Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Then Wilson and his allies happened upon a landmark insight. They figured out exactly what type of weapon the Afghan resistance needed: something the guerillas could hand-carry into the hills and use to shoot down helicopters.

  No such weapon existed yet, so Wilson and a self-appointed Afghan task force within the CIA set to work to get it invented. With technical help from the Israelis and logistical help from Egypt, they came up with the surface-to-air missile known as the Stinger, a heat-seeking rocket fired from a long pipe that two men could carry and one man could shoot. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  On September 25, 1986, Hezb-i-Islam commander Abdul Ghaffar (Engineer Abdul Ghaffar, he called himself) fired the first of the Stingers at a Soviet helicopter landing at the Jalalabad airport. The moment it hit its mark, the war was effectively over. A lot of bombs would still fall, a lot of lives would still be lost, but the economics of the thing was decisive. By the summer of 1987, according to ISI reports, Afghans were hitting one or two aircraft a day with these weapons. A Stinger cost less than $40,000 to produce. A helicopter gunship cost more than $10 million. Do the math. The CIA provided the Mujahideen with more than five hundred Stingers, and perhaps as many as twenty-five hundred. (British and Chinese versions of this weapon soon began reaching the Mujahideen as well.)5 Financially, the doddering Soviet Union simply could not fight a war on such unequal terms—losing $10 million at a pop to guerillas armed with little more than huge shotguns. Gorbachev knew he would have to get his troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible in any way he could—peace and honor be damned.

  The first step was to get rid of Babrak Karmal. His stewardship had been an unmitigated disaster. In his place, the Soviets installed the director of KhAD, Dr. Najibullah, a big brute commonly known as “the Ox” because of his heavily muscled weightlifter’s body. Najib had his instructions: he was to quit pushing Communism, negotiate with the Mujahideen, establish a coalition government, and build a broad base of domestic support. If only he could succeed in this, the Soviets would be able to get out with a clear conscience.

  Najib tried, he really did. He tried everything he could. He changed the name of KhAD to WAD, but everyone knew it was the same old dreaded secret police. He renamed the PDPA the “Fatherland Party,” but no one started singing patriotic anthems. He had a new constitution written declaring Afghanistan an Islamic republic and guaranteeing the freedom of all citizens, but no one believed him. He started building mosques and religious schools. He called for national reconciliation. He offered cabinet positions to selected Mujahideen leaders. He even offered to step down if certain conditions were met.

  The plan might have worked—ten years earlier. But in the late eighties, too much blood had flowed under the bridge. The longtime chief of Parcham’s secret police was never going to convince Afghans he was a Muslim nationalist interested only in restoring the values of Old Afghanistan. The Mujahideen cleaned their guns and moved closer to the city.

  The United Nations had launched peace talks in Geneva near the very beginning of the war. All these years, representatives of various countries had been trudging to Geneva and dutifully talking. In 1987, however, Gorbachev announced that the Soviets would begin withdrawing their troops the following year, come hell or high water in Afghanistan. That year, in Geneva, the Soviets tried to secure some agreements from Pakistan and the United States. They wanted some guarantees about the borders; they wanted the United States to promise it would stop supplying antigovernment forces with military aid; they wanted the world to accept a hands-off-Afghanistan policy. No one was in a mood to concede a thing, and the Soviet Union was in no position to press its points because its dissolution was picking up pace.

  In 1988, the first Soviet troops did come home from Afghanistan. All that year the trickle of withdrawal continued; meanwhile, however, from the Soviet and global point of view, bigger things were happening. The Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, formed popular fronts to oppose their own local Communist parties. Demonstrations broke out in Armenia, and then in Azerbaijan, and then in Georgia. The collapse of the empire had begun.

  In February 1989, Soviet commander Colonel Boris Gromov became the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan when he walked across the Termez Bridge to Uzbekistan. The Soviet withdrawal was complete, but few noticed because by then world attention was fixated on the wave of revolutions sweeping through Eastern Europe. It began when Gorbachev, on a visit to Poland, repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine and announced a new Soviet policy of noninterference in the affairs of other independent nations. Officially, these included the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. In Poland, Solidarity forced elections—and won them. Hungary then held free parliamentary elections and changed from the People’s Republic of Hungary to just plain Republic of Hungary. The grim regime in East Germany tried but failed to stop thousands of its citizens from escaping to the West. Hard-line East German ruler Erich Honecker was deposed, and in November the people of East Berlin began to tear down the wall separating them from the Western half of the city. Symbolically, that moment marked the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet empire. I can’t think of another time in history when such a gigantic empire came to an end so abruptly and so decisively. By New Year’s Eve 1989, all the Soviet satellites had broken away. In the year that followed, the various republics that formed the core country—the Soviet Union itself—began to declare their independence. When Russia declared its independence in 1991, the end had come: there was nothing left to gain independence from.

  23

  From Horror to Chaos

  THESE DRAMATIC EVENTS LEFT NAJIBULLAH STRANDED AS THE LAST Communist ruler of Afghanistan. He was still struggling to cobble together a compromise with the Mujahideen, but he was playing poker with a deck of Crazy Eights. With the Soviets gone, Najib the Ox had no one to depend on but himself. He did still have the awesome arsenal the Soviets had left behind, and Kabul was a garrison, so he dug in for the next year and five months, while the guerillas came closing in.

