Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  CHAPTER 21

  USSR Cannot Have Afghanistan

  Soviet soldiers took thousands of photographs in Afghanistan. Some were touristic—soldiers photographed each other at ancient Afghan forts, larking on the streets of Microrayon and in front of the Intercontinental Hotel. Many showed them on duty. Vladislav Tamarov, who spent twenty months in Afghanistan with a minesweeping unit after being drafted aged nineteen in 1984, recorded troops marching at his regimental base, being inspected by a general, and commemorating dead comrades. On missions into the mountains, he photographed members of his platoon at rest and fighting, and mujahideen prisoners and dead. When he set up a darkroom to develop his film, he gave prints to his fellow soldiers, who often sent them to family and friends, self-censoring some. As Tamarov explained of a photograph of an exhausted soldier in a battle: ‘I doubt that he sent this picture home. Because we all tried to send pictures and letters that showed how healthy and rested we were, so as not to frighten our parents.’

  All this occurred with the consent of many officers, though contrary to the Kremlin’s orders. Soviet soldiers were banned from taking photographs as part of the larger veil of silence the Kremlin cast over its operations until 1986. Even then, most official photographs of the Soviet forces continued to show them eating, bathing or resting. But Soviet television began showing them in combat and interviewed soldiers about the hazards of their mission. Pravda published the first account of alienated Soviet veterans of the war known as ‘Afghantsy’. Artyom Borovik who was at the forefront of glasnost, writing for the weekly Ogonyok, began exploring what it was like to be a Soviet soldier confronting ambushes and minefields or to be a pilot facing heat-seeking Stinger missiles.

  Most western observers thought the mujahideen had little chance of winning because they kept fighting each other and had never taken a major garrison. When Mikhail Gorbachev announced in February 1988 that the Kremlin would withdraw its forces, he was widely thought to be bluffing. But that May the Soviet exodus began, with convoys of troops and equipment departing along the Salang Highway. Alexsandr Sekretarev was one of a number of Soviet photographers sent to cover the exodus. While travelling with a military convoy, on his way to Kabul for the evening newspaper Izvestia, he became the first and only Soviet photographer to die in the war, killed in a mujahideen ambush. As part of glasnost, Izvestia reported his death on its front page, illustrating this story with some of Sekretarev’s photographs.

  American officials hoped Moscow would be humiliated on camera as Washington had been when evacuating Saigon in 1975. Instead, the Soviets had smiling soldiers wave from armoured personnel carriers in Kabul bedecked with artificial flowers given to them by apparently grateful Afghans. The departure of the final two hundred Soviet soldiers on 15 February 1989, with their commander in the last vehicle, was a small Soviet triumph. Midway across the Friendship Bridge built by the Soviets at the start of the war over the Amu Darya River, long known as the Oxus, Lieutenant-General Boris Gromov alighted for an interview with a Soviet television reporter. Then, Gromov’s fourteen-year-old son Maxim, brought to the border for the occasion by the Soviet Foreign Ministry, ran towards him dressed in army fatigues. After embracing his father, Maxim gave him a bouquet of red carnations and father and son proceeded arm-in-arm towards more cameras on Soviet soil, while ignoring the Afghan ones on the other side of the river.

  Gromov maintained that the Soviets had fulfilled their ‘internationalist duty without ever retreating’. Some Soviet veterans considered they were ‘neither victorious nor vanquished’. Others identified ‘a defeat, no question about it’—all the more shocking given the prestige enjoyed by the Soviet army since World War II. When the All-Union Veterans’ and Invalids’ Association and the Moscow branch of the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan held the first Soviet exhibition about the war, which opened in Moscow in July 1991, they called it Incomprehensible War, condemning the leaders who sent Soviet troops into Afghanistan. But the Foreign Ministry continued to defend the Kremlin’s actions by displaying telegrams relaying Kabul’s repeated requests in 1979 for military help, while the Ministry of Defence cast the Soviets’ part in the war as a job well done.

