Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism / Edition 3 available in Paperback, eBook
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism / Edition 3
- ISBN-10:
- 0745319173
- ISBN-13:
- 9780745319179
- Pub. Date:
- 08/20/2002
- Publisher:
- Pluto Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0745319173
- ISBN-13:
- 9780745319179
- Pub. Date:
- 08/20/2002
- Publisher:
- Pluto Press
Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism / Edition 3
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745319179 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2002 |
| Edition description: | 3RD |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.91(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Carter and Brezhnev in the Valley of Decision
Early in December 1971, I flew from my base in Beirut to cover the Western half of the war between India and Pakistan. The only way to reach Islamabad at the time, with West Pakistan's airports closed and under occasional Indian air attack, was overland through Afghanistan. As the Afghan airliner nosed past the snowy horizon of the Hindu Kush mountains and into a brown winter valley flanked by hills, Kabul's low buildings and higher minarets came into view. Soon my taxi threaded its way through moderate traffic, past mud huts, sternly styled administrative buildings and mosques not too unlike those I had grown used to in cities like Cairo, Damascus or Amman. There was the usual color and contrast of an Eastern city: turbaned folk on slowly trotting donkeys; women swathed in their coverall burqahs beside younger women and girls in 1950s-style Western dresses and stockings. Now and then a laden camel, decorated with red and gold tassels, growled wickedly at a passing Mercedes, BMW, or ancient Ford.
What I needed to find was the central bus station, to catch transport toward the Khyber pass and the Pakistani frontier. My quest led me down well-paved central avenues and then upward into narrow alleys and lanes, snaking around the hilly part of the city. Before long, I was able to board a bus which connected me with the truck route up the winding Khyber road. That afternoon and evening, I hitchhiked my way to Peshawar, Pakistan and a hostelry for the night before heading into Islamabad, capital of Pakistan. I was light years distant from the real war in the East – the battle for Dacca, detached East Pakistan's capital and soon, with India's help, to become the "liberated" capital of the new nation of Bangladesh.
In some cramming to overcome my ignorance at the time about South Asia, I had been re-reading James Michener's early Afghanistan novel, Caravans. Somehow this had led me into premonitions about this land, though I had crossed a mere corner of it in only a few hours. Here, Soviet and American meddling with an archaic, but slowly modernizing Muslim society, on terrain where Czarist Russia and Victorian Britain had played out their recent century of imperial rivalry called "The Great Game," would spawn mischief and evil. Both would spread into both the East and the West: a final act of the Soviet–American Cold War, ending the existence of the Soviet Union and attacking Western societies and governments and their allies.
Somewhere in my library, I had read the words of that wily British prophet and advocate of imperial power, Lord Curzon, published in 1889. For 50 years, he wrote, Afghanistan had "inspired the British people with a feeling of almost superstitious apprehension ... It is only with the greatest reluctance that Englishmen can be persuaded to have anything to do with so fateful a region ... Afghanistan has long been the Achilles' heel of Great Britain in the East. Impregnable elsewhere, she has shown herself uniformly vulnerable here."
After being checked into Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province after a jolting and dizzy ride over the mountains, I found myself, after paying outrageous passage money, in the cab of a Pakistani truck, smeared with the largely symbolic camouflage (presumably against marauding Indian jets) of mud and a few leafy branches. "CRUSH INDIA" was the brave slogan spray-painted on the truck's sideboards. After some more grueling travel, I was trying to relax and then write a story for my newspaper in a grim but adequate Peshawar hotel. It was far beyond the reach of my imagination then to suppose that in less than a decade, this austere winter town near the Himalayan foothills would be the main base for the last major armed conflict of the US–Soviet Cold War. Or that within less than two decades, it would be a rear base for a movement to spread militant Islam around the world, as a consequence of that conflict.
What occurred to bring about both these developments could be briefly encapsuled between the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971, which had ended within three weeks of my journey over the Khyber Pass, and the fateful Soviet and American interventions in Afghanistan. These two armed interventions – the Russian one direct, the American one using an army of Muslim mercenaries – would seal the fate of the Soviet empire. They also uncorked the bottle containing the genies which would, in the 1980s and 1990s, unleash terrorist violence and help to spread the culture of drugs around the world, from New York to the Philippines.
Afghanistan had largely escaped the impact of World War II. What it did not escape were the after-effects of the partition and independence of British India in 1947. Once the British had withdrawn, the claim was revived of Afghan governments in Kabul to the lands peopled by the Pushtun (called by Rudyard Kipling and many other writers Pathan) and Baluchi ethno-tribal groups, across the border in what now became Pakistan. "Pushtunistan," as it came to be called, became an inflammatory issue between Kabul and Islamabad. Pakistan's rejection of the Afghan monarchy's revanchist claims meant that landlocked Afghanistan was prevented from gaining a port on the Indian Ocean; also a traditional goal of Russian foreign policy through long generations of Czarist rule before 1917.
