Victory Point

by Ed Darack

  Still reeling over the U.S. military pullout from the Vietnam War, in which the Soviet Union was globally regarded as the behind-the-scenes victor over the United States, many officials within U.S. national security circles began to pay ever-closer attention to the Soviet’s involvement in Afghanistan in the late 1970s. The United States had been monitoring the steady inflow of financial, human, and military resources over the years, and when the Communist Taraqi government engaged the mujahideen in “hot” military campaigns, many in these circles smelled blood—of a thousand little insurgent cuts. Chief among these U.S. strategists was President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who believed that if the United States jumped in early enough, the Soviets could be pressed to move from shadowy military enablers to front-line fighters—and hence, front-line casualties. He formulated what would become the strategically vital Operation Cyclone. Put into motion with Carter’s signature on July 3, 1979, a little more than a year after the first shots rang out in Nangalam, the operation initially authorized millions of dollars’ worth of aid to be secretly funneled to the anti-Communist guerrillas. The project, which would remain top secret for years—unknown even by U.S. congressmen and senators at the time—would mark the beginning of a near decade’s worth of covert military aid to the mujahideen that would ultimately total billions of dollars. But again, like President Zia’s wishes to keep Pakistan officially uninvolved, the United States would have to execute the plan not just delicately, but with the utmost secrecy. And that would involve dealing with Pakistan—again, not official state-to-state cooperation, but through members of the CIA working with one of the most effective yet feared intelligence organizations in the world, Pakistan’s ISI.

  A controversial, shadowy organization within Pakistan’s military, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), maintains as its official role the defense of Pakistan’s interests through the gathering and analysis of intelligence both inside Pakistan and in neighboring countries. In reality, however, the ISI, particularly after Zia resurrected the organization (it had withered in power under Zia’s predecessor, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto), would fight Pakistan’s “shadow wars,” keep tabs on internal media, and attempt to influence political machinations within Pakistan and even India—and, of course, carry out its official duties of gathering information. Many in Pakistan, even those in their military, however, feared the ISI, as they operated virtually autonomously, with utmost anonymity, and wielded almost unlimited power. They were the ideal conduit through which the United States could secretly effect misery on the Communists.

  In September of 1979, Hafizullah Amin, an American-educated rabid Communist whom Moscow eyed suspiciously as harboring anti-Soviet sentiment, assumed the presidency of Afghanistan after forces loyal to him murdered President Taraqi. But the situation throughout the nation continued to collapse at an alarming rate. Amin had tens of thousands of political prisoners executed, and began to drive hundreds, ultimately millions, of Afghans out of their homes into refugee camps. The Afghan-on-Afghan fighting crushed morale in the army, engendering mass desertion—and those deserters quickly joined with those fighting the growing, albeit disorganized jihad. In October of 1979, the mujahideen of the valleys surrounding Sawtalo Sar took up arms once again—outside of Nangalam, in the Chowkay, the Korangal, and throughout the Kunar Valley including the city of Asadabad (also known to locals as Chagha Serai). From that point onward, they pledged to never lay down their arms until the Red Kafirs had been obliterated.

  Just a few months later, “the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War”—as stated by President Jimmy Carter—began with the raid by Soviet Spetsnaz special operations forces, who quickly took Kabul, killing Amin, and installed Babrak Karmal as the country’s third president. The world’s outraged eyes focused on the Soviets, now pouring into the seemingly helpless country from the north in armored personnel carriers, tanks, and heavy trucks, as destitute men, women, and children, carrying the barest of their possessions, marched into Pakistan. Brzezinski, ever the anti-Communist hawk, looked upon the situation with delight, writing in a memo to Carter: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”

