19. “Our formula for completing our crusade”: 1988
ON FEBRUARY 8, 1988, THE GENERAL SECRETARY OF THE SOVIET Union made a dramatic announcement to the world: Soviet forces would begin withdrawal from Afghanistan effective immediately. To Washington, it was an exciting, thrilling announcement, one for which the administration had been hoping for some time.
While this news warmed Ronald Reagan’s Cold War heart, it did not halt his aid to the Mujahedin, which Reagan continued until the Soviets were gone for good. A month after Mikhail Gorbachev’s announcement, in March 1988, Reagan once again marked “Afghanistan Day,” where he pledged his “constant support to the Afghans” and promised that “this support will continue… as long as is necessary…. Their struggle is our struggle.”
As it turned out, Reagan didn’t need to worry; Moscow’s campaign was over for good.
Snapping Soviet morale, the introduction of the Stinger was the action most directly responsible for the Soviet retreat. By 1987, Soviet planes had almost entirely ceased flying over Afghanistan, and those that did fly, did so at extremely high altitudes and with anti-Stinger precautions. Senator Gordon Humphrey (R-NH) personally observed a Soviet military-escort plane arriving above Kabul, spiraling down toward the city from 30,000 feet as it launched heat-emitting decoys from all angles to divert any Stingers. “I’d never seen anything like that,” said Humphrey of the spectacle. “They were scared to death of Stingers.”1 Soviet political officials recounted their terror as they sweated the entire trip inside Afghan territory, waiting to be blasted out of the sky. Sergei Tarasenko, then an assistant to Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, remembered:
I went with Shevardnadze to Afghanistan six times, and when we were coming into Kabul airport, believe me, we were mindful of Stinger missiles. That’s an unpleasant feeling. You were happy when you were crossing the border and the loudspeaker would say, “We are now in Soviet territory. Oh, my God. We made it!”2
When they did fly combat missions, Soviet pilots were forced to fly at such high altitude that their accuracy was diminished almost to the point of total ineffectiveness. Safer Soviet ground troops wryly began referring to their pilots as “cosmonauts.”
On the whole, the Stinger antiaircraft missile achieved an 80 percent shoot-kill ratio, which demoralized the Soviets and eliminated their air superiority. Within twenty months of the Stinger’s introduction, the Red Army, for whom surrender had been unthinkable, began its retreat in May 1988. At the June 1988 Moscow summit, Mikhail Gorbachev complained bitterly to Ronald Reagan that the rebels were firing upon withdrawing Soviet troops on their way home. His complaint was passed on to a contemptuous Muj leader, who responded: “They’ve killed a million of us. We’ve killed twenty thousand of them. It’s important that they leave with the sound of bullets in their ears.”3 By August 1988, half the Soviet troops had left Afghanistan.
As the Soviets mourned defeat, champagne was uncorked at CIA headquarters in Langley, as operations officers celebrated their tactical victory. Joining in the celebration were unsung heroes like Charlie Wilson, the swaggering, hard-drinking Democratic congressman from East Texas who fought to fund the rebels from the House Appropriations Subcommittee, as well as a CIA officer from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania named Gust Avrakotos, and men like Frank Anderson and Jack Devine.4 On all levels, the United States had emerged victorious in one of the largest covert operations ever undertaken, an operation that had helped David to beat Goliath. Against all odds, the mission impossible had been completed.
In the end, of one hundred twenty thousand troops deployed, the USSR suffered sixty thousand casualties—an extremely high percentage—including sixteen thousand killed.5 To the contrary, the largest death toll endured by a Reagan mission in the 1980s was the nineteen who perished in Grenada, eight hundred times less than the Soviet loss in Afghanistan. Not only had Reagan avoided another Vietnam, he helped hand one to the Kremlin.
