Afgantsy

The outrage was genuinely felt, but there was also an element of posturing. The Americans were still smarting over their humiliation at the hands of the Iranians, who had just taken American diplomats hostage in Tehran. President Carter was determined to show his mettle and remarked to an aide, ‘Because of the way that I’ve handled Iran, they think I don’t have the guts to do anything. You’re going to be amazed at how tough I’m going to be.’²³ He publicly denounced the Soviets on 28 December, told his cabinet that the invasion was ‘the greatest threat to world peace since the Second World War’ (ignoring the much more dangerous crises around Cuba and Berlin in Khrushchev’s day), called for a world boycott of the forthcoming Moscow Olympic Games, and imposed economic sanctions. The British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher (1925–), enthusiastically followed suit.²⁴ On 23 January, in his annual State of the Union Address, the President accused the Soviet Union of deliberately moving to threaten Western oil supplies and said, ‘Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.’²⁵ This uncompromising language, which soon became known as the ‘Carter Doctrine’, was at least as bad as anything the Soviet leaders had contemplated when they were weighing up the arguments for intervention. All hopes of salvaging detente were dead.

Just as the critics in Moscow had predicted, the non-aligned nations were in uproar. On 14 January 104 countries supported an American resolution in the UN condemning the invasion. A similar resolution was introduced annually, and support for it grew every year.²⁶

Support for the Olympics boycott was more lukewarm. British athletes refused to do what Mrs Thatcher told them, and only China, Japan, the German Federal Republic, and Canada joined the United States in a full boycott. Carter had to buy off American grain producers to compensate them for losing the Soviet market. The Americans’ allies were just as reluctant to support sanctions if their own commercial interests were affected. There was in any case no way that the Soviets could have bowed to the Olympic boycott and the economic sanctions. Soviet policy towards Afghanistan was unaffected.

The Americans and the British turned instead to more practical measures. On 26 December, the day after the Russians crossed the frontier, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, told him that the Russians were on the verge of achieving their age-old goal, access to the Indian Ocean: the moment, perhaps, at which this myth was born. Brzezinski judged that Afghanistan was unlikely to become the Soviet Vietnam, because unlike the Vietnamese the Afghan rebels were badly organised and led, had no organised army, no central government, and negligible outside support. But the comparison with Vietnam was to colour American thinking for the next nine years, as it coloured the thinking of the Russians. Ways should be found, said Brzezinski, to make the Soviets pay.²⁷

It was not as if the Americans had so far been idle. Even before the Herat rising in March 1979, well before there had been any question of Soviet troops entering Afghanistan, the CIA had put forward proposals for helping the growing anti-Communist rebellion. President Carter decided at the end of March that the Soviet presence in Afghanistan must be reversed. American officials were already drawing the parallel with Vietnam. In the summer Carter authorised the CIA to spend $500,000 on helping the Afghan rebels. Brzezinski later claimed that this was not a deliberate move to provoke the Soviets to intervene, but that ‘we knowingly increased the probability that they would’.²⁸

The Saudis and the Chinese looked as if they too would help. But the Pakistani role would be crucial. The Americans were in a dilemma. They were pressing the Pakistanis to rein in their nuclear weapons programme, but the pressures needed to bend the Pakistanis to their will were incompatible with seeking their aid on Afghanistan. Brzezinski persuaded the President to swallow his scruples and give the Afghan project priority over non- proliferation. Within weeks of the invasion, the US covert agencies were meeting their British, French, and German counterparts to discuss practical ways of supporting the mujahedin.

American assistance to the mujahedin was at first comparatively modest. President Reagan (1911–2004) had now taken over from Carter, and his new CIA director, William Casey, a religious man, believed that Christianity and Islam could combine against the godless Soviets. Charlie Wilson, the Congressman who mustered support for the mujahedin, said, ‘There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam, and we owe the Russians one.’²⁹ Casey redefined the objective. The aim should not be to make the Russians bleed, but to drive them out of Afghanistan altogether. The American programme expanded massively. After 1985 the American deliveries of arms multiplied by a factor of ten. The Pakistanis funnelled most of this stuff to the more radical groups. By the time the project ceased at the end of 1991, the Americans had given assistance to the rebels of up to $9 billion, supplemented by very large sums from the Saudis.³⁰

The mujahedin cause began to move out of the executive branch, win patrons in Congress in both parties, and become a major issue in US domestic politics. This made it harder for the American government to negotiate flexibly with the Russians when the time came, established even the least reputable of the mujahedin leaders as heroes, and helped to blind the Americans to the nature of the forces they had helped to unleash.³¹

The Russians knew, of course, that Soviet military deployments were readily visible to Western spy satellites and other intelligence gatherers. Years later the Soviet generals asked themselves why the Americans had made no comment, made no protest, and issued no meaningful warnings. They concluded that the Americans deliberately planned to entrap the Russians in a quagmire.³² It is not much of an excuse. The Americans did warn the Russians on several occasions before the invasion that they could not be indifferent to what the Russians got up to in Afghanistan. And if there was an American trap, the Russians should have had more sense than to fall into it.

The Heroes Go Home

For the men who had captured the Taj Bek Palace none of this mattered too much. They knew that they had taken part in a remarkable feat of arms. But it had been a very confused business, and in later years many of the participants found it hard to remember exactly what had happened. ‘Much has been wiped from my memory,’ remarked Vladimir Grishin of the Muslim Battalion. ‘When veterans of the Great Patriotic War talk, I am surprised at how well they can remember. I have switched off several episodes. Some of it remained there in my memory: for example, for several months I could sense the smell of flesh and blood.’³³ A survivor later remembered that the fight on the staircase was just like the storming of the Berlin Reichstag in April 1945, one of the most celebrated moments of the Second World War. Another was surprised when he revisited the ruined palace some years later how narrow the staircase was: he remembered it being as broad as the Odessa Steps in the film of The Battleship Potemkin. One of them wondered whether the deception that had been practised on the Afghan defenders—ostensibly their comrades in arms—had not amounted to outright treachery. He consoled himself with the thought that the Russian soldiers had had no choice but to win, and that victory could have been achieved no other way.

These men were later to be treated as heroes who had turned a glorious page of Russian military history. But for the time being the authorities in Moscow were determined that the details of the assault on the palace should remain secret, and so they did for nearly ten years. The men were sworn to absolute silence, their heroism was recognised with an absolute minimum of pomp, and no concessions were made in matters of discipline. Lieutenant Vostrotin and his 9th Company of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment did not rejoin their unit in Bagram until New Year’s Eve. They used the time to good effect, collecting bits and pieces lying around the palace: German helmets worn by Amin’s palace guard, television sets, ghetto blasters, pistols, carpets, and a sewing machine. They loaded them on a lorry and took them off to Bagram to improve the limited amenities of their camp. Alas, their regimental commander, Colonel Nikolai Serdyukov, chose—probably with justification under military law—to regard their actions as looting. The soldiers were relieved of their prizes, Vostrotin was threatened with court martial, and his action cost him both the medal and the promotion he had hoped for.³⁴

On 4 January the men from Grom and Zenit were loaded into a slow turboprop plane and flew—endlessly, it seemed—until they finally reached Dushanbe, the capital