Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Meanwhile, radical Islamism was making the whole region less and less hospitable for a Communist regime in Afghanistan. Unlike the coup in Afghanistan, the upheaval in neighboring Iran was a real revolution: the fall of the Shah and the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978 signaled a real sea change. Radical Islam was on the march in Pakistan as well. There, in 1977, Bhutto tried to steal an election, but his fraud gave the country’s reactionary religious parties the power to rally outrage. Massive demonstrations toppled Bhutto, and an Islamist general, Zia al-Haq, seized power. Zia and his allies put Bhutto on trial, found him guilty and shocked the world by hanging him, thus ending the secular-modernist experiment in Pakistan.

  Afghan Islamists who had been active in Kabul before the coup were all living in Pakistan at this point. Pakistan’s new president saw them as an opportunity. Perhaps, by aiding these rebels, Pakistan might weaken its truculent neighbor.

  Inside Afghanistan, new insurgencies kept bubbling up in rural areas such as Nuristan. Taraki and Amin kept “requesting” more and more military aid from the Soviets, and soon it wasn’t just advisors the Soviets were sending in, but whole battalions, whole airborne divisions.

  Even so, PDPA control kept deteriorating. The Soviets blamed the breakdown on Amin. From the Soviet perspective, this man combined the worst of three characteristics: First, he was a ruthless bully whose tactics were inciting hatred of Communism. Second, he was an incompetent commander who couldn’t manage the rebellion he was inciting. Third, he wouldn’t take orders. Even stupid Taraki would make a better head of state. In the late summer of 1979, Taraki went to Cuba to attend a socialist conference. On his way home, he was told to stop in Moscow for a chat. At the Kremlin, the Great Teacher was told to assassinate Amin the moment he returned to Kabul—simply gun him down at the airport as he approached the plane. Taraki’s entourage included Amin’s chief spy, and although the Teacher’s aides had all been excluded from the meeting with Kremlin leaders, Amin’s spy had slipped a listening device into Taraki’s pocket. He knew all about Taraki’s assignment.

  Before he left Moscow, Taraki sent word to four of his cronies in Kabul, ordering them to kill Amin at the airport. When Taraki’s plane reached Kabul, however, it didn’t land. It just circled and circled. Down below, the four men tasked with killing Amin—the so-called Gang of Four—looked around and realized they didn’t recognize any of the airport personnel. All the usual workers had been replaced by Amin’s gunmen. The Gang of Four realized it was they who might be gunned down if they tried anything. Then, just as Taraki’s plane finally came in for a landing, Amin drove up in a white Volkswagen, blandly greeted his four deadly rivals, and arrogantly strolled out to meet Taraki. As the two shook hands, Amin nodded toward the Gang of Four and told his supposed boss, “Get rid of them.”

  The plot had been foiled. What to do? Taraki and his Gang of Four met and fulminated. They had to kill Amin now, or they would be in trouble with the Soviets. Finally they came up with a plan. Taraki would invite Amin to lunch. Before he arrived, the Gang of Four would strap a time-bomb to the toilet in the palace. When Amin went in to use the facilities, they would lock the door—boom! Ha!

  But Amin was too wily to fall for the old exploding-toilet trick. He arrived two hours early for the lunch. The Gang of Four were away, getting the timing device for their bomb. The Great Teacher was standing at the top of the stairs with two guards. When he saw his Faithful Student walk through the doors and start up the stairs, he ordered his guards to open fire. They killed Amin’s sidekick instantly, but Amin rolled down the steps, pulling his own sidearm as he fell, and fired back as he ran out to his car, bullets zinging past his ears.

  After escaping with his life, the Faithful Student collected his men and returned to the palace. Taraki was never seen in public again. According to government newspapers, he fell ill. Three weeks later, a four-line item in the state newspaper announced that the Great Teacher had resigned all his party positions and died of natural causes. Henceforth, his Faithful Student would be shouldering his duties.10

  As the Soviets had feared, Amin took immediate steps to reduce his dependence on the Soviet Union. He put diplomatic feelers out to several other nonaligned powers, hoping to broaden his connections to the outside world. At the same time, he stepped up police activity, repression, torture, and air strikes inside his country to make sure that even if he lost Soviet support he would be able to hold onto his country. Of course this repression only inflamed the opposition.