  The Afghan Bureau of the ISI now assumed the critical role of enabling a coordinated insurgency against the Soviets. As the Soviet Bear lumbered throughout Afghanistan indiscriminately swatting at the small groups of mujahideen with tanks, helicopters, artillery, and machine-gun rounds, the bureau worked feverishly to coalesce the seven main “parties” of mujahideen, each with thousands of fighters, into a unified force. The party leaders, who based themselves just a few miles from the Afghan border in Peshawar, Pakistan, while single-minded in their determination to destroy or drive the Red Infidel from their home-land, nevertheless held deep-seated animosities for one another. Of the seven parties, three held moderate beliefs, and four were led by die-hard extremists. Chief among the most radical, Gulbadin Hekmatyar, the youngest and most aggressive of the leaders, founded Hezb-e Islami Gulbadin (HIG) in 1975 in Pakistan after spending two years in a Kabul prison for murder (of a fellow PDPA member). With his establishment of the HIG in Pakistan, Hekmatyar gained a wide range of ties in the country, leading the ISI to believe that he was “their guy” more than any of the other seven leaders. And while on paper all seven would be treated equally, HIG fell perfectly into President Zia’s strategic outlook for influence of Afghanistan for Pakistan’s needs.

  The methods by which the Soviets engaged the Afghan populace and the mujahideen would provide the Marines of ⅔ great examples—of how not to fight a conflict. The storied Soviet warrior of World War II who selflessly and valiantly defended the motherland against Nazi assault was nowhere to be found in Afghanistan. Mostly conscripts, the Red soldiers in Afghanistan lived in squalor, could barely aim their rifles, wanted nothing more than to go home, and many became addicted to hashish. They also arrived with old, clunky equipment, ill suited for war in the mountains: tanks and heavy transport vehicles incapable of negotiating narrow, twisting mountain roads armed with guns that could elevate to just thirty degrees, leaving high-perched mujahideen well out of the range of potential fire. While the Soviet paratroopers and the Spetsnaz performed better, too few were deployed to Afghanistan to make much of a difference in the long run. During their studies of the war, however, the Marines found the most important lesson learned to be the aggressor’s apparent outlook on winning: the Soviets seemed to believe that they could just arrive in Afghanistan and reinforce the Afghan Communist army, who would do the majority of the work of quelling the insurrection. Most Afghan soldiers defected and joined the mujahideen, however, forcing the poorly trained and equipped Soviets onto the front-line fight. But they would be fighting a counterinsurgency, a complicated—at times ultrafrustrating—type of warfare requiring heavy, heavy, heavy interaction with the locals to engender working relationships that enable the rebuilding of a nation and the flushing out of the enemy. Instead, the Soviets just bombed much of the country into oblivion. What they didn’t bomb, they shot, and what they didn’t shoot, they shelled with artillery, and what they didn’t shell with artillery, they rocketed. And so on and so forth. The Soviets committed the most gruesome and widespread acts of inhumanity since World War II. Genghis Khan would have been proud—and jealous—of the Communists’ modern, efficient weapons.

  Meanwhile, the Afghan Bureau of the ISI inhaled money from the United States throughout the 1980s, acquiring arms, food, and supplies from countries around the globe, and training the mujahideen in camps along the border. Not wanting to tip off the Soviets that outside forces had been aiding the fighters, the ISI didn’t procure fancy, state-of-the-art gear, but run-of-the-mill weaponry: AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, light machine guns, grenades, recoilless rifles, mortars, Chinese 107 mm and 120 mm rockets, and other basic light infantry implements. As well, they kept representatives of the CIA and other American agencies strictly separated from the mujahideen themselves, ostensibly to maintain th
e illusion that the insurgency was self-supported, but in reality to maintain complete control of which parties received the money and how these funds were used.

  But America wasn’t alone in its desire to repulse the Soviets. The Saudi Arabian government matched the United States in funding during the 1980s; the Brits, too, chipped in, as did Kuwait and some other Arab states. Of course, every nation sought to influence the war for different reasons—Pakistan to maintain “strategic depth,” the United States to beat down the Communist Soviets, and the Saudis in their desire both to free their fellow Muslims from the Communists and to spread their official state religion, that of the Salafi school of Sunni Islam.

