The Indians planned local attacks in the Punjab, but there the hope was that Pakistani gains could be minimized and that the existing civil unrest would not undercut Indian combat power. It would, however, require that some troops be held back from the front line for rear area protection. The other major thrust, Operation Trident, was a four-division corps operation. Its objective was to occupy the northern area of Kashmir and advance towards Skardu and Gilgit.30 This would be supported by a brigade-sized Soviet operation to take Chitral and subsidiary specialist units moving across from Afghanistan’s remote Wakhan Corridor.
The invasion opened on 1 April. The Indian opening moves were bold and forceful, and presented Pakistan with a significant military threat. What elevated them to the greatest military threat to Pakistan in its existence was the Soviet invasion. Division-sized composite forces of Soviet troops with comparably-sized Afghan communist forces advanced on the two traditional invasion routes into and out of Afghanistan, the Khyber Pass, aiming at Peshawar, and the Bolan pass, aiming at Quetta. A secondary thrust, with a Soviet air assault brigade, moved against Pakistani positions at Wana and Thal. Other brigade-size forces, in the deep south of Afghanistan, moved to cut the rail line to Iran. Soviet aircraft hit Pakistani airbases and reserve units. The KGB unleashed a sabotage and insurrection campaign throughout Pakistan
The International Crisis
The Indian–Soviet invasion of Pakistan presented the second Carter Administration, in its final year, with its greatest foreign policy crisis. Both of the invaders accompanied their military action with a diplomatic offensive that built on years of international groundwork. Both stressed that they were forced into this action by Pakistan’s rash actions in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Both compared this to the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 1982, portraying it as a temporary measure to remove a cross-border threat rather than one seeking the extinction of Pakistan. India stressed its democratic credentials (frayed though these had become under Indira Gandhi’s increasingly autocratic rule). Both raised fears of Pakistan’s professed Islamic ideology and sought to project the Afghan resistance supported by Pakistan as anti-modern Islamic radicals who held more danger to the West and US interests than did the Soviets and Indians.
Washington was limited in its response. There was a proposal—made before the invasion—to deploy US F-15 fighters and E-3A AWACS radar aircraft to Pakistan, as had been done to Saudi Arabia during the Iran crisis of 1979. This was seen as sending a deterrent signal while being obviously defensive in nature. The general indecision of the administration’s approach to crisis management meant that this option was not effectively considered until after the shooting started. Then, it was too late to implement it.
Once again, hesitation and half measures had led to a reliance on diplomatic means that could not be backed up with force—for there had only been a limited rebuilding of US forces in the years following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Even if Washington had wished to intervene militarily, its failure to rebuild its conventional force capability, especially strategic mobility and force projection assets, meant that there would be few viable options if it came to confronting the Soviets, save for a nuclear threat that was not going to be realistic. This administration was also not going to stand up for an ally whose human rights record, military government, and commitment to an Islamic state made Washington highly uncomfortable.
Therefore, Washington made strong diplomatic protests, put forces on alert and deployed the F-15/E-3 combination to Saudi Arabia, where they waited. Two carrier battle groups were sent towards the Arabian Sea. But the real US response would be in, once again, confronting the Soviet move diplomatically as the US had at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan.
On the ground, however, the war was not living up to the potential for successes that the Soviets’ diplomatic skills had bought it. The Soviet ground forces were one of the biggest disappointments. The army that was billed as being able to advance on the Rhine at a rate of 100km (60 miles) a day in a future war in Europe found itself ebbing slowly forwards towards Quetta and Peshawar at a rate of well under 10km a day. While the Pakistani Air Force was hard-pressed by Indian and Soviet air strikes on its main operating bases, by operating from dispersal strips it was still able to keep up a strong presence over the forward areas and limit the use of helicopters for close air support, air mobility and resupply which the Soviets and their Afghan allies had counted on.
In the south, the advance on Hyderabad across the Rajastan Desert was not succeeding as well as expected. The two spearhead corps, despite the large supply dumps that had been built-up at the railheads at Barmer, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, were soon encountering supply problems. The Indian Army was not set up to support a war of rapid movement, especially in its logistics. The corps themselves were advancing—those on the flanks had their own railheads and were doing better—but the logistics support soon started to fall behind. Pakistani air attacks on the advancing armor also proved stronger than anticipated. India had brought fighters up to cover the advance from the airfields at Bikaner, Barmer, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Null. Other fighters based at Jamnagar helped cover the southern flank. But each mile the Indians advanced put them further away from their fighter cover and closer to the Pakistanis. The Indian Air Force, always jealous that too-close cooperation with the Army would imperil its independence, had put more of its assets into striking the Pakistani main operating bases.31
Pakistan was able to trade space for time. The Pakistanis moved to conserve their forces, not engaging their armored divisions against the Indian economy-of-force defense in the Punjab, but rather shifted them to meet the thrust through the south, while airpower, covering forces, and their own logistics problems attrited and delayed the Indian armored spearheads. Pakistan’s small force of AH-1 attack helicopters proved critical on several occasions, decimating Indian mechanized units until suffering losses to their Soviet-built self-propelled air defense weapons.32 The Indian rate of advance, after repeated ambushes from helicopters and covering forces, slowed as they required thorough reconnaissance before advancing.