  The Soviets wrung their hands. With Amin at the helm, the whole situation was going to hell. If the PDPA lost its grip entirely, America might move in with a vengeance, especially since the Shah of Iran had fallen in 1978, and America was no doubt looking for a replacement ally in the region. In Soviet circles, some were saying it might be best to take direct action, just as the Soviet Union had done in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

  That October, a top Russian general and some sixty high-level officers visited Afghanistan. They didn’t mention that they were on a reconnaissance trip. They toured the country, studying the terrain to see if an invasion might be feasible. Even after the reconnaissance, the General Staff wasn’t sure. This was a dicey moment to be contemplating drastic action. Brezhnev still gripped the country with an iron fist, but the arm attached to that fist had corroded, and the brain directing that arm had begun to wander and stammer. In short, Brezhnev was old and sick. By the following year, he would be virtually incapacitated, and, for the next two years after that, the Soviet Union would have a figurehead at the helm while behind the scenes faceless bureaucrats in black greatcoats and sable caps struggled for power. Was this a good time to invade another country, even a small, primitive country like Afghanistan?

  According to a document prepared by the Russian General Staff, the decision to invade was not finalized until thirteen days before the invasion began.11 At that point, scattered units were sent to Tajikistan to muster near the border. Reserves were called up to form a force of eighty thousand, known as the Fortieth Army. Its troops were mostly from the central Asian Soviet republics abutting Afghanistan, because Soviet planners thought the invasion might feel less invasive to Afghans if the face of it were people of their same ethnic group. The Russian General Staff seemed not to take into account the fact that there were many ethnic groups in Afghanistan and that the dominant Pushtoons, who formed the numerical majority, were not even cousins to the Turkish minorities of northern Afghanistan.

  The Soviets put a top man at the head of the Fortieth Army: General Ivan Pavlovsky, who had directed the crushing of Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” eleven years earlier. Czechoslovakia . . . Afghanistan . . . it was pretty much the same problem, wasn’t it? What had worked in Eastern Europe ought to work here: a sudden, overwhelming assault—all potential dissidents stomped flat at once—a few weeks of tanks patrolling the streets—and then . . . as soon as quiet returned—restoration of a Communist order with a competent local fellow in charge—that was the plan.

  The Fortieth Army massed along the border in the late weeks of December 1979. The day before Christmas, an airborne division of Soviet troops landed at Bagram airbase near Kabul. The troops zipped quietly to the city, fanned out through the streets, and took control of key military and political installations. At the same time, the rifle battalions of the Fortieth Army were completing a hastily flung up pontoon bridge across the Amu River, the broad ribbon of water marking the northern border of Afghanistan. On December 27, Soviet troops marched across that bridge into Afghanistan. The soldiers in that army didn’t know their real mission. They thought they were securing a strip of territory near the border because “bandits” had been disrupting the peace. Once they were inside Afghanistan, they received new orders, to proceed to Kabul on the superb highway the Soviets had constructed two decades earlier.

  By December 28, the Soviets were totally in control of the capital. The first troops to land had hurried to the presidential palace. Hafiz
ullah Amin knew this sudden, aggressive thrust by the Soviets did not bode well for him, but he didn’t know what to do about it. The masses of rural Afghans outside Kabul hated him and his party, so he couldn’t look to them for help. Virtually all the ordinary Afghans throughout the city feared him and despised his People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, so he couldn’t count on their support. Within the PDPA, perhaps half the cadre belonged to the other faction, the Parcham group. They had suffered viciously at the hands of Amin’s Khalq and had been sharpening their knives and waiting for this moment. No help there. As for Amin’s own group? His own Khalq faction? Well, everybody knew Amin had murdered Nur Mohammed Taraki, and, although many regarded Taraki as a horse’s ass, many didn’t. Even within his core circle, Amin didn’t know whom to trust, and so he was reduced to depending on his Soviet-supplied bodyguards. They were Spetsnaz troops, the Soviet equivalent of Special Forces, men trained in the science of killing. They had their orders already and, with Soviet troops in the city, they hurried to carry out those orders. By the time the main Soviet forces arrived, Amin was dead. Reports on how he died vary. He may have been shot, he may have been suffocated. Either way, he was apparently poisoned first.

