Against All Enemies (11 page)

These actions by the Reagan administration were defensive. What they did in Afghanistan, however, was go on the offensive, in a way that drew the United States further into the region.

In the mid-1980s, as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence at the State Department, I produced a series of analyses of the cost to the Soviet Union of fighting the proxy wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan. We had only estimates, inferences, of the effect on the Kremlin treasury. Nonetheless, even the low-end guesses would place a serious burden on what was already a badly underperforming Soviet economy. That was, of course, what President Reagan and CIA director Bill Casey had hoped, that by turning the tables, going on the counteroffensive in the proxy wars and by rapidly increasing our own defense spending, America could force the Kremlin to respond in ways that would overtax the Soviet economy.

Afghanistan offered Reagan and Casey their best opportunity to drain the other superpower. Moscow had overcommitted there. Rather than just manipulate the Kabul government and secure the area around the capital, after invading in late 1979, the Red Army had decided to pacify the country. It was a major deployment for which they were not ready, equipped, or trained. The initial fighting showed the weaknesses of the Red Army's conscript divisions, but Moscow had responded with Spetsnaz Special Forces and Airborne troops. They began to employ heavily armed helicopters and new close-support aircraft, which were beginning in 1985 to have devastating effects.

Yet, despite their rhetoric, the Reagan administration had not significantly funded the Afghan resistance. The Afghan war analysts on my staff kept numerical indicators of the fighting, as well as anecdotal information on the spirit of the Afghan fighters. By 1985 the analysts were growing concerned that the tide had shifted in favor of Moscow.

My boss and mentor was a career ambassador, but hardly from central casting. Morton Abramowitz filled his darkened office with cigar smoke, and left ashes in his wake. He was oblivious to the fact that what little hair he had was often standing straight up. He had saved hundreds of thousands of Cambodians when, as U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, he had initiated a cross-border feeding program. Later, as Ambassador to Turkey, he would be responsible for starting a similar effort to save the Kurds in the wake of the First Gulf War. He focused not on appearances, but on getting things done.

“Don't just tell me we're losing, Clarke, tell me what the fuck to do about it.” That was how Abramowitz received our analysis of the shifting tide in Afghanistan.

Our analysis had focused on the Hind-D helicopter as being the thing that had worked for the Soviets. Afghan bullets bounced off its armor plate, while the helicopter's rockets ripped apart the hidden mujahedeen camps. “We need to give them Stingers to shoot down the Hinds,” I shot back.

“Agh, come up with a new thought. CIA and the Pentagon won't agree to release the missiles.” Mort was relighting the stub of a cigar. “You wanna do something? Go see your friend Richard Perle, the Prince of Darkness, get him to release the Stingers.”

Perle was Assistant Secretary of Defense and greatly distrustful of the State Department, whom he saw as capitulationists and accommodationists in the Cold War. Following the military coup in Turkey in 1984, Perle had flown to Ankara to counteract the State Department's denunciations of the takeover. His message: deal with the instability, but lay out a roadmap for a return to civilian rule. Perle charmed the Turkish pashas, as the four-star generals were known. He clearly loved their country, insisting on traveling throughout it and buying rugs and copper pots. I had been assigned by State to go along on the trip to keep an eye on Perle. Instead, I too had been charmed by his manner and persuaded by his logic about the strategic importance of Turkey.

Now, at Abramowitz's urging, I used my nascent friendship to have a private meeting with Perle. I confronted him with the Pentagon's refusal to send Stingers to Afghanistan. He at first denied it, but then hit an intercom button and asked an aide whether it was true. “God damn it! Who blocked it? Well, fuck the CIA!” He then hit another intercom button and, more politely, asked, “Can I stick my head in on Cap for a second?”

Perle left me alone in his office for a long time while he went down from the fourth floor to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's huge office on the Pentagon's third-floor E Ring. When he came back, his explanation was simple: “Cap didn't know about it.” I was still wondering whether his knowing about it now meant that he would approve the release of the Stingers to the mujahedeen. “No U.S. Army on the ground in Afghanistan. The muj will have to come out and be trained in Pakistan.”