  At that moment, as Kabul University economist Dr. Shams pointed out,1 Afghanistan had close to 300,000 battle-tested men in arms—perhaps 100,000 in the national army and about 180,000 fighting for the Mujahideen. It also had jet bombers, tanks, heavy artillery, as many as a thousand Stingers2 still unused, more than one machine gun for every man, woman, and child, and enough ammo to last for years. Had Najibullah and the Mujahideen come together to form one unified government, Afghanistan would instantly have become the most powerful state in the region.

  There was no chance of that happening, of course. Najibullah fought like a dog but couldn’t keep the wolves at bay. His army defected to his enemies in chunks. The heaviest hit of all came in April 1992, when one of his key allies, an Uzbek army officer named Rashid Dostum, joined forces with Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. Dostum had started out as a labor union boss in the days before the Communists took over, but after the 1978 coup he enlisted in the army and worked his way up the ranks. During those years, he built a disciplined corps of Uzbek soldiers loyal directly to him, an army within the national army. In the last days of the Soviet occupation, he had more than thirty thousand and perhaps as many as fifty thousand men fighting for him (on behalf of the Soviets). 3 His subsequent career shows, however, that he wasn’t really a Parchami or a Khalqi, nor did he belong to any other ideological category. He was a two-fisted, hard-drinking nonideological secular pirate of a man whose religion was political realism and whose program was survival.

  At this crucial moment in 1992, with Najibullah and the Mujahideen locked into a standoff, Dostum saw his chance to multiply his leverage. When he switched sides, taking his private army with him, it was game, set, and match for the Ox. By the end of April, tens of thousands of guerillas had moved into position on the slopes surrounding Kabul. The city was about to fall—but not to any single group. Those thousands of guerillas in the hills represented no fewer than eleven different armies.

  On the evening
of April 16, 1992, Massoud called Hekmatyar on a satellite phone. Their conversation was recorded, and a scratchy tape of it is still kicking around on the Internet.4 Massoud can be heard saying to Hekmatyar, “We should talk. I’m concerned about this Sunday. There might be trouble; because when one side enters, all the other armies and forces will enter too. The chaos that will result, the wreckage that will result—hits and blows among the Mujahideen—I want to lift these concerns by sitting down with you and your followers, let’s work out something, establish an acceptable government, and then we’ll proceed toward elections. It would be better to take these steps now, instead of getting to the stage where we’re settling things by force. It would be better if you would promise me that on this coming Sunday—”

  Hekmatyar interrupts. “There won’t be any trouble. So long as the situation that develops does not require our men, our followers, our Mujahideen to take action, we probably won’t resort to aggression at this time.”

  “You say no trouble will erupt, but I assure you,” says Massoud, “severe trouble will erupt if we don’t take some steps. We are not afraid. Everything depends on you and your followers—”

  “I’ve heard your words,” Hekmatyar cuts in, “and I have told you my intentions.”

  “Are you telling me you will certainly attack on Sunday? Should I prepare?”

  “Prepare for what?”

  “Prepare to defend the people of Kabul, the women of Kabul, the men of Kabul, the young and old of Kabul,” Massoud exclaims. “Prepare to defend this cruelly wounded nation, these people who by God every day call for refuge and plead to know what their future holds. I tell you, I take it as my duty to defend these people against every form of attack to the limits of my ability.”

  Then static comes up and the conversation ends.

  The next day, the various armies began filtering into the city. Najibullah and his brother left the royal palace in their chauffeured vehicle, headed for the airport. There, by prior arrangement, a United Nations plane was waiting to fly them to India. But Dostum knew of the plan and locked down the airport. No planes would be leaving that day.

  When Najibullah saw the roadblock, he had his chauffeur hang a U-turn and drive him directly to the United Nations headquarters, which granted the men political asylum. The Mujahideen respected this asylum: as long as Najib and his associates stayed in that UN building in the center of the city, they were safe—but only in that building. So there they stayed for the next four years. Their “political asylum” was indistinguishable from prison, except that they could order takeout and get all the Bollywood movies they could watch.

  The Mujahideen had cobbled together a loose plan for an Afghan Interim Government (AIG) when they were still in Pakistan. According to this plan, the relatively insignificant Subghatullah Mujaddedi, head of the smallest of the seven main Islamist parties in Peshawar, would start out as president. After two months, he would step down, and Burhanuddin Rabbani would take over for four months. Then he would step down and elections would be held. Ahmad Shah Massoud, whom many in the Western media saw as the face of the resistance, would merely be minister of defense (although this was, of course, the key post). Each Peshawar party of any significance would get at least one cabinet position. Hekmatyar, the other major figure, would be prime minister.

  Hekmatyar refused the title. “Prime minister” was too small for him. He headed up the biggest party, Hezb-i-Islam, he felt he should head up the whole government, and his sponsor ISI was determined not to let him slip into a junior role, for they had Hekmatyar chalked in as the man through whom Pakistan would take control of Afghanistan. He simply had to be the top guy.