  The Soviets claimed a group of Afghan conspirators had killed him. They had to say this to defend their claim that they had entered Afghanistan by invitation. Whatever Amin might have been and however he gained power, he was the head of the ruling regime when the Soviets arrived. He was the only man in a position to invite the Soviets in. The Soviets could not openly declare that their first move upon entering the country by invitation was to kill their host.

  In his place, they installed Babrak Karmal, head of the Parcham faction of the PDPA. Karmal had been living in the Soviet Union before the invasion, having sought refuge there when the struggle between Khalq and Parcham got too hot. The Soviets floated a suggestion that Karmal was the one who had called on them for help. In short, they were “invited” into Afghanistan by a man who wasn’t there (until the Soviets brought him in). You have to take your legitimacy where you can find it, I guess.

  20

  The Soviet Occupation

  WITH BABRAK IN PLACE, COMMUNIST AFGHANISTAN COULD SUPPOSEDLY start afresh. Job one: to wipe out the rural insurgents. Before the Soviets swept in, these Muslim antigovernment groups, generally known as the Mujahideen—“the ones who conduct jihad”—still operated as conventional forces. They fielded armies that fought pitched gun battles with government troops. Before the Soviets arrived, this made sense because the Mujahideen and the government were not so mismatched. The government was better armed but not dramatically better armed than the rebels.

  The Soviets, however, brought overwhelming military superiority to the field. Their tanks, jets, and field artillery made quick work of Mujahideen armies massed in the hills. Within weeks—only a bit longer than it had taken to crush Hungary and Czechoslovakia—the Mujahideen as such had been annihilated. Meanwhile, KhAD, the PDPA’s secret police, was busy arresting all urban residents suspected of any sort of antigovernment activity, including listening to BBC news broadcasts. Those “dissidents” were hauled into Pul-i-Charkhi, Kabul’s main prison, and the nightly executions began.

  Then came a shocker. On February 22, all across Kabul, from their rooftops and yards, people began to chant “Allah-u-Akbar!” which means “God is Great!” There was nothing the Soviets could do to stop it: the chanting was coming from everywhere. It was happening at night. The city had no searchlights, and the people could not be bombed into silence because the Soviets themselves were living among them.

  The Soviets tried to drown out the roar of human voices by firing rockets, but the human voices shouted louder, drowning out the rockets. The sound of a whole city shouting in unison was so loud, nearby villages heard it, and they joined in. The Allah-u-Akbar demonstration lasted the whole night through. The cry of Allah-u-Akbar didn’t mean all the inhabitants of Kabul and its surrounding villages were religious zealots. They chanted the phrase because it was the most efficient, most universally understood way to express “We are Afghans, we oppose you and your puppets.”

  From then on, one shocking demonstration followed another. Students from the universities poured into the streets. When the police tried to break them up, the women demonstrators taunted the police, ridiculing their masculinity, putting their own headscarves on the cops in mockery. Instead of brutalizing them, some of the police joined them. Secondary school students then began to stage protests. Finally, even kids in primary school were on the streets, waving signs and shouting. The regime couldn’t rely on the regular police, but it had plenty of party thugs to enforce the rule. The young Parcham cadre had no compunctions about shooting women and girls. One demonstration was led by a girl named Naheed, and, when the student marcher next to her went down, Naheed kneeled and took the fallen student in her arms, while still inciting the crowd, only to be shot dead herself at that moment. This made her a martyred hero of the Afghan resistance, like the woman who had rallied the Afghans against the British in the iconic battle of Maiwand: Naheed was the new Malalai.

