direct contacts with the Afghan rebels. Instead, the money went directly to the Pakistan intelligence service, ISI, who doled it out as they wished to their favorites. The CIA didn’t know who got what, nor did they care. They were big-picture Russian killers, not micromanagers.
Zia, seeing the value in his position, turned down a $400 million aid package from the Carter administration. Peanuts! When Reagan took office in 1981, the money became serious, and Zia got a tidy $3.2 billion package to bolster his own military and fledgling nuclear weapons program.
On the ground in Afghanistan, the situation quickly turned bad for the Soviets. Babrak Karmal’s army dissolved further when deserters brought their weapons over to the rebels. Most of the soldiers had more loyalty to the various tribes and warlords they were fighting than to Karmal or his foreign supporters. Uprisings that sprang up in the streets of Kabul were quieted down by Soviet machine-gun fire. But like the British 150 years earlier, the Soviets never succeeded in controlling the harsh mountainous countryside — and that, as it has throughout Afghan history, is where the resistance thrived.
By the spring of 1980, rebel fighters were ambushing Soviet army units and honing their hit-and-run tactics. The Soviets responded by destroying villages and killing civilians, the knee-jerk superpower plan to win over the local hearts and minds, as perfected by the United States in Vietnam.
To help the rebels, the CIA scoured the world for weapons that would not reveal their source. CIA buyers fanned out to purchase thousands of Soviet-made rifles from Egypt and Poland, chuckling to themselves over the irony of Soviet weapons killing Soviets. Even better, China proved a major ally in the cause, and the CIA secretly bought thousands of guns from them too, providing the Chinese with a handsome profit. In a war against Communists, a Communist country was engaging in aggressive capitalism to kill other Communists, natch. Oh, the biting irony of clandestine war.
To help the mujahideen, Zia set up training camps along the Afghan border. As the war grew, the entire region became dedicated to the fight with packed camps, warehouses, hospitals, and a road network. The CIA money flowed, and the Pakistan army and ISI partook handsomely from the American swag.
The U.S. involvement increased when President Reagan appointed William Casey to head the CIA in 1981. Casey first joined the spy business during World War II when he commanded the operation by the OSS — the predecessor of the CIA — to run spies into Nazi Germany. Casey deployed a secret weapon to achieve success within the Washington bureaucracy: mumbling. Few could understand him. Tired of asking Casey to repeat himself, people would simply politely nod and agree with him. Reagan himself would give up and just tell Casey to go ahead with whatever mumbled plot he had just hatched. Casey always maintained total deniability that he mumbled. The problem was with the listeners, he thought, all thousands of them.
Casey repeatedly flew to Pakistan to meet with Zia and the head of ISI to take the fight to the enemy. He not only supported the Islamic fighters but, as a devout Catholic, believed a combined squad of Christian/Islamic militants were a sure bet to take down the godless Soviets.
By 1984 Casey ratcheted up U.S. contributions to $200 million, with a matching contribution pledged from the Saudis. Zia funneled the money — after taking his cut — to the Islamic fighters, virtually excluding the moderates and non-religious elements. One of those excluded was Ahmed Shah Massoud, perhaps the most successful and famous of the Afghan fighters. He came from the Panjshir Valley, a narrow strip north of Kabul along the Panjshir River. A religious Muslim, he fled to Pakistan when the pro-Communist Afghan government cracked down on the fundamentalists in the early 1970s. But unlike other Afghan fundamentalists, he held a more moderate line.
Shortly after the Soviet invasion, the twenty-seven-year-old Massoud took thirty supporters, a handful of rifles, and pocket change into the valley to fight the Reds. The Panjshir Valley occupies an important strategic position in Afghanistan. Along either side stand steep, high mountains where rebels can hide with impunity. From their mountain hideouts they can sweep down and attack Soviet convoys along the Salang Highway, the only route from Kabul to the Soviet Union in the north. This lifeline of the Soviet occupation was laid bare to the crafty Massoud. He captured weapons for his growing army and raided Soviet columns without retribution.