  By the mid-1980s, that part of the Hindu Kush to which ⅔ would deploy two decades later became a tempest of clashing external interests. While the Soviets had retreated from most of the area after 1980, having pushed into the Chowkay (out of which the residents quickly and handily blasted them), Saudi Arabians, dressed as local Pashtuns, meandered down the Kunar Valley with suitcases stuffed with tens of thousands of dollars—money to be handed out to help build mosques and madrassas that would teach their brand of Islam. Other Arabs, unaffiliated with the Saudi government, showed up, too. Based out of Peshawar, these “Afghan Arabs” represented the most radical of all the Islamists in the world, even more so than the followers of Hekmatyar. Their beliefs were guided by the teachings of the “Muslim Brotherhood,” an organization founded in Cairo, Egypt, in the 1920s, and based on the teachings of the Salafiyya movement, and some in the jihad movement saw them as arrogant, hateful—even toxic. The Afghan Arabs had come not so much to help free the Afghan people or to stand with them in Muslim solidarity on the front lines, but out of a burning hatred of the European Infidel, and included among their ranks the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman the world would come to know all too well: Osama bin Laden.

  Fueled by money from the United States and Saudi Arabia, and armed with high-resolution and time-relevant satellite imagery and other intelligence from the CIA—as well as, later in the war, the much-hyped Stinger missile, which leveled psychological “what if” blows to Soviet pilots more than actual aircraft downings—the mujahideen froze the Soviet’s war effort into a virtual stalemate. True, the Soviets had control of the cities and major highways, but they rarely dared emerge from behind their encampments’ perimeters or step from their armored vehicles. The Soviets, having surmised that the ISI was responsible for training and equipping the mujahideen, struck back at Pakistan, not with bombs or rockets, but with Afghans themselves—chased out through the intentional attacks on civilian targets for the sole purpose of causing a humanitarian and economic crisis by inundating Pakistan with masses of refugees, many of whom arrived maimed by one or more of the millions of land mines the Communists had scattered throughout the Hindu Kush. Newly elected Mikhail Gorbachev, under intense and growing pressure from within as well as from countries throughout the globe, realized that he had no choice but to pull his troops out of Afghanistan. The Soviet Bear had been brought to its knees by the mujahideens’ ‘thousand little cuts.’

  The last of the Soviet troops crossed the Amu Darya River on February 15, 1989. The shock waves of the war that saw over 13,500 Soviet deaths and tens of thousands of wounded would contribute to the downfall of the Communist state a few years later, and with that, the war in Afghanistan landed a far more crushing blow against the USSR than the Vietnam conflict ever could have on the United States.

  In addition to over 40 million land mines—many disguised as toys to attract children—the Communists had left in their wake somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million dead, 1.5 million maimed and injured, 5.5 million refugees chased into Pakistan and Iran, over 2 million internally displaced, arsenic- and mercury-tainted water wells (one of their preferred tactics to render countless villages uninhabitable), and a virtually impotent puppet government now headed by a man named Mohammad Najibullah, who would see the demise of his power and lose his life in just a few years.

  Afghanistan would descend once again into chaos in the years after the Soviet withdrawal, as the seven mujahideen parties and various ethnic groups moved from warring against the Red Kafir to attacking one another, further destroying an already crippled, destitute country. From Pakistan’s standpoint, Afghanistan no longer stood as a base of a foreign threat, and they had their “strategic depth” once again; both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia would continue to provide limited amounts of foreign aid, but not enough to rebuild a nation. The United States, however, pulled its support from the fighters completely, not so much because they had achieved the desired end state of a demoralized Soviet withdrawal, but because U.S. leaders had learned that a disproportionate allotment of American money had been funneled by the ISI to Gulbadin Hekmatyar, whom they regarded as a potentially severe threat to the United States—possibly another Ayatollah Khomeini—should he ever gain national power. Hekmatyar, who spurned the Reagan administration by refusing an invitation to the White House in 1985 to celebrate the mujahideen freedom fighters, openly decried the Americans as infidels—although he was more than happy to accept ISI-routed American funds. The warlord would go on to kill untold scores of civilians in the power struggle that ensued after the Soviet withdrawal, and then continue to vex American interests into the next millennium.

  America seemed to have forgotten about Afghanistan by 1990; the internal conflicts of the country would reduce the crushed state to ashes in just a few years. But out of those ashes would rise yet another threat to the United States, one that would require not secretive international maneuverings, but direct action by American forces.