  By this time, the Soviet troops in charge of pacifying the countryside were discovering that defeating and dispersing the Mujahideen armies had not solved their problem. In fact, it had only complicated their task, because now the difficult terrain of Afghanistan, in and around the thousands of villages, was swarming with tiny groups of antigovernment militants, invigorated by the notion that they were fighting to defend Islam against an implacable atheistic enemy. These little forces never numbered more than about a hundred men and most were smaller, down in the twenty-man range.

  In fact, who was to say all the “forces” were even as large as twenty? Anti-Soviet rebels didn’t have to be part of any organized force. They could operate on impulse as individuals. The Allah-u-Akbar demonstrations in Kabul proved that it was not necessary to have lines of communication or secret meetings or organizational charts for everyone to get on the same page of the same overall enterprise. Rumor and gossip was perfectly equal to the task of permeating the nation with a broad sense of mission and with an intellectually vague but emotionally intense sense of mass intention, an exhilarating sense of a unified “Us” mustering to fight against a massive, evil “Them.”

  With that mood in the air, any group, from a handful of teenagers to an organized cluster of adult men, could conceive of a mission, plan it themselves, and carry it out. Such missions didn’t need to fit in with some larger strategic plan. It was enough to have struck a blow against the hated enemy, and that enemy was easy to identify.

  The enemy was easy to identify, because the Soviets looked foreign. Their Communist allies within the country also stood out from the rural natives because they dressed like urban folks, in suits, shirts, and western hats, not in dress-length tunics, baggy trousers, and turbans. Any self-defined volunteer anti-Communist rebel in the most outlying of villages could easily see whose murder would be a noble act of patriotism rather than a crime.

  And besides, the enemy was constantly coming around, for the government kept sending teams to the villages to teach the people what Communism was and what the Communist government was going to do for them. These teams tried to organize village councils to govern their local areas and administer Soviet development projects. The Soviets and their client regime assumed that as soon as people quieted down and the development projects began to show results, as soon as the electrical power started to flow, the roads were built, the goods came flowing in, the medical clinics popped up, and people saw their material lives improve, they would understand and embrace the revolution.

  But the little groups the government sent around were always composed of several Soviet advisors, one or more members of the dreaded KhAD, a number of officials from the Ministry of Interior (which ran the police and the prisons), a few PDPA cadres, and one or two mullahs and Muslim scholars employed by the government who, to the local people, inevitably looked like lapdogs and window
dressing. And because Afghanistan was an ever more dangerous country for them, these itinerant teams had a few dozen soldiers along for protection.

  What the villagers saw coming at them, therefore, was a tense cluster of people from not-around-these-parts, dressed like the hated enemy, accompanied by men-with-guns, pulling into town in armored vehicles, and calling upon the village elders and leaders to muster up for a public lecture, at which quite often the villagers were told that the first thing the government was going to do for them was to educate their women and girls. The government team would then order that the women and girls be brought out so that the best candidates for education could be selected.

  The second thing the government was going to do was execute land reform. Who were the big landowners around here? Bring them out too, the officials would say. The big landowners were told: you are stripped of your holdings. Your land is to be divided. The people who worked it for you own the land and you work for them now. Deal with it.

  Afghans use a pithy phrase to sum up why men fight wars: zar, zan, u zameen. “Gold, women, and land.” That’s exactly what these foreigners seemed to be after, at least to the villagers they were “educating.”

  Inevitably, when these government teams pulled into small rural villages and tried to modernize them overnight by fiat, clashes broke out. The villagers lost those clashes, because they lacked the firepower to stand up to the Soviets. So the government education and development teams were often in the position of telling villagers whose men they had just killed, “Bring us your women. We’re going to educate them.”1 When the government teams left, it was very easy for Mujahideen agitators to come back in and convince the villagers they should fight to drive these satanic foreigners off Afghan soil and reclaim the lives they used to have.