while on a trip to Italy, King Zahir was overthrown by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, who leaned toward the Communists. The Soviets had, by this time, spent years training and equipping the Afghan army and held con siderable influence in the country. And Daoud, seeing that his real opposition came from the Islamists, cracked down on them, and thousands fled to Pakistan. But much to the displeasure of the Soviets, who were expecting to control Daoud, he continued to exert an independent streak, insisting on such radical ideas as Afghans ruling themselves. This was too much for the Soviets. In April 1978, Soviet toadies in the army killed him.
Now the Afghan Communists, led by Nur Mohammed Taraki, took formal command of the country. He began immediately to create a cult of personality and insisted that the people call him the “Great Teacher.” To the shock of the Soviet leaders, Taraki took Russian propaganda seriously. He was not content to create a “Brezhnev-style” dictatorship of leaders brooding over a stagnant economy. Instead, he took Lenin’s most radical writings literally and began imprisoning and killing his political opponents. Caught by surprise that someone actually believed their own drivel, the Soviet leaders, especially KGB chief Yuri Andropov, cast about for a replacement.
What really alarmed the Soviets was the rise in power of the Islamists. The precocious mountain rebels announced themselves in February 1979 by kidnapping Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Taraki’s troops, aided by the always-helpful KGB, succeeded in rescuing him but then managed to get him killed in the same raid. The United States responded by vigorously doing nothing. Taraki still didn’t get it. He was too focused on choosing which glorious pose should adorn posters extolling his greatness to realize the Islamic fundamentalists represented his true threat. By early 1979 the Islamic leaders had started to revolt, and the Afghan army, more loyal to their tribal leaders than Taraki, slowly dissolved to join the rebels. Taraki responded by waging a fight against his fellow Communist goon Hafizullah Amin, the country’s prime minister, who contested Taraki for supremacy in the party. In September 1979 Taraki flew to Moscow for meetings with Soviet leaders. Upon his return Amin and his “elite guards” ambushed Taraki, took him prisoner, and had him executed.
Amin, the third to violently take over the country in six years, became its shortest lived. Everyone hated him. The Soviets, perhaps believing their own rumors, thought he was a CIA agent who had successfully infiltrated the Afghan Communist Party. The Afghans saw him as another tool of the Soviets. Amin hated the United States because he failed his PhD exams while a graduate student at Columbia University. The Americans hated him because he hated the United States. Another prime example of knee jerk.
Alarmed by the deteriorating condition of its Communist ally, the Soviets thought of ways to bail Amin out. A jolt of urgency hit their talks when radical students in Iran seized the U.S. embassy, taking fifty Americans as hostages. The Soviets saw the United States had now lost its most strategic ally on the southern rim of the USSR. The Soviets’ knee-jerk reaction was to believe the United States would take over Afghanistan as a replacement.
With their usual dearth of planning, Andropov pulled out the KGB invasion template. It would be along the lines of Hungary and Czechoslovakia: some lightning strikes at key installations in the capital — key media posts, government ministries, military bases — a quick change of leadership and long tank columns to enforce the new law and order. After a short time the Soviets would leave and their puppet would rule unopposed. Pull out the old playbook and change the names. The Soviets, however, were not the first country to invade Afghanistan. Geographically, the country lies between the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, and throughout history it has served as an entry point for invading armies to pass through, looking for someplace better to conquer. First the Persians, and later the Greeks and Mongols swept through the country’s steep mountain passes while the hardy tribesmen remained unbowed.
In 1838 the British invaded Afghanistan with an enormous army from India. The goal was to grab Afghanistan before the Russians could, and thereby create a buffer between the sprawling Russian empire and India, the crown jewel of the British Empire. The British quickly captured the major cities of Afghanistan and installed their man as the country’s new king. But the Afghans despised their new rulers; they buried their tribal feuds and hatched plans to oust the British in an eerie foreshadow of the Soviet invasion to come.