The Indian amphibious landing was even less successful. It was supported by a force of over 40 Indian warships, including the carrier Vikrant, three missile destroyers, four missile-armed frigates, six corvettes, four minesweepers and large number of amphibious and merchant ships. The force was attacked by Pakistani Mirage fighters armed with Exocet anti-ship guided missiles. Closer in to shore, Pakistani midget submarines operated against the beachhead. However, the Indian forces ashore were soon isolated by Pakistani reserves. As the Indian Navy had to maintain a presence offshore to support the beachhead, this led to a series of naval battles. Most of the Pakistani Navy was sunk, either at sea or, in the case of those ships not operational, in Karachi harbor. However, the Indian Navy also suffered severe losses. The Vikrant, damaged by a non-contact torpedo explosion, had to be towed to safety. The Indian amphibious assault—reinforced by airdrops at night—was able to hang on, but at a high cost.33
On the northern front, Operation Trident was supposed to reach Gilgit in two weeks by way of Skardu. Limited by the high-altitude winter conditions, it advanced barely a third of the distance in that time, not making it even to Skardu. The Soviet-supplied Mi-26 helicopters that were counted on to support the thrust made sure that Indian forces could advance, but not achieve the high-altitude Blitzkrieg that the plan had required.34 In Northern Kashmir the Indians also advanced slowly.
The Soviet advance was, surprisingly, not much more successful than the Indian one. Even though they were faced by numerically inferior Pakistani forces and could call on superior Soviet airpower, they were unable to achieve their objectives. Part of the reason was that their communist Afghan allies proved no more effective against Pakistanis than they were against other Afghans. The two division-sized Soviet forces were made up mainly of composite units. There were not enough high-quality airborne troops both to spearhead the offensives and keep the lines of communi
cation across Afghanistan open. This latter requirement tied up most of the Soviet effort.
After 12 days of fighting—with ongoing US diplomatic pressure and the threat of an oil boycott of India from OPEC—Pakistan accepted a Soviet-offered cease-fire. The Pakistanis were proud of themselves. Alone, they had held off a massive two-front invasion and kept their major military forces intact. The Indian and Soviet-Afghan forces disengaged, starting with the costly amphibious foothold near Karachi. Only in the northern glaciers were the Indians able to hold on to some of their gains. Compared with the 1971 War, Pakistan had done well in combat.
Yet the impact of the war was soon to overshadow the euphoria of having staved off battlefield defeat. Pakistan realized that India had been defeated more by its failure to adapt fully to Soviet-style Blitzkrieg operations than by Pakistan’s military power. The Soviets had made their point about Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s support for the Afghan resistance remained at a constrained level, following the destruction of many of the camps and much of the support infrastructure in the border areas—though the Soviet invaders never managed to take Quetta or Peshawar. Pakistan saw that the damage done to its nuclear program had been considerable—there would now be no bomb for at least a decade—and that the next time the Indians might rely on nuclear blackmail to achieve their policy options.
Pakistan also realized how little it could count on the US to support it in a crisis. Following the events of 1980, however, this was hardly news. To Pakistan, it appeared that its future was linked to accommodation with the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and in greater links to the increasingly radicalized elements of the Islamic world. Pakistan realized that another conflict, after India had worked out its command of the operational art, might well result in its destruction as an effective nation before it had a nuclear deterrent. While the Soviet attempts to inspire division between Pakistan’s diverse and divided ethnic and economic groups had not led to collapse during the war, the shared Islamic religion was seen as one thing that could keep them together for the future. An Islamicized Pakistan would also serve as a “poison pill” that India dare not decisively defeat and annex—for fear that radical Islam would spread to India’s own Moslem population.
Sputtering Out
The Carter second term did not undo its 1980 decisions overnight. Rather than reversing them, it changed their context. Rather than being elements of a strategy of confronting the Soviets, they became impediments to achieving better relations. The INF decisions were incrementally reversed, with first the new weapons to be kept in the US and deployed only in times of a crisis and, finally, replaced by “earmarked” ballistic missile submarines, which had been used for this mission in the 1970s.
The US kept the Afghan resistance supported at a level of about $20 million annually through the second Carter administration. This kept the conflict going but—because the distribution of the aid reflected Pakistani policy concerns—this was not enough to change the dynamic on the battlefield, even though the Soviets were having little success in legitimizing the rule of their Afghan clients.
One of the key issues in determining the ultimate failure of the Afghan resistance was the US refusal to supply high-technology weapons. This had support, especially in the Congress, but was strongly opposed by the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA.35 Any president would have had difficulty in overcoming such opposition. The second Carter administration was unwilling to expend the political capital needed to win this fight. The president’s political appointees were not likely to fight for issues such as the supply of Stinger SAMs to the Afghans when this was strongly opposed by the bureaucracy. So the situation rested when Jimmy Carter left the White House in January 1985.
