casey, and growing public support. This shift culminated in National Security Directive 166, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan and set a clear U.S. objective in Afghanistan: to push out the Soviets.⁶⁰ The CIA was deeply involved in the distribution of wealth, providing money, arms (including heavy machine guns, SA-7s, and Oerlikon antiaircraft cannons), technical advice on weapons and explosives, strategic advice, intelligence, and sophisticated technology such as wireless interception equipment. Most of this assistance went through the ISI, rather than directly from the CIA to the mujahideen.⁶¹

One of the most useful U.S. weapons was the shoulder-fired Stinger missile. The Stinger fired an infrared, heat-seeking missile capable of engaging low-altitude, high-speed aircraft. Its combat debut had occurred in May 1982 during the Falklands War, fought between Great Britain and Argentina, and British Special Forces had been clandestinely equipped with several missiles. The CIA had initially opposed providing U.S.-manufactured weapons—especially the Stingers—to the mujahideen because they risked starting a major confrontation with the Soviets. The Pentagon had also opposed the deployment of Stingers out of concern that the Soviets would capture one and steal the technology. By 1986, however, U.S. policymakers saw the destruction caused by the Soviet Mi-24 Hind gunships and decided that introducing Stingers would make such a difference on the battlefield that it was worth the risks. At a meeting in January 1986, Pakistan’s President Zia told CIA Director Casey: “This is the time to increase the pressure.” In mid-February, the United States ordered the Defense Department to provide the CIA with 400 Stingers for use by the mujahideen.⁶²

In September 1986, a force of roughly thirty-five mujahideen led by a commander named Engineer Ghaffar fired the first Stingers in Afghanistan. They crept through the underbrush and reached a small hill a mile northeast of Jalalabad airfield in eastern Afghanistan. Their targets were eight Mi-24 gunships scheduled to land that day. Ghaffar could make out the soldiers in the airfield’s perimeter observation posts, and he and his men waited patiently for three hours until the helicopters arrived. They fired five missiles and downed three helicopters, as one mujahideen, shaking nervously with excitement, videotaped the attack. This first Stinger attack marked a major turning point in the war. Over the next ten months, 187 Stingers were used in Afghanistan, and roughly 75 percent hit aircraft.⁶³

In addition to Wilson and Casey, a growing coterie of U.S. government officials played a role in turning Afghanistan into the USSR’s Vietnam. One was Zalmay Khalilzad. In 1984, he had accepted a one-year fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations and joined the State Department, where he worked for Paul Wolfowitz, then the director of policy planning. From 1985 to 1989, Khalilzad served in the Reagan administration as a senior State Department official advising on the Soviet War in Afghanistan. “The Stingers sent a big message,” Khalilzad later remarked. “It was an open secret that we were involved, but the intelligence channel gave us deniability. The Stingers removed that. American power and prestige had become engaged, we had crossed a threshold. But, at the same time, there was a lot of soul-searching as to whether or not this was going to make it harder for the Soviets to back down.”⁶⁴

Other countries also played roles. Saudi Arabia gave nearly $4 billion in official aid to the mujahideen between 1980 and 1990, while millions of dollars also flowed from unofficial sources: Islamic charities, foundations, the private funds of Saudi princes, and mosque collections. ⁶⁵ The Soviets were, of course, well aware of the U.S., Pakistani, Chinese, and Saudi activities. A report by Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov, and Ponomarev in 1980 concluded that the United States and China were working closely with Pakistan, where “the most important bases of the Afghan bandit formations” were located.⁶⁶ A separate report by Ustinov to the CPSU Central Committee noted that the “USA and its allies are training, equipping, and sending into [Afghan] territory armed formations of the Afghan counterrevolution, the activity of which, thanks to help from outside, has become the main factor destabilizing the situation in Afghanistan.”⁶⁷

Soviet intelligence agents monitored U.S. assistance at training camps in Pakistan, as well as U.S. and other arms shipments through Pakistani ports, especially Karachi.⁶⁸ The KGB had orders to hunt for Afghan mujahideen with connections to U.S. intelligence and “undertake appropriate work with them” to extract information.⁶⁹ In the end, Soviet leaders reached the conclusion that if they pulled out of Afghanistan, the United States would not go in with military forces.⁷⁰ They were correct—at least for another decade. Instead, Afghanistan deteriorated into a bitter civil war as various militia groups fought over control of the country.