King Zahir Shah, who had reigned since 1933, had chosen as prime minister a member of his own family, Prince Muhammad Daoud Khan, whose devotion to the cause of Pushtunistan was one of the factors which drew him somewhat closer to the Soviet Union, after a long post-World War II balance between Soviet and American influence. Each pursued aid projects and sought in this way and others to purchase more influence. From 1956 and 1961 onward, Moscow agreed to equip and train the Afghan army and air force respectively, after the US refused to sell arms to Kabul or provide it with loans on favorable terms. Soon, the Soviet Union began to build huge infrastructure projects of strategic importance, effectively seeking to incorporate the ancient monarchy into the power system of the Soviet borderlands: a highway from the border of Soviet Tajikistan to Kabul; port facilities along the Amu Darya river (where during the Afghan war of the 1980s, CIA-backed incursions of Afghan guerrillas and saboteurs into Soviet territory nearly provoked a major Soviet–Pakistani, if not Soviet–American war).
A giant new military air base was built at Bagram. In Afghanistan's north, development projects flourished, stimulated partly by discovery of huge reserves of natural gas in Jowzjan Province, close to the Soviet frontier. By 1968 Soviet engineers had completed a gas pipeline to pump low-priced Afghan gas to Soviet Central Asian industrial centers; a flow rarely interrupted even during the 1979–89 war, despite sabotage training given to prospective Afghan saboteurs by the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). The gas line was one of the few enduring Russian successes of the period. By 1985, Moscow was claiming annual gas production of 2400 million cubic meters (m m3). Only three percent was used for Afghan needs; all the rest went to the Soviet economy.
Despite competition from US aid and that from West Germany, France, Russia, China and India, the USSR had loaned Afghanistan so much money, much of it at heavy interest charges, that by 1972 the Soviets were Afghanistan's biggest creditor. They had committed close to a billion dollars between 1957 and 1973. This was about 60 percent of all the civilian foreign aid reaching the country. A liberal constitution which King Zahir Shah initiated in 1964 brought in parliamentary democracy. Political parties, mainly small ones, flourished for a time: the Leftist one increasingly under Communist influence; the others growingly under the sway of Islamist ideology. Both the Communists and the Islamists militated most effectively in the high schools and Kabul's university, and among junior officers of the armed forces. The Leftists and Communists founded the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Its two wings were called Parcham (Banner) and Khalq (The People). Parcham recruited adherents chiefly from Persian-speaking, young urban elites; Khalq from mainly Pushtuns (Pathans) from a more humble rural background. On the fringe were a few small extremist groups, such as the "Maoist" and definitely non-religious group called Sholah-e-Javed (Eternal Flame), attracting non-Pushtuns, Shi'a Muslims (as opposed to the Sunni majority of about two-thirds of the population), and others discontented with the functioning of the Left-leaning constitutional monarchy of Zahir Shah.
Progressively, the King's indecisiveness and, some said, weakness, failed to prevent erosion of the democratic principles he had helped to launch with the new constitution of 1964. He was, his critics remarked, too spineless to support the more honest and capable prime ministers, five of whom tried successively to rule until 1973. Much of the blame for the mishandling of affairs, including foreign relief help at the time of the drought and famine which in 1972 killed up to 100,000 Afghans, fell on the King's son-in-law, General Abdul Wali. Then, in 1973, while the King was abroad, a junta of armed forces officers staged a sudden military coup, proclaiming a Republic and the monarchy's end. Their figurehead and in some senses their real leader, was one of Zahir Shah's cousins, Muhammad Daoud, who had functioned as an effective foreign minister from 1953 to 1963, but who was banned from power during the period of Zahir's democratic experience. Daoud tried to rule with an iron fist. He largely neglected social and economic problems. Western commentators – few of whom really understood Afghan politics or society then, nor understood their complexities later on, when the West became embroiled in its proxy war with the Russians – wrongly called Daoud "the Red Prince." They believed, though the Soviets themselves did not, that the support of Leftist PDPA elements in his successful bid for power made him automatically a tool or a satellite of Moscow.
The events which would provoke the fateful Soviet military intervention of December 1979 could be said to begin with the reunion of the two rival PDPA factions, Parcham and Khalq, in 1977. It was fragile and temporary, but it helped to make possible another military coup, this time fatal to Daoud who with most of his family was killed resisting it. Their murders happened on April 27, 1978. They brought the PDPA, now identified by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other Western agencies as Communist and pro-Soviet, to power at last. The winning faction in his "Saur" or April Revolution, as it was called, was the Khalq, numerically superior to the less radical and more cautious Parcham. From April 1978, the new president, Nur Muhammad Taraki, was a sort of hack Marxist writer, and a front man for the much more able politician, Hafizullah Amin.