The conflict continued in Afghanistan. When Gorbachev succeeded to the Soviet leadership, he escalated the conflict in 1985–86 as part of his goal to “have both reform and Afghanistan.” While it would never be peaceful, after that, the Soviets were able to adapt to Afghan conditions and settle in. They were in occupation rather than in control and the body counts remained considerable, but the Soviets were able to meet their policy goals.
The Impact
The failure of the US to support the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union beyond the continued flow of covert aid was critical because it went to the heart of the nature of Cold War competition. Because of the primacy of the nuclear balance, military confrontation between superpowers was not feasible. Winston Churchill, who had been first to identify the Iron Curtain in 1946, three years later prophesied that: “Safety will become the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”36 Because war between superpowers became too costly, proxy wars became more important. Regarding Afghanistan, Carter decreed that, like Woodrow Wilson in the opening years of the Great War: “there was such a thing as being too proud to fight.” Carter would persist in his claim that he was “the first American president in 50 years who has never sent troops into combat” and that no US personnel had died in combat during his administration. He was also practical. There did not appear to be any votes in supporting a distant and alien people. This was reflected also in his refusal to intervene in insurgencies in Central America.
The Soviet success in Afghanistan did not solve the fundamental problems of governance and the economy that were beginning to become apparent in the final senescent years of Brezhnev’s rule. It did, however, suggest ways that his successors could use Soviet strengths to avoid dealing with them. It also meant that reform could be directed primarily in terms of state maintenance rather than meeting challenges by the US and the West, expressed either in terms of a military response or support for human and economic rights.
The success in Afghanistan had shown the Soviet leadership that they had backed the right horse in investing in military strength rather than in modernizing the economy or in broadening the base of the government or in expanding its legitimacy among many people who still saw themselves as under military occupation from Moscow. The Soviet Union would not extract much of value from Afghanistan, either in terms of natural resources nor even in having a base for future military operations adjacent to two key regions: Iran and the Gulf, Pakistan and the subcontinent. What it did take away of value was the lesson that military power, if effectively used, could solve Soviet problems. It also realized that, as long as the threat of Soviet military force kept foreign countries from providing aid and support, internal challenges to Moscow-approved rule could be defeated by the traditional application of stick and carrot. The promises of the Helsinki “Third Basket” on human rights were overshadowed by the reality of the KGB taking care of anyone too interested in these rights.
Internally, the success in Afghanistan strengthened the hand of the military and the security services. They had demonstrated that in return for the large-scale investment made in them throughout the Brezhnev years, they could deliver the goods in the form of imposing and maintaining Soviet policy objectives. They also demonstrated that, with strategic nuclear parity to back up the Soviet Union’s long-standing numerical superiority in conventional forces, the West could be subjected to a form of nuclear blackmail. It might be as crude and intended for a mass audience as that which was directed at Western Europe following the 1956 Suez crisis, but its ability to deter the West from supporting Afghanistan or modernizing theater nuclear weapons showed its effectiveness.
The weakness of the Western response to the invasion also demonstrated that, as long as the Soviets did not attempt to redraw the map of Europe by the direct use of force of arms, they would be unlikely to be met by force of arms. The Soviet Union was able to concentrate on imposing a solution in Afghanistan—one that emphasized force of arms rather than building a legitimate government—because it was not straining to meet US challenges. By the time Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, the cost of the continuing conflict in Afghanistan was low enough that it did not stress either the economy or the internal will of the Soviet state, however unpopular it
might be. Gorbachev’s policy—enabled by the second Carter administration—was that he could have both reform and Afghanistan, and there had been four years of US policy that did not dissuade him by escalating the costs of Moscow’s war. Gorbachev apparently remembered his mentor Yuri Andropov’s words to the Politburo back on March 17, 1979: “We will be labeled as an aggressor but in spite of that, under no circumstances can we lose Afghanistan.”37
The message of the Soviets’ ability to impose a military solution on Afghanistan was unmistakable. To the critics of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, such as Solidarity in Poland (under a harsh martial law regime) it became apparent that, as long as the Brezhnev doctrine would be backed up by force, the fundamental fact of rule from Moscow could not be challenged. It could be modified or obviated around the edges, but it became apparent that, if there would be no strong Western support to a challenge of the Soviet-dominated status quo where it was marginal and recent, as in Afghanistan, there certainly could not be one where it was long-standing and presumably vital to Soviet national interests, as was Poland. As a result, the opposition throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was marginalized
The West’s failure to provide effective help to Afghanistan was key in the future of relations with the Islamic world. The West’s unwillingness to provide effective support for the Afghan resistance made it apparent that the West would rather have a pro-Moscow regime in Afghanistan than an Islamic one. Indeed, they saw informed opinion in the West stating that an Islamic regime would certainly lead to instability and likely to the export of terrorism. The failure to stand up for Afghanistan by the West diminished its influence throughout the Islamic world. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others realized that they could not look to the US as a counter to threats in the region. This meant that the Camp David Accords, signed in March 1979, were not expanded. The rejectionist bloc was soon seen as dominant, with an increasingly embittered post-war Pakistan as a member.
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