With State, Defense, and the National Security Council in favor of deploying Stingers and with heavy congressional pressure, CIA relented. The training was over and the weapons smuggled in by September 1986. Within weeks of the deployment of the infrared-seeking Stinger antiaircraft missiles and the wire-guided British Javelins, the mujahedeen had figured out a clever strategy to employ them in tandem to deal with the Soviets' countermeasures. The number of Hind and MiG kills started slowly, but then accelerated dramatically. Over 270 Soviet aircraft were shot down. Then the Hind kills stopped. The Soviets were no longer flying their airborne tanks into harm's way.

The overall covert action program expanded greatly in Reagan's second term. Unclassified studies show that it grew from $35 million in 1982 to $600 million in 1987. With few exceptions, the funds bought matériel that was given to Afghan fighters by Pakistan's intelligence service. CIA personnel were not authorized to enter Afghanistan, except rarely.

State's analysts were not cleared to know details about the U.S. covert action program, including the Stingers. They could, however, see the effects in the war and they heard the Afghans talking about the Stinger. By 1987, they told me the tide was shifting back to the Afghans. Soon they predicted that the Soviets would pull back to Kabul. They were wrong. The Soviets agreed in 1988 to pull back all the way out of the country, and did so the following year.

Pakistani military intelligence, funded by the U.S. and Saudi governments and “charitable” organizations, had turned groups of nineteenth-century Afghan tribesmen and several thousand Arab volunteers into a force that had crippled the mighty Red Army. The Stinger had been the final element they had needed.

Throughout the war, the Soviets had restrained themselves from bombing the mujahedeen sanctuary and U.S. staging base that was Pakistan. On a few occasions their fighter aircraft had strayed over the border, but they had taken American cautions seriously and not attacked. Following the Geneva agreement that called for a quick Soviet withdrawal, two things happened. First, the major base used by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence to stockpile arms for the Afghans mysteriously blew up in an explosion of immense size. The nearby city of Rawalpindi shook for hours. Second, a few months later, the military ruler of Pakistan died in an unexplained aircraft crash. I could never find the evidence to prove that Soviet KGB had ordered these two acts as payback for their bitter defeat, but in my bones I knew they had.

The word of the death of Pakistan's ruler came to me as Abramowitz and I stood on the deck of the USS
Theodore Roosevelt
in the Atlantic. A Navy officer tapped on my helmet to get my attention over the roar of F-14s taking off. He signaled for us to step inside the tower so we could talk. “State Ops just radioed us. They want you two back in Washington. There's a COD getting ready to take you direct to Andrews. Seems the Pakistani president died in a plane crash.”

I was glad we would have an S-3 Carrier Onboard Delivery aircraft, but puzzled by why the State Department leadership should want us back so fast. I asked him, “What else do you know about it?”

“Oh, yeah,” the officer replied, “the American ambassador. He was on board the plane, too.” Abramowitz paled. I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach. The American ambassador was Arnold L. Raphel, Abramowitz's close friend and my mentor. He had risen rapidly through the State Department, demonstrating great understanding of South Asia and the Middle East, cleaning up messes others had made in Lebanon and elsewhere. Despite his successes and responsibilities, Arnie, as everyone called him, found time to encourage and advise younger officers and to fight against sexism in the Foreign Service. In the years that followed, as we stumbled through one Middle East crisis after another, some of us would often wonder what would have happened had Arnie not been on that aircraft. The American government had many highly competent experts on the Soviet Union, but few senior officers who could both speak Urdu and Farsi and make things happen in Washington.

Were we right to have armed the Afghans with Stingers and other weapons? Was it a misjudgment to have involved the Saudis? There are many who believe that these were mistaken Cold War policies that laid the seeds of al Qaeda.

