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 Lycee 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.