Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  The war reversed that equation.2 Now, when the ever more religiously purist Mujahideen looked for partners in the country, they zeroed in on clerics. This class gained unprecedented power at the expense of the secular elders, whose basis for authority all but vanished once the land was scorched, the economy destroyed, and the old tribal structures blown apart by Soviet carpet bombing, which drove so many millions into exile. Also, a whole new class of elite emerged out of this struggle, new men whose power was based on their skill with guns, not on tribal connections, ancestry, and such.

  Early on, no one gave the Afghan resistance any chance against the Soviets. A few primitives against the Red Army, what were the odds? Virtually every analyst assumed, however, that if the Afghans were to have any chance, any chance at all, they would have to unite. In fact, the strength of the Afghan resistance lay in its disunity. The same problem that had plagued the British in the nineteenth century plagued the Soviets. It wasn’t that the foreign superpower couldn’t beat any Afghan force it faced. Seen purely in military terms, those few celebrated Afghan victories against the British—at Maiwand, in the Hindu Kush passes between Kabul and Jalalabad—were trivial. The real problem was that those wars dissolved Afghan society into thousands of fragments, every one of them dead set against the British (and now the Soviets) and so the British (and now the Soviets) had no one to beat that would matter, no one to negotiate with whose acquiescence would enable them to govern.

  In the grand scheme of things, of course, the fragmentation hurt the Afghans far more than the Soviets. All the consolidation and development the House of Dost Mohammed had achieved between 1826 and 1978 had been wiped away. Akbar Nowrouz, whose father headed up the parliament in the days of Zahir Shah, once remarked, “It will take us 50 years to get back to where we were 50 years ago.”3

  Among the many Mujahideen leaders, a dozen or so were prominent and two stood out dramatically: Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Both were young men who had swashed some buckle as sixties’ activists during Zahir Shah’s tumultuous final decade.

  Massoud was a Tajik from Panjsher and thus belonged to the country’s second-biggest but traditionally subordinate ethnic group. His family had moved to Kabul when his father was appointed to some minor post in the technocracy. Massoud went to the French-built school Istiqlal, next to the royal palace where the doomed Daoud made his final stand. Much later, I realized that Massoud must have been at Istiqlal at the same time as I, but he was in the sixth grade when I was in the eleventh, so I didn’t notice him. After Istiqlal he entered the Polytechnique Institute, a Soviet-built engineering school, but did not finish because he got distracted by politics.

  By the time Massoud started college, he was not just a devout politicized Muslim but one who constantly harangued his classmates for neglecting their religious duties, if he saw them eating during Ramadhan, for example, or playing when it was time to pray. Already, he embodied a departure from the easygoing attitude that had typified the old Afghanistan. 4 He was not just a Muslim but an Islamist.

  Massoud was a moderate, however, compared to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This rebel started at the military academy and then transferred to Kabul University, but politics distracted him from finishing too. He did take a few engineering courses, which led him to ever afterward call himself “Engineer Gulbuddin.” Rumor has it that Hekmatyar started his career as a member of the Marxist PDPA, a rumor he and his followers indignantly deny; and, indeed, whatever he may have flirted with in his youth, there can be no doubt that the adult Hekmatyar has staked his life on representing the most radical Islamist extremism. In 1972, Hekmatyar was sent to prison for murdering another student, a supposed Maoist; a few years later, however, a prime minister hoping to curry favor with the Islamist right set him free, whereupon Hekmatyar fled to the safety of Pakistan.

  Massoud belonged to a religious party called Jamiat-i-Islam—“Islamic Society”—founded by Kabul University theology professor Burhanuddin Rabbani. Even after Massoud became the best-known Afghan resistance leader in the world, he defined himself as a mere member of that party and deferred to Rabbani as his leader. Hekmatyar started out in Jamiat but soon broke away to form his own organization, eventually called Hezb-i-Islam or “Party of Islam.” Jamiat (The Society) and Hezb (The Party)—these would be the two most significant players in the years of violence that followed.