  The exhibition included tanks and trucks and a replica of a Soviet field hospital, complete with a mobile operating room and cases of surgical instruments. There were paintings, drawings and photographs of soldiers, colour panoramas, videos and photomontages. Display cases told the stories of some of the Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan. There was a stack of iron bunk beds, ‘each pillow adorned with a single rose, a photo of a fallen comrade on the blue wool blanket’. The prime omission was material revealing the consequences of the war for Afghanistan and acknowledging its one million dead. The exhibition also included nothing expressing an Afghan view of the war apart from a display of ‘Afghanistan depicted in rugs’, almost certainly war rugs brought home by Soviet officers and officials.

  Historian Hasan Kakar was one of many Afghan refugees who saw little or no reason to celebrate the Soviets’ departure. ‘The parties have destroyed the pleasure that we Afghans should be feeling,’ Kakar observed of the main mujahideen groups, whose fighters celebrated, at least when they had an audience. One observer was Saira Shah, the English-born granddaughter of Sirdir Ikbal Ali Shah and daughter of Idries Shah. Having become a freelance journalist covering the war from Peshawar, Shah made a trip into southern Afghanistan where she witnessed how the mujahideen took an abandoned Soviet base and, in a performance for the media, ‘made great effigies of Soviet officers, paraded them about and—almost as an afterthought—burned them’.

  Weavers responded with several forms of small mat marking the Soviets’ exodus. One design, which became the most popular and enduring form of war rug, showed armoured personnel carriers heading home along the Salang Highway across the map of Afghanistan, with Soviet aircraft above. As these mats initially featured extensive text, a little was in Dari, but most was in English indicating they were made principally for a western audience. ‘USSR cannot have Afghanistan,’ proclaimed the earliest versions. ‘Russian Aggressors Final Defeat’ and ‘Finally the Soviet Union Satanic Treason has come to the End,’ pronounced later ones.

  The United States saw itself as the victor. Commentators identified Afghanistan as ‘Washington’s greatest foreign policy triumph of the decade’—a perfect proxy war with no American casualties, costing the US just $3 billion. Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson regretted that the war did not come at even greater Soviet cost than its 15,000 dead. ‘We lost 58,000 men in Vietnam. The Soviets still owe us,’ Wilson declared. Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who joined the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s, argued that because of Afghanistan’s common border with the Soviet Union, Moscow’s withdrawal was a greater defeat than Washington’s in Vietnam. Yet, as a few analysts began to acknowledge, there was also much to trouble the West, since a mujahideen government ‘could be as anti-western in its social and political values as it likely would be anti-Soviet’.

  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar attracted most attention in this re-evaluation of the mujahideen. Commentators blamed Hekmatyar incorrectly for the acid attacks on women in Kabul in 1970. But they also deplored his repeated attacks on other mujahideen groups, held him responsible for the murder of Polish cameraman Andy Skrzypkowiak, and revealed that he controlled six of twenty heroin refineries in Pakistan. Washington’s special envoy to the mujahideen, Peter Tomsen, advised that Hekmatyar was committed to waging ‘violent international jihad’, especially against the United States. Having ignored the mujahideen’s barbarism since the photograph of their ‘vengeance’ in 1980, Newsweek featured ‘terrible stories’ from Soviet veterans that the mujahideen ‘would sexually mutilate live prisoners, or slit the skin round their waist and pull it up as though it were a shirt’.

  Meanwhile, Ahmad Shah Massoud was widely idenfied as Hekmatyar’s prime mujahideen rival—and antithesis—prompting his celebration in film and photography. While Frenchman Christophe de Ponf
illy made two documentaries about him, British newscaster Sandy Gall featured him in two more. Sylvester Stallone made him the basis for the mujahideen leader in Rambo III, fueling Massoud’s identity as the ‘Afghan Rambo’. Elaborate photoshoots in the Panjshir Valley showed him as both a man of war and man of peace. In some photographs, he discussed strategy with his commanders, instructed and ate with his men and went on missions in majestic snow-clad mountains. In others, he was at prayer, lying in a grassy meadow, reading a book, playing soccer, riding a motorbike, at his desk at night. He appeared smiling, thoughtful, loquacious and listening—almost always wearing his signature pakul hat on a rakish angle.