While Reagan himself may not have fired any shots at the Soviets, his decisions, money, and weapons did. Through middlemen, his administration armed and trained the Afghan people to fight and kill Soviet soldiers, which had a devastating impact on the Kremlin. In Afghanistan, Reagan abandoned the constraints of economic war, launching a campaign that involved live ammunition and real death. Here the Reagan attack was not simply economic; Washington was not merely murdering Soviet hard currency earnings. For the first time under his administration, United States dollars had translated into Soviet deaths. The stakes could not have been higher for Reagan.
This assistance allowed the Afghan rebels to pull off an enormous military upset, one that ran completely contrary to conventional wisdom and that the press had long viewed as impossible.6 In June 1984, Newsweek had told its readers: “The Mujahedin can never be strong enough to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.”7 Three years later in the same weekly, reporters Russell Watson and John Barry assured subscribers that, “the anti-Communist insurgents can never hope to defeat their better equipped adversaries.”8 About the same time, Mikhail Gorbachev had concluded just the opposite. Similarly, in a January 1985 piece with the rhetorical title, “Why Aid Afghanistan?”, Richard Cohen wrote with certainty in the Washington Post: “[W]e are covertly supplying arms to guerrillas who don’t stand the slightest chance of winning…. Afghanistan is not the Soviet version of Vietnam.” By April 1988, with Soviet defeat imminent, Cohen wrote a new piece titled, “The Soviets’ Vietnam.”9
GORBACHEV AND AFGHANISTAN
Mikhail Gorbachev later wrote in his memoirs that from the moment he took office he knew that, “We needed to withdraw from the damaging and costly war in Afghanistan.” The conflict had “brought shame” on the USSR. By the late 1980s, approaching the end of the conflict, he called the war a “hopeless military adventure” and a “loss.”10 But despite these claims, he nevertheless undertook an expansion of the war that intensified fighting in an attempt to win, costing thousands of lives on both sides. According to Ken Adelman, the director of Reagan’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, it was during the years that Gorbachev presided over the war that most of the dead Afghan civilians were killed. During Gorbachev’s first year in power alone, a quarter to half of all Afghan peasants had their villages bombed and a quarter saw their water systems and livestock destroyed. Under Gorbachev, says Adelman, Communist forces repeatedly violated Pakistani airspace and perpetuated numerous “terrorist acts” within Pakistan, possibly even the 1988 plane crash which killed its president, Zia ul-Haq, and U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel.11
Ultimately, Gorbachev was forced to pull troops from Afghanistan because the USSR lost—a fate he sought to avoid. The proper metaphor for Gorbachev is not a dove flying out of Kabul with olive branch in mouth; the accurate image is an exasperated leader, who wanted what he felt was best for his country, who ordered his military to win—with subsequent brutal tactics and results—only to flee in frustration.
Moreover, unlike other causal factors in the downfall of the USSR, this one did not stem from a Soviet internal contradiction or from a failure inherent in Communism. The Reagan administration did not exploit a crack in the Soviet system, as it did with oil and energy exports, but instead it exploited a weakness in the Soviet military. Without U.S. aid, and most notably Stingers, the Soviets would have at worst stalemated in Afghanistan, but they would not have been humiliated and defeated in the theatre. Proactive Reagan administration policies, not Soviet internal inconsistencies, made the difference and proved fatal.
The end of the war in Afghanistan was a fitting start to 1988, as the loss proved symbolic of the larger Soviet defeat looming on the horizon. Military historians have argued that when a major dictatorial power—with varying designs on expansion—faces death, as the USSR did in the mid-1980s, that power typically makes a vital choice to turn outward or inward.12 Strategists considered 1985—the year of Gorbachev’s arrival— the arc of the Soviet crisis. Moscow struck outward by pouring resources into the Afghan effort, but to no avail. Thus, one of the incalculable benefits of the Reagan administration’s victory in Afghanistan was that the Soviet leadership concluded that it could no longer turn outward. With that option closed off—and Gorbachev committed to internal reforms—the USSR was forced to turn inward, a move that was about to have enormous implications