  In 1975, when Daoud was running the country with a cabinet of Communists, Hekmatyar, Massoud, Rabbani, and other Islamists tried to organize a putsch out of Panjsher. They failed, and all had to flee from Daoud’s wrath, to Pakistan. That’s where they were living five years later, when the Soviets invaded their country. The moment the tanks crossed the border, these men knew their time had come.

  Massoud shot back to his home valley of Panjsher to organize resistance, while Rabbani remained in Pakistan to protect the interests of the Jamiat party. In this one case, the guerilla commander in the country and the politician outside the country really were partners joined at the hip.

  Hekmatyar also planted himself in Pakistan and only sporadically went into the country to fight alongside his men. He took lobbying, fund-raising, and political organizing as his central duties, but somehow he managed to extend his influence to every corner of Afghanistan.

  Massoud had been something of a mediocrity among student activists back in the days of marching and speechifying. He wasn’t good at that stuff, which could be why he abdicated political leadership to Rabbani. Once he hit the mountains, however, he found his calling. He was, it turned out, a military genius on the order of Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung. Admirers were soon calling him the Lion of Panjsher (Panjsher means “Five Lions”). Not only could he set an ambush and shoot down helicopters, but he had a gift for organizing civil life on the fly, administering his community with a gun in one hand and a stone for a pillow. He organized a system, for example, whereby the people of his valley would hide in the hills during the day when the Russians did their bombing and go down to their fields at night to plow, plant, and take care of other rural chores.

  In the early eighties, Massoud cobbled together a supervisory council to coordinate the actions of 130 separate guerilla commanders, but, being a Tajik and given the growing ethnic tensions of this period, Massoud could not build much strength among the majority Pushtoons.5

  Massoud inspired in his followers a loyalty that bordered on religious reverence. Years later, I talked to his close aide Abdullah Abdullah, and, when I asked Dr. Abdullah what he remembered about Massoud, he fell to reminiscing about the warmth Massoud used to radiate when he came home from a hard day of killing Russians to play with the children. Of such stuff are legends made, and of such legends do later generations craft mythological heroes. The truth, it seems, was far more complicated.

  In Hekmatyar, however, Massoud faced a formidable rival with assets of his own. Hekmatyar didn’t have Massoud’s charisma, and he wasn’t much of a guerilla warrior; it wasn’t his thing. Hekmatyar was (and apparently remains) a brilliant organizer with superb political savvy. I have a hunch Dost Mohammed was a man like this. While Massoud was inspiring adulation in the mountains, Hekmatyar was busy cultivating friends in the ISI. As a result, as much as three-quarters of the money and guns that ISI disbursed went to Hekmatyar. He used this bounty to build Hezb-i-Islam into a powerful, intertribal (though basically Pushtoon) guerilla network, with fighters all over the country and agents in all the Afghan refugee camps on the Pakistan border, where Afghan boys were growing into grim, emotionally disturbed Afghan men.

  As the years wore on, even though Jamiat and Hezb both fought the Soviets and their Afghan puppets ferociously, they also fought each other. In fact, Hekmatyar’s group acquired a reputation for attacking other Afghans in the resistance. Once, they almost succeeded in killing Massoud. Everyone knew that a showdown was coming someday between these two men.

  22

  Cold War Endgame

  THE INCENDIARY AFGHAN RESPONSE TO THE SOVIET INVAS
ION, THE apocalyptic revolution in Iran, the fall of Bhutto and the triumph of Islamism in Pakistan, the rise of clandestine, antigovernment, anti-Western, revolutionary Islamist cells and parties throughout the Arab world—all these developments presaged a reconfiguration of global tensions along a new fault line. In the Muslim world, not just thinkers and activists but ordinary people in the bazaars were reframing current history as a contest between Islam and the West.

  In the West, by contrast, late into the eighties, political analysts still saw global events in terms of a bipolar confrontation between the Soviet camp and an American-led camp. Both sides had nuclear weapons, so neither could attack the other directly, which locked them into that Cold War competition for influence and sometimes proxy wars within the (so-called) Third World.