  After Rabbani took over the presidency, Hekmatyar did grudgingly accept the post of prime minister but still refused to come into the city. If the cabinet had to meet, he insisted that it come to a building just outside the city and meet with him.

  Almost immediately after the new government was in place, chaos broke out, just as Massoud had predicted; but Massoud, it should be noted, was among the architects of this chaos. He took action when Hezb-i-Wahdat, a supergroup representing all the various parties of the Hazara ethnic group, claimed southwestern Kabul, where the Hazaras mostly lived. Massoud would have none of this. He made common cause with Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, an Arab-backed Pushtoon warlord. Sayyaf’s army held the territory southwest of the Hazaras. Massoud occupied the territory northeast of them. Between their two armies, Massoud and Sayyaf had the Hazaras in pincers.

  But the Hazaras fought back ferociously. The fallout was horrific: looting, rape, and murder rose to a crescendo amid gun battles and bombardment. My cousin Zaheda lived at the western edge of the city when these battles began. She later recounted how a contingent of Hazaras burst into her compound and commandeered it for use as a military post. Zaheda and her family scurried out and made their way to my uncle Asef’s house, deeper inside the city, which was abandoned because my uncle had fled to America.

  Here, Zaheda told me, things were quiet at first, although one could hear occasional gunfire in the distance. Then it seemed the shots were ringing out a little closer, but it was hard to tell. Then they seemed to be sounding more frequently, but it was hard to judge. Then gunfire was definitely close and constant, but Zaheda and her family could not now leave the compound—it was too dangerous. They should have left then, however, because leaving was still possible. They only realized this later when leaving had become even more dangerous; for, instead of fading away, the battle grew hotter. Bullets were zinging into the yard, shells were coming over the wall—they had to retreat into the house.

  But then shells started hitting the windows, and they had to retreat to a windowless storeroom in the deep interior, where they had raw onions and potatoes to eat, but no water. Every night, therefore, under cover of darkness, Zaheda’s husband went out to get water from a well in the yard. One night a piece of shrapnel hit him, and he crawled back bleeding. The wound was not critical; Zaheda cauterized it with burning cotton soaked in rubbing alcohol; but that moment tipped her into a freak-out. “If we don’t get out of here right now, we’re going to die in this house,” she said.

  So she put on all her jewelry, an Afghan woman’s portable wealth, and the family bundled together all the money they had, and as soon as there was a lull in the gunfire, they stepped out of the compound. The street was littered with corpses. At the end of the block, they saw a Hazara teenager with a cigarette in one hand and a machine gun in the other. He would take a puff, fire a few rounds at the hills, take another puff, fire another round. Every time he shot at the slopes, Massoud’s forces, dug into the mountain, would fire back.

  My cousin yelled to the boy to please stop shooting for a few minutes, so they could get away. He shrugged and complied, and they got to the river and made their way along the banks to a safer neighborhood where they knew a man who would take them in.

  For people who lived in Kabul between 1992 and 1996, my cousin’s experience was typical. News reports record the struggle for that city as a series of battles punctuated by periods of calm, but for residents it might as well have been one continuous stream of carnage: more than sixty thousand people were killed, and perhaps five times that many fled to the countryside, ending up as IDPs or “internally displaced persons,” which is what refugees are called when they don’t make it out of the country. Rashid Dostum, who kept switching sides and was allied to every other major figure at some point or another, perpetrated some of the bloodiest battles. The Hazaras took a vicious battering but—let’s face it—dealt it out just as savagely. Sayyaf, Massoud—all ended up with blood on their hands.

  By all accounts, however, the author of the greatest, most inexcusable bloodshed was Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. As soon as his rival Massoud established himself in Kabul, Hekmatyar dug into a suburb some miles away and, from there, hit the city relentlessly with rockets. In one two-day period (August 10–11, 1992), he fired over a thousand rockets into Kabul. He claimed to be aimi
ng at particular targets, but since he didn’t have the technology to aim his rockets precisely, his claim couldn’t be true. Also, firing from a stronghold several miles outside the city as he was, he couldn’t have known where his bombs were landing, even if he could have aimed them. The rockets came in at the rate of two or three a minute some days, hitting random spots and killing whoever happened to be standing where they landed.

  The Soviets had destroyed the Afghan countryside; now Afghans themselves destroyed the cities. The Mujahideen reduced nearly half of Kabul to rubble. Kandahar fragmented into gangland chaos. The civil war took on an ethnic cast, which planted resentments that will be difficult to erase, for, although few remember or even know which particular person killed their loved ones, they know and will long remember which ethnic group committed the crime.

  As the carnage was ripping apart the cities, warlords were fighting to solidify holdings in the countryside. Hundreds carved out tiny semi-sovereign domains of their own. Numerous checkpoints sprouted up on what remained of the roads. At each checkpoint, some local strongman collected tolls from travelers happening by. The few goods that made it into the shops cost more than most people could pay. Poverty became endemic. Starvation loomed. Such was the final legacy of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

  24

  Out of the Camps