16. Http://www.gunboatriders.com/theboats/pg86.html.
17. Http://www.navy.mil/homepages/vp-45/prod04.html.
18. Zumwalt, On Watch, p. 435.
19. Ibid., p. 447.
20. Ibid., pp. 439–40.
21. Ibid., p. 443.
*22. Gadsden, Warbirds Away!, pp. 111–12. The failure of the second missile to abort has never been explained, though Gadsden noted that extensive testing of remaining stocks of SM-1s by the Navy after the incident revealed “only”’ a 0.1 percent chance of malfunction.
*23. Ralucca Boishov, A Family Affair: Wives, Children and War (Free Press, Moscow, 1993), pp. 344–48.
*24. I.M.A. Fakir, Delivering the Goodies: VP-45 in Peace and War (NOVAT Press, Shelmerston, 1987), pp. 183–87.
25. Http://www.usslapon.com/usslapon/citations.html. Lapon did receive a Naval Unit Citation for its efforts in the Mediterranean between June and December 1973, though not for the reasons given here.
*26. Times Post: “Armageddon” Special Edition, October 26, 1973.
*27. Vassily Chernikoff and Sam Brown, Prepare to Board! We Survived (Truth Press, Washington, 1993).
9
AFGHANISTAN
The Soviet Victory
David C. Isby
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 proved to be a watershed in the history of the Cold War. The first direct and overt Soviet military offensive outside their perimeter since the 1946 withdrawal from northern Iran, it came at a time when the impact of the second oil shock of the 1970s and the Iranian Revolution alike were both affecting Western economies and the West’s relations with the Islamic world. The Afghanistan crisis took place at a time when the West’s economies and culture were changing. The West had to learn how to confront the Soviets while standing on this new—shifting—ground.
Afghanistan demonstrated that a superpower cannot fight a small war. The Soviet Union’s worldwide interests made sure that the lessons of its war in Afghanistan would have an impact far beyond the mountains and deserts of that war-torn country. The Soviet forces involved were smaller than those of the British in the Boer War, the US in Vietnam, or the French in Algeria. Yet the war in Afghanistan had, in its way, a greater impact on the Soviets than any of those other conflicts had on their participants. Afghanistan came about at a time when the Soviets believed the “correlation of forces” had shifted in their favor, yet when the economic and social costs of the “era of stagnation” were starting to emerge both in the Soviet Union and in their European allies. How Soviet governments made changes in response to this emerging challenge was linked to how they responded to Afghanistan.
Throughout the Cold War participants were continually surprised by the unintended consequences of their own actions. The invasion and continued war in Afghanistan was undertaken for what the Soviets considered modest defensive purposes. Yet because of the extensive problems it created—mobilizing former rivals and creating new ones—Afghanistan brought to a head a decisive crisis of the Cold War. What the US and its allies were willing—and unwilling—to do in response became key for the results of the Cold War.
The Cold War and the War in Afghanistan
The US and its European allies had seen Afghanistan as a peripheral issue in the 1970s. No one projected broader consequences when the April 1978 putsch by communist military officers brought Afghanistan to the front pages of the worlds’ newspapers. Auden famously termed the 1930s a “low dishonest decade,”1 but that seems to apply just as well to the 1970s. The mid-1970s Cold War “correlation of forces,” to use the Soviet term, was changed by the narrow election, in November 1976, of Jimmy Carter: “a president who is best remembered for alerting Americans to their festering malaise, only to prove incapable of addressing it.”2 He was going to change things. He could not foresee that what he was going to change included Afghanistan.
