The Crusader

six million Afghans fled to neighboring Pakistan and India, where they lived in squalor for two full decades.³ Countless Afghans were scattered among refugee camps, where they birthed over one million children who had never seen their homeland. In all, more than half the population was displaced. Observers estimate that one to two million Afghans were killed in the war with the Soviets, 90 percent of which were civilians; another two to four million were wounded.⁴ And long after the last Soviet soldier left, Afghans were still being maimed by the five to ten million landmines buried in their soil.

REAGAN’S REACTION

From his first days in office, Reagan made sure that he was well-versed on the subject of Afghanistan. His team would brief him routinely on developments in the country, and he would often speak with dissidents and rebel leaders about how the United States could best proceed. To Reagan, the culprit was obvious: this was yet another predictable result of Communism. He used the bully pulpit of the presidency to denounce the Soviets and their intervention, and to ratchet up rhetorical support for the resistance. When he spoke of “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua or Poland, he often hailed them in Afghanistan as well. (More accurately, the Muj were fighting for freedom from the USSR, but were hardly Jeffersonian democrats.⁵)

In every Captive Nations Day statement or human rights address or in most speeches blasting Communism, Reagan hit the Soviets on Afghanistan. Following the tone that he had set for Poland, Reagan issued proclamations and memorials, initiating Afghanistan Days and even releasing statements in support of the Observance of the Afghan New Year, where he lamented the “tragedy of Afghanistan,” where the people were subject to “intolerable conditions,” “devastation,” “immense suffering,” “total war,” and were generally “being brutalized.”⁶ The USSR stood guilty of “indiscriminate Soviet attacks on civilians,” who were “innocent victims of Soviet imperialism.” “Massive Soviet military forces” had invaded the “sovereign country of Afghanistan.”⁷

“Nowhere,” claimed Reagan, were “basic human rights being more brutally violated than in Afghanistan.” This was a result of the “brutal and unprovoked aggression by the Soviet Union.” Moscow was employing “blanket bombing and chemical and biological weapons,” a fact he noted frequently. He also noted that three million people had been driven into exile—one of every five Afghans. “The same proportion of Americans,” he calculated, “would produce a staggering 50 million refugees.”⁸

Reagan hoped to offer more than vocal support. As early as January 1980 he wanted to help the Muj fight and defeat the Soviets.⁹ Once president, his administration worked hard to get weapons to the rebels, which included shipments not just from Washington but from sympathetic nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, and Pakistan. CIA director Bill Casey jetted around the world prodding nations for aid and arms; he reprimanded foreign leaders when the weapons were not up to par, once in April 1981 telling a stunned Anwar Sadat that the material being supplied by the Egyptians was “garbage.”¹⁰ The Chinese provided valuable AK-47s, plus other forms of aid—details that to this day are kept tightly under wraps. “We can see Beijing too in the trenches of this dirty war,” said a reporter in an angry Izvestia article titled “Aggressors and Hypocrites.”¹¹

So concerned was Reagan about Afghanistan that he told Gorbachev directly at the Geneva summit, which occurred several months after Gorbachev took power, that “the continued Soviet occupation of Afghanistan remains an obstacle to overall improvement in our relationship.”¹² At Geneva, he excoriated the Soviets, to Gorbachev’s face, for human rights abuses in Afghanistan, including the dropping of booby-trapped toys from airplanes, which were picked up by Afghan children. Making this point in a heated reprimand of Gorbachev, Reagan then asked the general secretary angrily and pointedly: “Are you still trying to take over the world?!” Gorbachev was visibly shaken, staring at Reagan in silence, mouth agape, with a stunned expression.¹³

Reagan arms control director Ken Adelman, a witness, called Reagan’s words in that exchange the most “harsh indictment of Soviet behavior ever delivered to the top Soviet man.”¹⁴ Edmund Morris reported that the only person who appeared more flabbergasted was the State Department notetaker.¹⁵ Reagan was seething: like Poland, he had developed an emotional attachment to the Afghan experience. Even as it appeared that relations between the United States and the USSR were improving, Reagan continued to offer blistering assessments of the Soviet war, assessing the Soviet occupation as a “reign of terror” on the people of Afghanistan.¹⁶

Reagan’s heated rhetoric enflamed the Soviet press. To Moscow, the Afghan rebels were not freedom fighters but rather, according to the standard over-the-top language of TASS and Izvestia, “a handful of corrupted and despotic parasites,” “imperialist lackeys,” “ruffians,” “terrorists,” the “worst enemies,” or, on a good day, “barbarous and uncivilized bandits.” To call them freedom fighters was a “malicious distortion.” Hence, when Reagan spoke up for human rights in Afghanistan he was engaging in “hypocrisy,” “slander,” and “flagrant demagogy.”¹⁷

Despite the linguistic counterpunch to Reagan, by spring 1985 it had become increasingly clear that the Soviets were going to do more than just talk about escalating the war. With Gorbachev at the helm and a renewed vigor to see Soviet success in Afghanistan, the Russian military initiated a new war plan under General Mikhail Zaitsev, making the Afghan war the highest priority. Under Zaitsev, who was transferred from the prestigious command of Soviet forces in East Germany, the USSR planned to shift one-third of total special forces, known as Spetsnaz, to Afghanistan. The very best paratroops and KGB operatives were sent in, along with top battlefield communications equipment which was deployed via sophisticated Omsk vans.¹⁸ According to Aleksandr Lyakhovskii, a high-level military official who wrote an insider’s account of the war, Gorbachev gave Zaitsev “a year or two” to win.¹⁹

NSDD-166 AND THE ESCALATION

This Soviet escalation by Gorbachev catalyzed the Reagan administration’s response, which had been brewing in the mind of Ronald Reagan since 1980. For a long time, Reagan, Casey, and their team had searched for the most opportune moment to strike back at the Soviets on this new Asian front, and Gorbachev’s heightening of the conflict provided just the impetus necessary.

Of all the overtures to the Afghan rebels, none was more important than NSDD-166, signed by Reagan in the spring of 1985.²⁰ NSDD-166 was not the first Reagan administration directive to voice support for the Mujahedin. In January 1983, NSDD-75 had said that the “U.S. objective” in Afghanistan was to “keep maximum pressure on Moscow for withdrawal” and to “ensure that the Soviets’ political, military, and other costs remain high while the occupation continues.”²¹ Still, it was NSDD-166 that delivered the firepower.

Though nearly all of Reagan’s NSDDs have been declassified, to this day NSDD-166 remains unavailable, even in redacted form.²² Why would it remain so secretive a decade-plus after the end of the Cold War? The reason is its aggressive nature, which can be distilled from reports and interviews. In the words of Peter Schweizer, who interviewed those who crafted and implemented the directive, the objective of NSDD-166 was to provide covert assistance to enable the rebels to achieve “outright military victory” against the USSR²³—a goal deemed impossible by all but the Reagan team. Another person who interviewed the principals, Steve Coll of the Washington Post, disclosed his findings in an explosive two-part, front-page series. He reported: “[T]he new, detailed Reagan directive used bold language to authorize stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahedin, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.”²⁴ According to Reagan official Leslie Gelb, academic researcher James M. Scott, and other knowledgeable sources, the directive looked to force the USSR out of Afghanistan “by all means possible,” shifting the U.S. objective from “make Moscow pay a price” to “make Moscow get out.”²⁵ Another informed source, Christopher Simpson, reported that the directive committed the United States “to support a significant escalation” in the war.²⁶ Reagan