  In 1980, conventional wisdom in the West saw the Soviet Union verging on victory. The American economy seemed moribund, having managed to combine high inflation, stagnation, and high unemployment, a trifecta that economists had previously deemed impossible. Oil prices had skyrocketed, and US president Jimmy Carter had responded by telling Americans to wear sweaters. The pessimism shrouding America inspired the president to go on TV and tell the nation it was suffering from a malaise.1

  Meanwhile, Castro was clinging to power in Cuba despite all CIA efforts to destroy him. Leftist Sandinistas had taken control of Nicaragua. Leftist guerillas were fighting hard for El Salvador. In Europe, Soviet power had seemingly crushed the dissident Polish labor union Solidarity. The Soviets had installed a new type of nuclear missile, the SS-20, capable of hitting targets in Western Europe. In the Middle East, America had lost its stoutest ally, the Shah of Iran. To make matters worse, a bunch of student-age Iranian activists had seized the American Embassy and taken fifty-two US diplomats hostage—an unprecedented humiliation for a great power like the United States. Now the Soviets were in Afghanistan. Was there no stopping this juggernaut?

  Jimmy Carter responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with the curious declaration known as the Carter Doctrine. He said the United States would regard any Soviet interference in the Persian Gulf as a threat to America’s vital interests and act accordingly. In other words, he conceded Afghanistan and moved the goalposts to the Persian Gulf.

  His national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski took the view that Afghanistan might well prove to be a quagmire for Russia, draining it of blood and treasure in the same way that Vietnam had sapped the United States. He saw Afghanistan as an opportunity to make the Soviets suffer at little cost and no risk to American lives. Brzezinski was not proposing that the United States help the Afghans win, because the idea of an Afghan victory never seems to have crossed Brzezinski’s mind. He only thought America could prolong the war and thus make the inevitable Soviet victory as costly as possible.

  In retrospect, it’s hard to see why the Soviet Union struck such fear and awe into the hearts of people around the globe in 1980. America might have been wobbling a bit, but the Soviet Empire was in its actual death throes. The government had degenerated into a rust-caked bureaucracy that even its own functionaries despised. Its “command economy” couldn’t produce anything but megaweapons and industrial machinery—certainly not the seductive consumer goods that Soviet citizens now knew the “Free World” was enjoying in abundance.

  Worst of all, the empire had no animating ideal to compensate for the drab grind of daily life. Communism had fulfilled this function once upon a time, but Communism had lost credibility even in the Communist world, where it now lacked the power to inspire even Communists. Brezhnev was a sick old man, unable to rule but impossible to get rid of. The Soviet political establishment was just waiting for him to die but had no charismatic visionary waiting in the wings to replace him. When Brezhnev did finally expire in 1982, power passed to Yuri Andropov, about whom little was known because, as head of the KGB, it was his business to be little known. Already an ill old man, Andropov died within fifteen months of his ascension, to be succeeded by an even more colorless politburo cog, Konstantin Chernenko, another ill old man who lasted less than a year. This was the country that was, to Western eyes, winning the Cold War and might soon (cue evil laughter) rule the world.

  Yet, because the Soviet Union did still project so much menace, Ronald Reagan was able to win the 1980 presidential election by campaigning as a cowboy. He called the Soviet Union “the evil empire.”2 He vowed to stand up to it as his hand-wringing predecessor Jimmy Carter had not done. Afghanistan (and Iran) gave Reagan a decisive cudgel with which to beat Carter about the head and shoulders. Afghanistan served Reagan especially well because it had become a cause célèbre among old-guard anti-Communists on the Right, one of Reagan’s key constituencies. Political activists on the Right, who knew little about Islamism (or Islam for that matter), lauded the Afghan Mujahideen as glamorous freedom fighters, seeing them only as anti-Communists.

  After the election, Reagan had to back up his macho campaign image with some real action. I don’t mean to imply that it had all been for show. Reagan surely meant what he said. To gain advantage in the Cold War, he did not hesitate to use nuclear brinkmanship. He put Pershing missiles in Germany, close enough to bomb Moscow, and grinned amiably at the Soviet squawking that resulted. He threatened to build a defensive shield that would render Soviet nuclear missiles irrelevant. His Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly known as the “Star Wars” defense) jolted nuclear policy experts, for it violated the core formula of Mutual Assured Destruction upon which the Cold War stalemate (and global stability) was based: neither side could afford to use nuclear weapons because it would result in the destruction of both. If the United States achieved immunity from Soviet nuclear attack, the United States could attack the Soviet Union with impunity. If the Soviets saw this outcome as imminent, they might launch a pre-emptive strike. Reagan flashed his avuncular grin and reckoned he’d take that risk.