From the beginning of Taraki's rule, the Kremlin of President Leonid Brezhnev carefully watched every development in Afghanistan. It suspected that Amin was pro-American, and possibly an agent of the CIA. In March 1979, there was a major revolt in Herat province against Taraki's government. Soviet intelligence noted that it was supported from abroad, mostly by the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeiny, the fiery cleric who had returned to Tehran from exile to become Iran's supreme religious and political chief following the Shah's departure in February 1979. Several Soviet advisory personnel were killed in suppressing the Herat uprising. To keep an eye on Amin, now prime minister, and other members of Taraki's clique who might have pro-Western leanings or worse, the Kremlin sent Vassily Safronchuk, a competent senior diplomat fluent in English, the foreign language in which Amin was most at home, to keep an eye on things in Kabul, as counselor to the Soviet Ambassador in Kabul, A.M. Puzanov.
Safronchuk found Amin to be "of middle height and solid build, with well-pronounced Pushtu features, a vigorous and polite man [who] if he wanted to, could charm any visitor from the very first." After hearing Amin's initial protestations of loyalty and friendship to Soviet Communist principles and people, Safronchuk found him actually to be "a commonplace petty bourgeois and an extreme Pushtu nationalist," both traits which Moscow considered dangerous. Amin, Safronchuk reported, was a political schemer with "boundless political ambitions and a craving for power" which he would "stoop to anything and commit any crimes" to fulfill.
Because of Amin's "suspicious" contacts with the Americans and persistent signs that the CIA, Iran and Pakistan had all begun to encourage agitation and ferment among the Islamist-minded tribal leaders (especially after the Herat uprising in March 1979), Taraki and Amin both began urging Moscow of the need for a "limited contingent" – soon to become the favorite phrase of Kremlin bureaucrats seeking to justify their military intervention – of Soviet troops. In June 1979, says Safronchuk, Amin at one of their first meetings asked him to inform the Soviet leadership of his and Taraki's request for sending "two or three battalions" of Red Army troops "to protect certain military communication lines and the Baghram airfield." Safronchuk says he told Amin he doubted there would be a positive response. Moscow, he said, feared the arrival of Soviet troops on Afghanistan's territory could be used by the West, Pakistan, Iran and China, all viewed as adversaries, to "discredit the Afghan revolution," and would be viewed in the Kremlin as an admission that the Taraki–Amin regime was weak.
During the summer of 1979, during which the principal anti-Soviet "hawk" in President Jimmy Carter's administration, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, got Carter to sign a secret directive for covert aid to the nascent moujahidin, or anti-Russian resistance fighters, more trouble developed for Taraki, Amin and the Soviets. On June 23, an army mutiny erupted in the heart of Kabul, close to the central Chandaval bazaar. On August 6, carefully monitored by the CIA and Pakistani observers, if not directly encouraged by them, an Afghan army unit mutinied and tried to seize the ancient fortress of Balahisar, on the southeastern slope of the hill called Shir-Darviz, inside Kabul. From this fortress, guns could be trained on all the capital's main streets and neighborhoods. The Soviet diplomats and military advisors in Kabul, as well as the KGB station, suspected that Amin had provoked these rebellions, or had known about them in advance. In any case, these events consolidated Amin's power over the Afghan armed services The Soviets judged that Amin, long on friendly terms with the US Embassy in Kabul, was aiming for a personal dictatorship, possibly in collusion with the Americans.
Selig Harrison, former Washington Post correspondent whose writings on South Asian events are authoritative, describes the setting for "Moscow's monumental blunder" in invading Afghanistan. He depicts a "Byzantine sequence of murderous Afghan intrigue complicated by turf wars between rival Soviet intelligence agencies and the undercover manipulations of agents for ... contending foreign powers" (presumably the US, the USSR, Iran, Pakistan, India and Britain). The Kremlin's fatal blunder, taken by a small coterie of President Leonid Brezhnev's advisors, and imposed when Brezhnev himself, "ailing and alcoholic," imposed the secret decision without calling a full Politburo meeting, "disregarding the opposition of three key generals in his Army General Staff."
Many of the riddles and mysteries of the decision-making process in both Moscow and Washington concerning Afghanistan were elucidated in Oslo, Norway, in September 1995. Grandly entitled "Afghanistan and the Collapse of Détente," this was the fourth and final meeting of senior Russian and American policymakers, diplomats, soldiers and intelligence operatives; many, though not all, retired. Most if not all the participants took part in the crucial decisions in both capitals concerning intervention in Afghanistan's internal turmoil; the last great political chess game and military contest of the Cold War. Some important truths emerged from the meetings.
At the Oslo conference on Afghanistan, participants included key senior aides of President Carter: Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor; Admiral Stansfield Turner, CIA director; General William Odom, director of Soviet affairs in the National Security Council; Dr. Marshall Shulman, a special assistant to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (who was not present at Oslo), Mark Garrison, a senior counselor at the US Embassy in Moscow and Dr. Gary Sick, former US Navy Captain and Iran expert on the National Security Council.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Unholy Wars"
by .
Copyright © 2002 John K. Cooley.
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