  2

  THE BATTALION

  While the Fourth of July stands as the most hallowed date on the historical calendar of the United States, for many Americans the less conspicuous date of 10 November ranks in the same echelon. Some actually consider this autumn day to be the most important of the year, eclipsing birthdays, religious holidays, even wedding anniversaries, as on 10 November 1775, at Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern, Captain Samuel Nicholas, under decree of the Second Continental Congress, established what would arguably become the most venerated, the most feared by America’s enemies yet beloved by its citizenry and allies, the most tireless, brave, and selfless, and the most daring yet professional family of war fighters in history: the United States Marine Corps.

  Captain Nicholas, the Marine Corps’ first Commandant, who would designate the Tun Tavern as the Continental Marines’ headquarters and recruitment center (Nicholas appointed the Tavern’s owner, Robert Mullan, to undertake the recruiting operation), quickly stood up two battalions of Marines, who quenched their thirsts with the Tavern’s beer and feasted at the adjacent eatery, Peggy Mullan’s Red Hot Beef Steak Club at Tun Tavern. Not four months after their fateful birth, the Continental Marines entered battle for the first time, immediately establishing what would become an enduring tradition of fortitude and decisive victory at the Battle of Nassau, where Captain Nicholas and 230 of his Marines (accompanied by twenty Continental Navy sailors) stormed onto the shores of the Island of Nassau and captured the British stronghold of Fort Montague. Then, on 3 March 1776, these “soldiers of the sea” took all of the island, seizing a large cache of British cannons, mortars, and rifles—later to be used against their onetime owners.

  In the centuries that would follow that christening expedition to the Bahamas, the U.S. Marine Corps would indelibly burn into historical records as well as the psyches of millions—if not billions—chronicles of virtually unimaginable travails pitting spirit, skill, courage, and camaraderie against malevolent adversity and often overwhelming odds throughout the globe, in all climes, from scorched desert, to dripping jungle, to piercingly cold alpine heights. Throughout their history—a history that began almost eight months before the very birth of the nation their ranks would shed so much blood to foster and pledge to defend to the last—the United States Marine Corps has produced victories not just exemplary, but iconic of the wars in whic
h they fought.

  In the First Barbary War of the early 1800s, the Marines would prove that they could succeed in combat for their country not only on the home front, but as a world-class expeditionary force capable of defending American interests anywhere on the planet. Ultimately arising out of a failed diplomatic attempt to maintain security of American merchant shipping through payoffs to pirates of the “Barbary States” (the modern African nations of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco), the then-fledgling U.S. government dispatched a small group of Navy frigates—crewed by sailors and defended onboard by U.S. Marines—to the Mediterranean to protect American vessels from the marauders. Over the course of the following years, the U.S. Navy would fight a series of engagements in the region that resulted in mixed outcomes. The relative stalemate would end, however, in the spring of 1805 at the Battle of Derne, when U.S. Marine First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon led five hundred of his men, accompanied by local mercenaries (whom he and his Marines helped train), six hundred miles from Alexandria, Egypt, across the scorching Sahara Desert over the course of forty-five days, to storm the heavily defended Derne outpost—Tripoli’s primary defensive rampart—as U.S. Navy ships supported their ground efforts by pounding the fortress with heavy gunfire. Once captured, O’Bannon personally raised the American flag above Derne, marking the first time in U.S. history that the American flag flew above foreign soil.

  The Battle of Derne would become one of the most popularly enduring in all of the Marine Corps’ history, being referenced in the second line of the famous “U.S. Marines’ Hymn,” reading “To the shores of Tripoli.” The well-known Marine Corps officer sword, which would become the weapon issued for more years than any other in the U.S. military, also hails from this battle.

  O’Bannon and his Marines’ training of and fighting alongside local forces marked the beginning of what would become a long-standing Marine Corps approach to waging war against America’s enemies—an approach that would yield immense dividends in theaters throughout the world in the decades to follow. Of course, ⅔ would continue to carry this tradition forward in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush during their deployment over two centuries in the wake of O’Bannon and his mens’ work with indigenous fighters in the North African desert.