Babrak called for the ‘severest punishment’ of Amin’s former associates and the execution of those responsible for the deaths of Soviet troops. He also requested the installation of direct telephone lines to connect him not merely with Brezhnev but also with the four members of the Politburo’s Afghanistan Commission (Andropov, Ustinov, Gromyko and Ponomarev) and Kryuchkov.
5
Ponomarev informed the Politburo, ‘Babrak Karmal listens very attentively to the advice of our comrades. The leadership of the [Afghan] Party now has a backbone.’
6
At the beginning of February 1980 Andropov visited Kabul for talks with Karmal and the main members of his regime. It is clear from the tone of his report to the Politburo on his return that Andropov consistently talked down to his fraternal Party comrades: ‘. . . I stressed . . . the necessity of a quick correction of all the shortcomings and mistakes which had been tolerated earlier . . . I particularly pointed to the correct distribution of his responsibilities by every comrade.’ Encouraged by the obsequious tone of the Afghan comrades, Andropov returned in optimistic mood:
First of all, it is necessary to note directly that the situation in Afghanistan is stabilizing now. This is evident from all the data. In the conversation which I had with Com[rade] Karmal, he cited in great detail what has been done in the month since the removal of Amin from power. Although the situation in the country does continue to be complex, and demands the most urgent and pressing measures aimed at its stabilization, the main thing is that now the leadership of Afghanistan understands its fundamental tasks and is doing everything possible so that the situation really does stabilize.
Since Andropov did not doubt that he had correctly identified the measures required ‘to liquidate the contradictions which had arisen within the [Afghan] Party and in the country’, it only remained for the Karmal regime to implement these measures. Andropov was ideologically incapable of grasping the fundamental obstacles which stood in the way of the imposition of a Communist regime with very little support on a large, staunchly Muslim state. Ustinov’s comments on Andropov’s report to the Politburo were notably less optimistic. It would, he said, take at least a year, perhaps a year and a half, for the situation in Afghanistan to stabilize.
7
Andropov’s extraordinary misjudgement on the pace of ‘stabilization’ in Afghanistan was quickly exposed by events in Kabul. From 20 to 23 February, only a fortnight after Andropov’s report to the Politburo, there were mass anti-Soviet demonstrations in the capital. Martial law was declared and over 2,000 Soviet troops, more than 1,000 Afghan troops, 73 tanks, 240 personnel carriers (mostly armed) and 207 sorties by Soviet and Afghan aircraft flying low over the city and its environs to intimidate the population were required to restore order. The KGB reported that over 900 demonstrators were arrested.
8
According to other reports, hundreds of demonstrators were killed and thousands arrested (and later executed).
9
The Kabul demonstration and
mujahideen
attacks elsewhere in the country finally destroyed the illusion that Soviet troops would have to do no more than garrison major cities and provide logistical support while Afghan government troops mopped up local pockets of resistance to the Karmal regime. Most of the countryside, it now recognized, was in the hands of the rebels.
10
In March the Soviet general staff ordered Marshal Sergei Sokolov, who had commanded the invasion forces, to ‘commence joint operations with [the Afghan army] with the mission of eliminating armed bands of the opposition . . .’ Soviet forces were not equipped for the war which awaited them. They had been trained to fight a modern enemy who would take up defensive positions on the northern European plain. The
mujahideen
, however, declined to dig in and wait to be attacked by Soviet artillery. Not merely were Soviet forces untrained for the problems of fighting Afghan guerrillas; the general staff had barely studied even their own experience of irregular warfare in the Second World War or against post-war Ukrainian and Baltic partisans - let alone the experience of foreign forces. Boots suitable for mountain combat, like clothing and sleeping bags for winter warfare in temperatures as low as minus 30° centigrade, were in short supply. The most prized trophy of war for a Soviet soldier was to capture a Western-manufactured
mujahideen
sleeping bag which, unlike his own, was warm, waterproof and lightweight. Though Soviet military equipment improved in the course of the war, health care remained primitive. Eight times as many soldiers died from infectious diseases as died in hospital while being treated for combat wounds. Over 40 per cent of those who served in Afghanistan contracted viral hepatitis.