Carter famously claimed that the US needed to end its “inordinate fear of Communism” and “move beyond the belief that Soviet expansion was almost inevitable but that it must be contained.”3 Carter’s 1976 campaign rhetoric showed his belief in instilling what he saw as suitable morality into US policies. He saw this, rather than the Cold War policies of confronting the Soviet Union that he often denigrated, as the key to foreign policy.4 He pledged to end secret diplomacy and for greater public involvement in decision-making. In practice Carter’s commitment to human rights was interpreted, however, as undermining relations between authoritarian governments and the US, even though it was not generally used to confront the Soviet Union for its human rights record.5 But even when the administration did confront the Soviet Union on human rights issues—as Carter did when he sent a letter to Brezhnev over the treatment of dissident Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov and when he pointedly received Soviet dissident exile Vladimir Bukovskiy in the White House—he received both rage from the Kremlin and opposition from his own political party. Former presidential candidate Senator George McGovern complained that such actions “look like a reincarnation of John Foster Dulles’ attempt to being Communism down by encouraging dissent and revolt in Eastern Europe.”6
McGovern was wrong, because there was no strategic challenge to Soviet power in the administration. The president was a reflexive supporter of human rights, to be sure, and had no love for tyrants. But Carter was a sentimentalist, and the need for a hardheaded, principled national security strategy was difficult to reconcile both with his worldview and a belief that such a realpolitik hangover as a national strategy should co-exist in the morally-based approach he preferred. It would also be a situation-based approach, for Carter felt uncomfortable even with the whole idea of a national strategy.
In this, he had support primarily from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance—a strong proponent of détente but a skeptic on the utility of an overall grand strategy—and also in part from Vance’s rival, Zbiginiew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor. While considered a hard-liner, Brzezinski characterized Carter’s policy as a recognition that “the world is changing under the influences of forces no government can control.”7 This meant that no over-arching strategy would be effective. Carter quickly backed down from using human rights against the Soviets and observed: “Our conception of human rights is preserved in Poland.”8 Political allies soon described Carter’s policy as “McGovernism without McGovern.”9
Iran Raises The Stakes
The Iranian Revolution of January 1979 put new importance on the security problems of south Asia and attendant superpower competition there. The turmoil following the sudden abdication and flight into exile of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the longtime ruler of Iran and staunch US ally, brought to power anti-American fundamentalist Shiite Muslim clerics led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. On November 4, two weeks after Carter had allowed the former shah to enter the US for medical care, 3,000 Iranians—Revolutionary Guards and “student” radicals—invaded the US Embassy in Tehran and seized it, holding 66 Americans, mainly diplomats, hostage. Chief of Mission L. Bruce Laingen and two aides were held separately at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Khomeini and his supporters repeated demands that the former shah be returned for trial.
It became apparent that the Iranian government would not release the hostages despite a large-scale diplomatic effort. It was unclear whether the hostages were being tortured or readied for execution. However, Carter, facing a re-election battle in 1980, strongly favored a diplomatic solution. Many of his advisors were opposed to the use of force, most notably Cyrus Vance. However, despite this, Brzezinski directed the Pentagon to begin planning for a rescue mission or retaliatory strikes in case the hostages were harmed. Within hours, US Army Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta (Airborne) was on full alert.
This set up the situation for a multi-front conflict for influence on Carter’s foreign policy. The 1978 communist coup in Afghanistan had been followed by brutal repression and the systematic elimination of educated Afghans, made possible by an increasing Soviet military presen
ce. This resulted in an escalating anti-communist national rising, bringing the issue of US policy to the fore. Vance opposed any attempt to link Soviet aggression worldwide with the central relationship.10 Carter himself largely saw the Cold War as limited to Europe. Hence, Afghanistan could not be allowed to disrupt the basic realities of relations with Moscow. And in any case Carter assumed the Afghans could never be more than an irritant to the Soviets. On March 5, 1979 the CIA presented Carter with a series of possible covert actions. On July 3 propaganda support, but not cash or arms, was authorized. However, within months this was changed and monetary assistance was provided and arms were sent from Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere to the resistance.