  Westerners celebrated Massoud because he was the most successful mujahideen field commander—alone in establishing a substantial regional government that constructed roads, built schools and opened medical facilities. His admirers lauded two extended truces that he negotiated with the Soviets as marks of his strategic adroitness. But many Pashtuns looked on these truces as Tajik treachery to the mujahideen cause. Massoud too was accused of atrocities, with photographs from the Soviet news agency Ria Novotni reputedly showing corpses of civilians slaughtered by his men.

  As the Soviets continued to provide Najibullah with arms and funding—initially doubling what the mujahideen received from the US and the Saudis—a few commentators recognised that Najibullah would retain power because the mujahideen were ‘not only divided but traditionally prone to switch allegiance if the price is right’. Most western analysts expected that once the last Soviet troops left, he would fall. A diplomat in Islamabad predicted: ‘either Najibullah will be relaxing in the sunshine on the Black Sea coast or he will be dead’. A mujahideen poster showed a large hand reaching over a mountain shaped like one of the peaks on the edge of Kabul. Labelled ‘mujahideen’, this hand was pulling Najibullah by the legs towards the mountain while Najibullah clung to a chair labelled ‘Russians’ that was slipping from his grasp.

  Jalalabad, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, just inside the Pakistan border, was the first big battleground. Having formed the Interim Islamic Government of Afghanistan, as if they were ready to rule, the mujahideen announced Jalalabad would be their provisional capital by March 1989. But the mujahideen had neither the training nor the equipment for conventional warfare. Mass defections by government troops were the mujahideen’s one chance, but that disappeared when they executed seventy-five deserters, dismembered their bodies and sent them to Jalalabad. When the mujahideen abandoned their assault in September 1989 having suffered heavy casualties and killed many civilians, some mujahideen commanders recognised they were engaged in a civil war, not a Jihad. ‘Sometimes now it becomes difficult to convince our people why we should go on fighting at such a cost when even the Russians have gone,’ Abdul Haq acknowledged. ‘How can we call Najib a puppet when we have half the world pulling our strings?’ another mujahideen leader asked.

  The mujahideen also attacked one another on an unprecedented scale—physically, verbally and pictorially. The most notorious episode began when one of Hekmatyar’s field commanders killed a party of Massoud’s men, perhaps as many as thirty. According to Massoud, these killings occurred after Hekmatyar’s commander promised Massoud’s men safe passage. According to Hekmatyar, his commander acted pre-emptively to stop an attack. When Massoud retaliated by killing and capturing dozens of Hekmatyar’s men, Hekmatyar called for an ‘impartial’ investigation by ‘internationally renowned Muslim scholars’. Instead, Massoud tried Hekmatyar’s commander and three of his men, filmed them admitting their guilt for local and international circulation, then had them hanged and sent photographs of their corpses on the gallows to Hekmatyar. Meanwhile, Massoud had the streets of Peshawar plastered with posters commemorating his slain men, which Hekmatyar’s followers tore down and defaced wherever they could, though many remained on view.

  The anniversary of the Saur Revolution provided an index of Najibullah’s control of Kabul. The test was the government’s capacity to stage a public spectacle. The celebration in 1988, when Gorbachev had announced the Soviet withdrawal but Soviet forces still maintained three defensive rings around the city, took place on 27 April. A giant mural of King Amanullah—presented as Afghanistan’s first revolutionary leader—was erected on a building in the city centre. The arsenal on show included new Soviet tanks as the Kremlin strengthened the government’s forces. Doves were abundant and paper flowers filled the barrels of the Kalashnikovs of commandos, symbolising Najibullah’s aspiration for peace. But the mujahideen brought carnage to the city by exploding a lorry packed with explosives by the Kabul River, killing six passers-by and wounding forty-nine.

  A year later, although the Soviet troops were gone, Najibullah had regained control of some districts held by the mujahideen since the start of the war. He also retained the support of Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom he made a general in the Afghan army. While Dostum’s men were notorious for pillaging, leading them to become known as ‘carpet baggers’, they were a much stronger force than that of any mujahideen leader. Still, Najibullah celebrated the revolution a day early for fear of mujahideen rocket attacks. Diplomats and journalists were invited at short notice to attend a forty-five-minute display of weaponry otherwise watched by just a couple of thousand of Najibullah’s closest supporters. On the day of the anniversary, the mujahideen attacked as expected, killing twenty-seven and wounding many more.

