The Road to Afghanistan

Introduction Hundreds of books—memoirs, histories, fiction, poetry, chronicles of military units, and journalistic essays—have been written about the Soviet war in Afghanistan. If the topic has not yet been entirely exhausted, it certainly has been very well documented. But what led up to the invasion? How was the decision to bring troops into Afghanistan made? What was the basis for the decision? Who opposed the intervention and who had the final word? And what kind of mystical country is this that lures, with an almost maniacal insistence, the most powerful world states into its snares? In the nineteenth and early twentieth century it was the British, in the 1980s it was the Soviet Union, and now America and its allies continue the legacy. Impoverished and incredibly backward Afghanistan, strange as it may seem, is not just a normal country. Due to its strategically important location in the center of Asia, the mountainous country has long been in the sights of more than its immediate neighbors. But woe to anyone who arrives there with weapon in hand, hoping for an easy gain—the barefoot and illiterate Afghans consistently bury the hopes of the strange foreign soldiers who arrive along with battalions of tanks and strategic bombers. To understand Afghanistan is to see into your own future. To comprehend what happened there, what happens there continually, is to avoid great tragedy. One of the critical moments in the modern history of Afghanistan is the period from April 27, 1978, when the “April Revolution” took place in Kabul and the leftist People’s Democratic Party seized control of the country, until December 27, 1979, when Soviet special forces, obeying their “international duty,” eliminated the ruling leader and installed 1 another leader of the same party in his place. This twenty-month period is the key to unlocking an understanding of many of the events and on-going developments in the Middle East. The bloody coup d’état of April 1978, in the course of which revolutionaries killed President Mohammad Daoud, his family, and his allies, was the first link in a lengthy chain of plots, intrigues, and murders over the next years. It was the April Revolution’s suppression of Islamic fundamentalist forces that both stymied the Islamists’ reach for power and subsequently facilitated their consolidation of forces. It also fostered international support for their cause from both eastern and western states. The April Revolution was the world’s last (and for the time being) social coup, the executors of which proclaimed noble aspirations but suffered a devastating defeat. The agents of the coup to a large extent dug their own graves. Why were the masses unsupportive of, and often even tremendously resistant to, the revolutionaries’ aspirations to lead Afghanistan out of the darkness of the medieval ages, to conduct economic reforms, and to transform the country by instilling democratic principles? How is it that the Kremlin, quite pleased with the prior bourgeois feudal regime of Mohammad Daoud, and at first quite nonchalant about the April Revolution, became the revolution’s de facto hostage? Who were the agents responsible for the murder of Adolf Dubs, and what motivated the assassination? Was Hafizullah Amin an agent of the CIA? What were the various roles of the politicians, military personnel, special services, and diplomats behind those events? To this day there are more questions than answers. 2 When the Kremlin’s “international duty”/intervention began in 1979, only a “limited contingent of Soviet troops” was envisaged. The operation very quickly escalated into a prolonged regional engagement, which led to direct conflicts between the Soviet Union and a broad coalition of Western countries, the Islamic East, and China. By the time the conflict was concluded nearly ten years later, it had made an indelible impact on the world. It can be considered the final note of the great standoff that comprised the essence of global politics during the preceding decades. The debate over whether Soviet troops should have crossed their southern borders in those years will not die down any time soon. Was the intervention an inevitable response to dangerous threats posed by external enemies or was it a fatal mistake? Were there other means to prevent the dangerous machinations of Islamic radicals and retain Afghanistan in the sphere of Soviet influence? Supporters on either side have weighty arguments to justify their positions. One thing, however, is obvious. The enemies of the Soviet Union capitalized on the strategic opportunity afforded by the intervention brilliantly, first by enmeshing Moscow in an exhaustive war of attrition and then by labeling the USSR an “evil empire,” a designation that would stay with the nation for a long time. The perspective that contends that the war in Afghanistan expedited the processes that eventually led to the destruction of the Soviet project and state is widely accepted and disseminated. It cannot be denied that the war had a terribly negative impact on the Soviet economy, corrupted the moral foundation of the state, and drastically reduced the number of the USSR’s international allies. 3 However, if one examines the military activity of the Fortieth Army, as well as the measures implemented by thousands of Soviet advisors in Afghanistan, it should be acknowledged that by the time of the “limited contingent’s” departure from the DRA*, many of their goals had been accomplished. It can be said with confidence that were it not for the chaos that marked the minds and actions of the Russian leaders following the collapse of the USSR, and were it not for their abandonment of the Afghan president Najibullah, who was left to face his powerful enemies on his own, the history of the Middle East would have developed very differently. There would be no Talibs, drugs, terrorists, or subsequent invasion by NATO coalition forces. This, however, is conjecture. It is obvious that the Soviet Union was not led into Afghanistan by the capricious desires of individual politicians within the USSR’s Communist Party, but rather by the confluence of a great deal of both objective and subjective circumstances, the logical result of geopolitical positioning over the preceding three decades of the Cold War. For the authors of this book, Afghanistan and the tragic events that we describe do not belong to some fantastic and abstract story, but to our very lives. One of us, as a staff member of the Soviet embassy in Kabul, witnessed the first stage of the April Revolution first-hand and even directly participated in the events. The other author, as a journalist and historian, has visited the mystical country many times and has written countless articles, books, and a dissertation on the subject. In our work we naturally rely upon not only our own memories, but on open sources (books, articles, and monographs published in Russia and abroad), archival documents (many of which are quoted here for the first time), as well as invaluable eyewitness accounts and reports from those who participated in the events (a * The official name of the state of Afghanistan from Apr. 30, 1978-Nov. 30, 1987 4 full listing of which is provided at the end of the book). We would like to express our enormous gratitude to all of our sources. Despite our backgrounds as historians, we intentionally decided against relating a dry point-by-point account of what transpired, and opted instead for the more ambitious approach of political investigation in the form of a belles-lettres narrative. We believe that such a format will attract a broad readership interested in the key moments of modern history. All of the situations described in the book are real. The conversations in which the authors did not directly participate have been reconstructed based on archival documents and the narratives of the actual participants. During our work on the book we verified every oral account. There is not one fabricated character in the book. A few names of KGB operatives who were working undercover in Kabul have been changed at their request. 5 Chapter 1: VIRUS: How the invasion of Afghanistan infected us. How we were infected by the invasion of Afghanistan Springtime brings the roar of thunderstorms to the capital of Afghanistan. The clear and sunny morning skies darken perceptibly as the lengthening days draw towards noon and heavy black clouds creep over the mountain ranges, encompassing the city. The faint glean of heat that shimmers on the ground is sensed by the whole human organism before the sight recognizes it as the signal of the day’s transition from a radiant morning to a sweltering afternoon. As the storm approaches, the lack of oxygen creates the impression that the encroaching thunderclouds are wringing out any remaining fresh air. In these moments the earlier polyphonic harmony of the city loses cohesion and the noises of pedestrian activity begin to sound discordantly amplified and distorted by the incipient gloom. The wind picks up as nascent dust devils carry discarded papers, plastic bags, and other trash, all the while stinging skin and eyes with irritating sand. Suddenly a flash of light, a delayed report of thunder, and a few ripe, warm drops fall scattered in the dusty streets, announcing the imminent downpour. Soon lightning will flash almost incessantly. The heavy storm clouds, laden with electricity, rapidly approach the capital until bolts of lightning seem to strike from directly overhead. Thunder becomes a continuous rumble. The storm will continue for an hour or two before the thunder relents and the black clouds begin to disperse. The fallen rainwater forms puddles that are sucked into the greedy soil right before your eyes.

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