To rid themselves of this pesky rebel, starting in 1980 the Soviets threw attack after attack against Massoud. Each time they had him seriously outgunned; he not only survived but also became stronger. Rebels flocked to him as his reputation as a fighter grew. With his battlefield successes he acquired the very cool nickname of “Lion of the Panjshir.”
Frustrated, in 1982 the Soviets launched a massive push and threw 10,000 Soviet troops, 4,000 Afghan troops, tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets at the Lion. But Massoud, tipped off by informants in the Afghan army, hid his fighters in the mountains and swept down on the Soviet column in the narrow valley, slicing them to pieces and capturing tons of equipment. Once again, the defeated Soviets slouched back to the safety of Kabul where they resumed their scorched-earth policy in an already scorched country.
A huge Soviet offensive in 1984 punished Massoud, after he broke off a short-lived truce. The Russians introduced two new weapons: thousands of special forces troops with the skill and dedication to take on Massoud’s men in the mountains, and attack helicopters that could withstand antiaircraft fire. Now it looked as if the Soviets might actually win the war. Massoud barely hung on. By this time the Soviet price for propping up their puppet was more than steep. A CIA report stated the Soviets had suffered 17,000 soldiers killed or wounded, and lost up to 400 aircraft, 2,750 tanks, and 8,000 other vehicles.
The new Soviet weapons forced Casey to push more chips to the middle of the table. More money than ever flowed, with Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson as chief war booster from his perch on the committee that controlled the budget. Casey also sent in sophisticated communications equipment along with experts on explosives and commando warfare. What had started as a mom-and-pop operation had mushroomed into a full-fledged U.S. government agency. It also became impossible to pretend to the Soviets that the United States was not involved. Congressmen inspected training camps in Pakistan, journalists spent weeks with the rebels, and President Reagan, in his best “win one for the Gipper” voice even pronounced the mujahideen “Freedom Fighters.” Casey and Zia glowed.
As the war ground on, life for the Soviet soldiers became intolerable. Their enemy were ghost soldiers who appeared from nowhere and just as quickly vanished. Armed with U.S.-supplied sniper rifles, rebels picked off Soviet officers by the dozens in Kabul. Death hung around every corner for the Soviets. Clever bomb makers fashioned plastic explosives into ordinary objects — pens, cigarette lighters, thermoses — and sold them to the Soviets. Many died while writing letters home; others were poisoned in restaurants. Soviet morale plummeted as despair and drug abuse swept the ranks. Word of the failure seeped into the Soviet press, and the citizens back home began to notice that their country was fighting a disastrous foreign war. To stop the slide, the Soviets pushed Babrak Karmal into retirement and replaced him with head of the Afghan secret police, Najibullah, the one-named torturer.
As the war expanded, it grew from a Soviet/Afghan fight into one embraced by the entire Islamic world. Afghan leaders flew to Saudi Arabia for fund-raising tours at mosques and returned flush with cash. But more important, the Arab countries sent their young men. Spirited with dreams of fighting the godless invaders, these young men flooded to U.S.-financed terror camps along the Pakistan/Afghan border ready to take up arms against the hated Soviets. These rebels studied the tricks of guerrilla and terrorist warfare from Pakistani trainers, and absorbed the credo that Islamic fighters should fight all nonbelievers. One of the newcomers was a tall, very rich Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
As the seventh year of the war sped along, what had been a secret CIA operation to fund a small group of Afghan fighters had blossomed into a U.S.-financed effort to equip, house, and train Islamic fundamentalist warriors without any concern where these thousands of soldiers would end up and who they would fight. Blowback hung in the air.
But the Soviet dream of empire died hard. Seeing that the rebels needed a more potent weapon capable of destroying Soviet helicopters and aircraft, the United States began supplying Stinger missiles to the Afghans in the fall of 1986. Few weapons altered the war as much as the Stinger. Once the cheap, lightweight, shoulder-fired weapon entered the fray, they immediately turned the tide against the Russians as the rebels knocked down hundreds of Russian helicopters and aircraft. Missile-fear forced the Soviets to keep their aircraft above the missile’s 12,500-foot ceiling, meaning they had minimal impact on ground operations. The Soviets never developed a way to counter the Stingers.
After the Soviets took off, the CIA realized that it might not be prudent to leave thousands of these deadly