  In 1990, following an attempted coup led by one of Najibullah’s own ministers, he cancelled the parade. The only ceremony in Kabul lasted twenty minutes and was held thirty-six hours early in a bunker. Najibullah’s increasing vulnerability spurred him to declare it a ‘mistake’ to have embraced communism. Where the Saur Revolution had been central to the school curriculum, he reduced it to just another ‘historical event’. He identified Afghanistan as an Islamic nation, symbolised on television where female newsreaders began wearing headscarves.

  Because of the National Museum’s vulnerability on the outskirts of Kabul, it closed in the autumn of 1989 and its staff moved much of its collection, with each box sealed by the tawildar or ‘key holder’ responsible for the material. Partly to spread the risk, partly because so much was moved, some objects went into the museum’s underground store, while others were transferred to the Ministry of Information in central Kabul, and the best pieces were placed in the vaults of the Central Bank in the compound of the Presidential Palace. By some accounts, museum staff initiated this move. By other accounts, Najibullah not only approved but ordered it. Either way, his role was pivotal.

  Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films gained a new role in this context. As a censor in Kabul in the 1970s, Nokta Cheen would have expected them to find scant audience because of Afghans’ antipathy to violence on screen. But after years of war, Rambo II was a hit in Kabul, especially with bodybuilders. Giant posters advertising pirated videos were commonplace at the start of 1987. Rambo III, which was derided in the United States as a ‘gore bore’, was the ‘No 1 attraction at Kabul’s thriving video stores’ in 1988. A year later, the CIA and Pakistan tried to exploit Rambo’s popularity by inserting anti-Najibullah propaganda into videos of the movie sent into Afghanistan.

  The signs of war remained ubiquitous in Kabul and other Afghan cities. Artisans moulded amulets and necklaces from spent brass shells. Store-holders in bazaars mounted knife blades on empty flare shells used to deflect Stinger missiles. Plastic caps of anti-tank mines served as ashtrays. Empty tank shells defined the edges of streets. The toilet seats in a cinema were made from empty ammunition boxes.

  War rugs, meanwhile, reached an unprecedented audience as the Soviets’ withdrawal sparked a surge of interest in Afghanistan. Luca Brancati was a key figure. In 1988, still just a twenty-three-year-old university student, majoring in computer science, he staged a series of exhibitions in Milan, Turin, Venice, Parma and Fiesole. After selling most of the rugs in his first show, Brancati used part of the proceeds to fund further shows where the rugs we
re displayed but not for sale. These exhibitions excited attention in England, France, Germany and the United States. The Venice show, held during the annual film festival, attracted directors, actors and critics so keen to buy that Brancati had ‘to fight not to sell’.

  Joyce Ware, a collector of tribal weavings in Connecticut, was the first American dealer to specialise in war rugs. After advertising in Arts Magazine in February 1989 when Ewa Kuryluk’s article about them appeared, Ware held a small exhibition, which was a sellout, then pursued a military market through Soldier of Fortune. R. Neil Reynolds, provost of a small college in North Virginia, who also ran a gallery in Old Town Alexandria, was attracted by the rugs’ similarities to the patriotic American military posters that were his bestsellers among conservatives working in Washington DC and the Pentagon. Reynolds found the rugs sold well because they looked ‘great in the gun room or with their other propaganda posters’.

  A contributor to Soldier of Fortune encouraged such purchases, advising the magazine’s readers that if they wanted ‘something martial yet practical for peaceful use’ as a souvenir of the war, they should buy a Kalashnikov mat. A caption to an accompanying photograph identified war rugs as ‘cheap but attractive collector’s items’ which would be on sale at Soldier of Fortune’s annual convention in Las Vegas. For Diana West, a journalist with the arch-conservative Washington Times, the rugs meant an end to years of only leftists finding distinctive products in the Third World. As the last Soviet troops left in February 1989, she wrote: ‘So stash that Kaffiyeh, badge of PLO-chic, and abandon those sacks of Nicaraguan coffee, Sandinista-grown. Finally, there’s a politically correct emblem for the right.’