Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous R

The exiled Cuban leaders, having learned the PR lessons from their CIA trainers all too well, declared that the invasion was really a small supply op­eration that had failed to achieve all its objectives. And they swore up and down the United States was not involved.

In all, 114 rebels died and 1,189 were captured. Castro returned most of the captors to the States in late 1962 in ex­change for $53 million in drugs and food.

In a ceremony held on December 29, 1962, at the Orange Bowl in Miami to honor the returning fighters, Kennedy prasied their courage and vowed that the rebels’ flag would one day fly over a Castro-free Havana.

Eight presidents later, the wait continues.

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER

From the ashes of Kennedy’s biggest disaster sprang his greatest triumph. To protect Cuba, the Soviets parked some nuclear hardware in Fidel’s backyard. When discovered in 1962 by the United States, Kennedy confronted the Soviets and forced the Russkies to back down and remove the mis­siles. The Cuban Missile Crisis stands as the world’s closest known moment yet to a nuclear exchange.

The failure of the invasion provided Castro with a good cover story to imprison tens of thousands of dissenters, fur­ther strengthening his hold on power. Even after the Soviet missiles were removed, Castro has kept a vigilant, paranoid guard against external enemies. Since 1962 he’s been waiting for the next invasion to overthrow him.

And for Richard Bissell, the genius behind the whole mess? Bissell left the CIA, with a national security medal pinned on him from Kennedy, and moved back to Hartford, Connecti­cut, where one can be quite certain no day is ever as exciting as running black ops for the agency. Bissell died in 1994.

THIRTEEN. THE SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN: 1979

Cars have cruise control. Planes have autopilot. And em­pires have auto empire control.

Without thinking, empires will respond to the same situa­tion the same way time and time again, disregarding other options that might be better suited. It worked once before, their thinking goes, so let’s not mess with the plan. When two superpowers run on reflex and fight a pilotless war against each other, however, the situation is ripe for disaster.

In December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in order to prop up its failing Communist regime. Just like in the old days when the Red Army crushed opposition in Hun­gary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Russians felt that the philosophy of Marx and Lenin was best taught by tanks machine-gunning the populace, repeating as necessary.

In knee-jerk response, the Americans stepped in and sup­ported anyone, absolutely anyone, who was willing to fight the hated Soviets. The result was a long, bloody, and destruc­tive war that left Afghanistan in ruins, rapidly put the Soviet Union on the fast track to disappearance, and created a whole new brand of enemy for the United States, just in time for the demise of the USSR.

Two superpowers fought it out, in the last great battle of the Cold War. Both lost more than they could have possibly imagined.

THE PLAYERS

William Casey — head of the CIA under Ronald Reagan, the devout Catholic took command of the U.S. effort to supply the Afghan rebels and pumped billions into killing Russians.

Skinny — During World War II, he ran the U.S. spy program inside Germany.

Props — Mumbled so badly that few understood what he was saying. Turns out this is a great way to get what you want.

Pros — Killing godless Communists brought him to a state of grace.

Cons — Thought it was a good game plan to team up with the devout mujahideen.

Mohammed Zia-ul Haq — Dictator of Pakistan and the gatekeeper for the anti-Soviet operations. After spotting the opportunity, he enriched himself like a good ole American vulture capitalist.

Skinny — Started his life as an officer in the British colonial army.

Props — Murdered his predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, made himself dictator, and created an Islamic state. This earned him status as a moderate in the region.

Pros — Spoke with British accent.

Cons — Looked the other way as a mob of students ransacked and burned the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in early 1979. Miraculously only a handful of the 139 employees died.

Ahmed Shah Massoud — The “Lion of the Panjshir,” he was perhaps the most successful and famous Afghan to fight the Soviet invasion.

Skinny — Fought the Soviets, the Taliban, and al Qaeda and yet there is no statue of him in Washington, D.C.

Props — Started his jihad against the Soviets with thirty supporters and seventeen rifles.

Pros — Took the Russians’ best shots and withstood six direct Soviet campaigns to wipe them out.

Cons — Declared a truce with the Soviets in 1983.

THE GENERAL SITUATION

The Soviet Union’s best export was always puppets. At every opportunity, the tireless revolutionaries in the Kremlin grabbed territory and installed puppet regimes to run the show. And when things went bad, as they usually did, such as the local people realizing they didn’t like being an abused and overlorded nook of the Soviet empire, the Russians knee-jerked in their second most successful export, the army.

The knee-jerk strategy became so ingrained in Soviet thinking that it even had a name, “the Brezhnev Doctrine,” bathing it in a gloss of scholarship as if produced by profes­sors at Invasion State University. And of course once you create a doctrine, it needs to hit the road every few years so the battery won’t die. It morphed into a doctrine looking for a target.

This one popped onto the Soviet radar in the 1970s along its southern border. For the first decades after the end of World War II, Afghanistan, isolated and poor, occupied a minor place in the Cold War. Both the Americans and the Soviets, however, shipped in small amounts of money and advisors to curry favor with Afghan ruler King Zahir.

Earlier, during the 1960s, two competing philosophies swept through Afghan schools and universities — Commu­nism and Islamic fundamentalism. At the same time, the economy started to crumble. As the 1970s dawned, the United States had almost totally withdrawn to focus its nation-building energy on Vietnam. In 1973,