Even with hindsight, I believe the Reagan administration was right to assist the Afghans and to drain the Soviet Union's resolve. We had sought to end the proxy wars by proving to Moscow that these conflicts could be a two-way street. Our security was directly affected by those struggles. The stakes in the Cold War were high. We also sought to help a people who were occupied by an invader who had come to set up a puppet government. The Stinger missiles were largely expended in the war or destroyed in the Rawalpindi blast. Others were bought back. Some were not accounted for, but became inoperative when their unique batteries expired. None were ever used by terrorists, although Stinger became a generic name for shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles around the world.

The involvement of the Saudis and other Arab states was also prudent. Not only did it reduce the financial cost to the United States, but it also proved to those governments that we had common goals and beliefs, despite our differences about Israel. The U.S. did, however, make four mistakes during the Reagan administration that affect us today.

First, the fact that the CIA became dependent upon the Pakistani intelligence service to aid the Afghans meant that we developed fewer ties and loyalties among the Afghans that we should have been able to generate for our multibillion-dollar effort. (Later in the 1990s, CIA would also make a similar mistake, failing to put U.S. operatives into the country to kill bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership, relying on hired Afghans instead.)

Second, when the U.S. engaged the Saudis, Egyptians, and other Arab states in the fighting against the Soviets, America sought (or acquiesced in) the importation into Afghanistan and Pakistan of an army of “Arabs” without considering who they were or what would happen to them after the Soviets left. The Saudis took the lead in assembling the group of volunteers. The Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki, relied upon a man from a wealthy construction family that was close to the Saudi royal family. Turki empowered a son of that family, one Usama bin Laden, to recruit, move, train, and indoctrinate the Arab volunteers in Afghanistan. Many of those recruited were misfits in their own societies. Many had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, a longtime fundamentalist group that had threatened Egypt and Syria. Many of these volunteers later became the al Qaeda network of affiliated terrorist groups, staging campaigns in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere.

Third, America's quick pull-out of assets and resources following the Soviet defeat left us with little influence over, or understanding of, what happened next. The United States sought to reduce the burden of Afghanistan on our foreign policy and our intelligence budget, largely abandoning the country to its own fate. (Later, after our invasion in 2001, we would also try to influence Afghanistan on the cheap.) Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the Afghan factions eventually defeated the Soviet puppet regime and then set upon each other. Kabul and other cities were destroyed in the civil war, forcing huge refugee flows into Pakistan on top of those who had fled there during the long war with the Soviets. Pakistani intelligence, whom we had empowered in Afghanistan, used its power and influence to bring order out of the chaos through a new religious faction, the Taliban. The Pakistanis also facilitated the Taliban's use of the Arab Afghan War veterans, al Qaeda, to fight for the Taliban.

Fourth, the U.S. did little to help Pakistan understand or deal with the corrosive effects on its society caused by the mix of millions of Afghan refugees and the wealthy, fanatic, misfit Arabs who came and stayed. Instead, concerned with Pakistan's nuclear program, the U.S. cut aid to the country. The aid cutoff did not, of course, end the nuclear program. Rather, it insured that the country that was deploying nuclear weapons was politically unstable and threatened with a takeover by fanatics.

The Red Army and the Soviet Union were greatly changed by the war in Afghanistan. As the body bags and the lies had piled up, the average citizen's faith in the Communist Party had further declined, as had the standard of living. Changes, however, also came in Afghanistan.

The withdrawal of the last Soviet soldier took place in February 1989, the first full month of the administration of George H. W. Bush. It was just a matter of time until the pro-Moscow puppet government fell. In Afghanistan a new power structure was emerging. The new players were the tribal chiefs who had led fighting forces, the Pakistani military intelligence officers who had conveyed the American supplies to them, and the Arab volunteers who had brought money and Korans.

As they sat together in Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad, they mused on what was now happening to the Soviet Union. Among them were the Saudi Usama bin Laden, the Pakistani Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the Indonesian known as Hambali, and others we did not know then. In the wake of their Afghan defeat (and, the Arabs believed, because of that defeat), the Soviet Union was now unraveling. Some Afghans and some Arab fighters pondered what you could do with money, Korans, and a few good weapons. You could overthrow an infidel government. More important, you could destroy a superpower. They just had. It was now 1990.