Invasion and Reaction
The Soviet commitment to Afghanistan grew throughout 1978–79, with advisors, helicopters, and combat troops being committed to battle. Despite the limited outside assistance reaching the Afghan resistance through Pakistan, the weakness of the Afghan communist government and the growing strength of its opponents led the Soviets to decide on a military invasion. On December 24–25, 1979, the Soviets quickly moved against their Afghan clients, killing the head of state and installing a new pro-Moscow Afghan communist, Babrak Karmal, by 27 December.
Brezhnev personally called Carter on the hot line to assure him of his defensive objectives. But with the American electorate’s attention focused on south Asia by the hostage crisis, it appeared that, as in Iran, the US had once again proved to be an impotent and ignorant giant. Carter was furious. He had been photographed in a well-publicized embrace with Brezhnev some six months before. Now he appeared to have been played for a fool. Carter withdrew the ambassador from Moscow. Vance, however, believed the US had failed to understand Soviet motivations, which he saw as primarily defensive.11 Vance continued to stress that détente and its ripest fruit, the SALT II arms control agreement, were what needed to be preserved, not Afghanistan.
But the Soviet invasion had made Carter receptive to Brzezinski’s views and recommendations for a strong response. Carter accordingly authorized the supply of lethal aid to the Afghan resistance12 and on January 3 he withdrew the SALT II Treaty from consideration for ratification, heading off Senate defeat. On January 7 he announced a grain embargo and then put a temporary ban on US high technology exports to the Soviet Union. On January 20 he announced an Olympic boycott. He acceded to the Senate’s demand for a five percent defense spending increase. The US led a debate in the UN General Assembly that voted 104–18 to condemn the Soviet invasion.
On January 23, 1980, the President proclaimed what he hoped would become known as the “Carter Doctrine.”13 He had proposed to say that any attempt by an outside power to gain control of the Gulf would be regarded as “a direct assault on the vital interests of the United States.” Brzezinski had fought hard for this language and his views had prevailed. Vance had pointed out that no country in the region would welcome a US base.
For a while, Carter’s hard line against the Soviet invasion had widespread support. It boosted him in the polls against both Democratic and Republican challengers. The increase in his polling numbers represented the most dramatic turn-around in the history of the Gallup poll to that date.14 But, as with so many of the advances of that administration, both the policies and the lead soon started to erode. As early as January, Carter denied that he had changed his views on Soviet behavior.15 Vance was soon regaining influence.
Much of the impetus for this erosion of the response to the Soviet invasion came from US allies. Europeans were inclined to ignore the invasion of Afghanistan. There was a widespread feeling that this crisis was too distant and involving people that had no impact on their security. France, Italy, West Germany and Japan all opened bilateral trade talks with the Soviet Union in the immediate wake of the invasion of Afghanistan.16 The Soviets were only too happy to shift from US exports to European and Japanese ones. In 1980 US exports to the Soviet Union were halved, while those from Britain, France and West Germany alone increased by over 30 percent.17 French policy was seen as so subservient to the Soviets that the domestic press characterized it as “self-Finlandization.”18
The US did not use its position as head of the Western alliance to mobilize support against these policies. Indeed, on 12 June, Carter told a news conference that he still believed in détente.19 This made it impossible for Carter to pressure the Europeans to see Afghanistan as a challenge to world security rather than a commercial opportunity. At the same time, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt flew straight from Washington to Moscow to sign the first pipeline contract with the Soviets.20 Afghanistan would not prevent cheap energy exports from paying for the Soviet Empire, including its subjugation of Afghanistan. The high technology export ban came off (although higher licensing requirements remained).
Despite their continued economic problems, their seeming success in the invasion of Afghanistan convinced the Soviets that the morale aspects of “correlation of forces” remained in their favor following the US failure to deploy neutron weapons in Europe in the 1970s in the face of widespread opposition and effective Soviet-origin disinformation. The decision, in December 1979, to modernize the intermediate nuclear forces in Europe would be the next target of Soviet policies, modeled on those that had been successful in the preceding years. It appeared that the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan would end up being accepted without imperiling détente as, in the end, that of Czechoslovakia was in 1968.