  The Star Wars defense might not have been viable, but the Soviets could not afford to dismiss it. They had to pour enormous sums they could ill afford to develop new nuclear weapons that would keep them in the arms race.

  As a gesture of macho strength, however, the Star Wars initiative was a bit abstract, even for those who approved. To really back up his ten-gallon stance, Reagan had to bull up to the line of scrimmage in the real-time US/Soviet confrontations of the day. One such spot was Nicaragua; another was Afghanistan.

  For the Reagan administration, Nicaragua was the main item on the agenda. There, the administration promoted right-wing rebels called the Contras, who eventually did bring down the first Sandinista government. The Reagan administration also opened the tap to let guns and money flow a bit more freely to the Mujahideen. It was only a few tens of millions, but it was more than the Carter team had contemplated spending.

  As always, all this Cold War pushing and posturing had implications for Afghanistan. In 1985, the Soviet Union finally got a dynamic younger man at the helm, but Mikhail Gorbachev had inherited a sinking ship. Reagan’s initiatives had forced the Soviets to risk spending themselves to death. Gorbachev knew he would have to scale back the military and shrink his country’s foreign commitments, or the country was doomed. So he launched several policies. One was perestroika, which gave the market a role in the Soviet economy. Another was glasnost, which allowed Soviet citizens some limited freedom of expression. The West applauded Gorbachev as a heroic reformer.

  The Soviet chief also met with Reagan to discuss some way of reducing nuclear tensions, and their conversations led to real progress. Reagan reaped the rewards in domestic acclaim, but Gorbachev won some applause as a peacemaker too (except among right-wing evangelical Christians who saw the birthmark on his forehead as a sign that he was the Antichrist).3

  Gorbachev probably did deserve some praise, but, for Afghanistan, his advent initially brought untold horror. Gorbachev thought the invasion had been a mistake, and he wanted to get the Afghan albatross off the Soviet neck; but, instead of ordering an immediate and unilater
al withdrawal, he told his generals to win the war as quickly as possible by any means necessary. Like Richard Nixon, who had sought “peace with honor”4 in Vietnam, Gorbachev wanted to get out of Afghanistan with at least the appearance of a victory: he couldn’t afford to look weak going into the sensitive nuclear negotiations he had set in motion.

  The Soviet military stepped up its bombing and flew more sorties than ever, up and down the narrow valleys of Afghanistan, shooting peasants from their deadly helicopter gunships. The first year of Gorbachev’s tenure proved to be the bloodiest, most horrific period of the war in Afghanistan. It was in this year that the Soviet military adopted its genocidal plan to depopulate the Afghan countryside as its strategy for victory. In this year, Soviet carpet bombing laid irreparable waste to that universe of tribal village republics that was the old Afghanistan. It was then that the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan and Iran, already vast, swelled past six million—and Afghanistan had only twenty million people when the war began. In an age of refugees, Afghans became the world’s largest refugee population. The destruction of Afghanistan did not come at the hands of a mighty superpower at the arrogant height of its power: Afghanistan was destroyed by a dying dragon flailing its spiked tail in its final agony.

  With the flames rising ever higher in Afghanistan, elements in the United States defense and intelligence establishments began to glimpse the astonishing possibility of an actual Afghan victory. In Congress, Senator Gordon Humphrey, Congressman Don Ritter, and others lobbied for the Afghan cause. Reagan adopted an advisor for Afghan affairs, an Afghan expatriate educated at the American University of Beirut, Zalmay Khalilzad. Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, who chaired the House Appropriations Committee, embraced the Afghan cause and, together with allies in Congress and the CIA, managed to triple the (secret) US funding for the Mujahideen. What’s more, he convinced the Saudis to match whatever the United States contributed. By 1987, the Mujahideen were receiving a billion dollars a year from the United States—almost all of it coming through the ISI pipeline, of course—and that much again from the Saudis.