The Afghans broke into open rebellion in 1841. They cut the British link to India and turned on the British in Kabul. Thousands of troops and civilians were pinned down in their fort and slowly slaughtered. At a conference with the Afghan leader, a deal was arranged allowing the British to leave during the first week of 1842. Immediately, the slow-moving caravan suffered grievously from the harsh cold and attacks by bands of Afghans. The dead mounted over the ensuing days as the Afghan attackers swooped down at them as they staggered through snow-covered mountain passes. The death march lasted a week. One solitary survivor reached the British garrison at Jalalabad. Although the British army returned later that year to exact revenge on the Afghans, the British adventure in Afghanistan had arrived at a ruinous end.
The Soviets did not find this blazing example of defeat germane to their situation. Empire cruise control was turned on, the tanks were gassed up, and they were ready to roll.
WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “MASSIVE REFLUX”
The first week went perfectly. The next ten years were all downhill. In early December 1979, the Soviets infiltrated soldiers into Afghanistan to scout out key locations in and around Kabul. They also snuck in their latest puppet, Babrak Karmal, as Amin’s successor and stashed him at an air base. Finally, on Christmas Eve the Soviets rolled. The Soviet Fortieth Army — yes, the Russians had lots of armies — crossed the Amu Darya River into Afghanistan as troops deplaned at the Kabul airport. By Christmas morning the army was racing forward. Two days later they entered Kabul, seized the radio and TV stations and key government ministries, and surrounded Amin in his palace. A siege raged over a few hours, but it ended as expected with Amin riddled with Soviet bullets. Another election Afghan-style, this one with Soviet monitors.
As the Soviets clucked over their brilliant stroke, the Afghan warlords and tribal leaders watched in anger. The descendants of warriors who fought Alexander the Great and slaughtered thousands of British troops, sharpened their knives. Once again it became time for them to repel foreign invaders. They put aside their many differences and focused on one goal: kill Soviets. They called themselves
To the Americans, they were soldiers from heaven. Long before Amin was killed, U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski urged President Jimmy Carter to support the Afghan rebels and finally fight the Soviets. The final struggle of the Cold War was on.
This secret war screamed out for one group, the CIA, to take command. Starting with the debacle of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the CIA had slowly lost credibility and power in the States, and by the late 1970s had fallen to its lowest level of prestige. Things got so bad even Congress was looking over their shoulder. Now opportunity knocked. Afghanistan would become their raison d’être. The CIA was stocked with bitter Vietnam vets who smiled at the thought of arming soldiers to kill the Soviets, a main supplier to the North Vietnamese. And the war would give a flagging CIA a leg up in Washington. As long as day-in-and-day-out Soviets were dying, the CIA was back on its game. Guns for all became their rallying cry.
The U.S. leaders had no illusion the rebels could actually defeat the Soviets. They were happy to just force the Soviets to fight — and die — in the barren mountains of Afghanistan. But the United States had a practical problem. To reach Afghanistan, supplies had to cross Pakistan. Fortunately, the Pakistan dictator, Mohammed Zia-ul Haq shared the American devotion to killing Soviets, as long as he could get a fat cut of the booty.
Zia was a devout Muslim who declared Pakistan an Islamic state when he took command in 1977, but he tempered his religious zeal with heavy doses of political realism. During the struggles within Afghanistan between the Communists and Islamists, he sheltered Islamic leaders, such as Massoud. Once the Soviets invaded, Zia saw both the need and the opportunity to risk a fight. First, he feared getting squeezed between a powerful Soviet puppet on his western border and Pakistan’s traditional enemy India on his eastern flank. And by supporting the Islamic fighters he would gain serious street cred in the Muslim world. Once the Americans started tossing money around like drunken investment bankers at a strip club, Zia seized his golden opportunity. He would help the United States fight the Soviets and help himself to unlimited, unmarked CIA cash and military toys. It became a textbook case of doing well while doing good. As the Afghan resistance geared up with American hardware, the CIA station in Pakistan took control of the U.S. supply operation. It was a humble, mom-and-pop shop, confined to a handful of people who funneled about $30 million in cash and arms to the rebels. But to satisfy Zia, the United States had no