1980 was an election year. Carter had needed to demonstrate a forceful response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for political reasons and in this he had found strong support from both the Congress and the public. Carter was facing, throughout, a strong challenge from his left in the presidential primaries in the form of Senator Edward Kennedy. Kennedy was running on a platform of redistributive social spending and increased government control that had appeal following two oil-driven shocks to the US economy. Even if US trust in government was reduced due to Watergate and Vietnam, trust in free markets was lower still.
Carter was able to pull off successive narrow victories over Kennedy to win the Democratic nomination and over Ronald Reagan in the November general election. This was the result of a number of factors. The foremost of these was the “October Surprise,” the release of the US hostages by Iran before the election in return for undisclosed US concessions. This had followed the final triumph of Vance in Carter administration policy making. He had succeeded in preventing, at the last minute, Delta Force being inserted in the long-planned and rehearsed hostage rescue mission in Iran that had been scheduled for April 24–25 (Brzezinski resigned in disgust). In a crucial late-campaign debate, Carter had succeeded in demonstrating his in-depth knowledge of the details and minutiae of national security while Reagan, having an off-night, appeared old, detached, and out of it. All of these things happened in the days before the election. Indeed, a week before the election, Morton Kondracke, a leading American political journalist had written: “the movement of the presidential campaign suggests a Carter victory.”21 The “October Surprise” of the hostage release and the debate had made it so.
Afgahnistan and the Carter Second Term
Carter’s victory was, in many ways, a triumph for the government party over the countryside. Its views were that of the pessimistic in Washington, who saw the lesson of the 1970s as being that the US was in decline. Certainly many Americans had shared this pessimism. Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Gallup polls recorded that 84 percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.22 Carter, having gained his second term by playing to this pessimism, had little interest in reversing its direction. Indeed, he did not see that it was reversible. One of the many lamentable things he saw as irreversible was the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan, even though this was only being enforced by a long and brutal counter-insurgency struggle.
In his second term, Carter was willing to reverse policies that proved to be unpopular with key constituencies even if he had already paid the p
olitical price for them. The neutron bomb issue of his first term was a prime example of this approach. Even as a campaigner, he was known for his “flip-flops.”23
Two key policy decisions that would be effectively—if never explicitly—reversed in the second Carter term were those leading to NATO INF modernization and the provision of aid to the Afghan resistance. Both would be incrementally sacrificed to revive détente and improve relations with the Soviet Union, as would all but rhetorical support for human rights in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In all these cases, Carter found strong domestic approval—no one really was pro-nuclear missiles or pro-Afghan—and gratified the élite media and US allies. None of the US allies, even Britain under Margaret Thatcher, had offered as strong a response to the Soviet invasion as did the US. They were thus in no position to complain when the US response was reversed. After the failures of 1980, Carter acted to remove sanctions from the Soviet Union.
Soviet Policy Changes
With the death of Brezhnev in November 1982 and the rise to power of Andropov as a result, Soviet policy in Afghanistan lost its orientation towards preserving a pro-Moscow status quo that would allow the “balance of forces” in the region to reflect Soviet regional dominance. Andropov was unwilling to consider extending the Brezhnev policy that had endured since the initial invasion, that of conducting a limited liability conflict, keeping the number of Soviet troops in Afghanistan limited while also limiting the cross-border operations from Afghanistan, and diplomatic pressure on Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan. However, the lack of military and political success in 1980–81, due in part to the continued flow of outside aid through Pakistan, led to an escalation of military action in 1982, including a return to large scale ground offensives, such as the Panjshir V offensive in the spring. Andropov indeed considered a broad range of options for Soviet Afghanistan policy, ranging from withdrawal to large-scale escalation. In the end, he believed that there was too much at stake for withdrawal. Therefore, escalation to conclude the conflict—and prevent a more intensive war that a potential increase in aid flow from the West and the Islamic world in the future might yield—was to be the aim of Andropov’s policy.
Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War Page 27