11
There were numerous cases also of addiction to easily available opium-based drugs.
The reluctant recognition in March 1980 that the Soviet Union was at war was a major personal embarrassment for the previously rashly optimistic Afghanistan Commission of the Politburo and, in particular, for Andropov, who only the month before had insisted that all available intelligence demonstrated that ‘the situation in Afghanistan is stabilizing now’. The Commission report on 7 April made no mention of its earlier errors of judgement. Instead it resorted to specious self-justification. Events since Soviet military intervention had, the Commission insisted, confirmed ‘our assessment that this was a timely and correct action’. The Babrak Karmal regime, ‘with comprehensive assistance from the Soviet Union’, had ‘in general correctly outlined the tasks’ confronting it. As a result of Soviet and Afghan military operations, ‘the counter-revolutionary forces would probably be unable to carry out any large-scale military actions’ and engage instead in ‘terrorist acts and small group actions’ - though there remained the possibility of ‘massive uprisings’ in some parts of the country. Though the Commission did not explicitly disavow its earlier confident assertion ‘that the new leadership of the DRA will be able to find an effective way to stabilize completely the situation in the country’, it acknowledged that no solution was yet in sight:
The situation in Afghanistan remains complicated and tense. The class struggle, represented in armed counter-revolutionary insurrections, encouraged and actively supported from abroad, is occurring in circumstances where a genuine unity of the PDPA is still absent, where the state and Party apparatus is weak in terms of organization and ideology, which is reflected in the practical non-existence of local government organs, where financial and economic difficulties are mounting, and where the combat readiness of the Afghan armed forces and the people’s militia is still insufficient.
The Commission could not bring itself to mention the glaring personal weaknesses of Babrak Karmal, whom it had eulogized only three months earlier.
12
The Kabul residency reported that Karmal had developed an absurd sense of self-importance, claiming to be a major world statesman of even greater stature than Fidel Castro. Yet, at the same time, Karmal was plagued with self-doubt, found it difficult to take decisions and had begun to drink heavily. The KGB also disapproved of the fact that Karmal had made Anahita Ratebzad (the only female member of the Politburo), with whom it believed was having an affair, Minister of Education. Nepotism and favouritism towards friends and relations were, it reported, rife within the Party leadership. The Interior Minister, Sayed Gulabzoy, a long-serving KGB agent, expressed surprise to the Kabul residency that Karmal’s Soviet advisers seemed unwilling to criticize to his face either his alcoholism or his poor performance as Party leader. As the months passed, Karmal made less and less pretence of seeking to reconcile his Parcham faction of the PDPA with the Khalq. He complained to his Soviet advisers: ‘As long as you keep my hands bound and do not let me deal with the Khalq faction, there will be no unity in the PDPA and the government cannot become strong. There can be no organic unity as long as there are Khalqists in the Party. They tortured and killed us. They still hate us. They are the enemies of unity!’
While in Moscow for medical treatment in December 1980, Niyaz Muhammad, the head of the economic department of the PDPA Central Committee, told the KGB that all Afghan officials had been instructed to assure their Soviet advisers that Party unity had been achieved and that Khalq supporters had been punished for revealing the persistence of chronic divisions. Muhammad gave a damning account of the nepotism and incompetence of the Karmal regime: ‘Government positions are given to friends. The people do not support the Party at all. The leadership thinks that the USSR will solve all the economic and military problems. All they can think about are motor cars, positions and amusements.’
13
The KGB’s main immediate responsibility in Afghanistan after the installation of the Karmal regime was the creation of a new Afghan security service, Khedamat-e Etala’at-e Dawlati (KHAD), to replace Amin’s bloodthirsty secret police. KHAD was trained, organized and largely financed by the KGB.
14
In January 1980 the KGB selected as head of KHAD the energetic, brutal thirty-two-year-old Muhammad Najibullah, a man capable of intimidating opponents by his mere physical presence. Codenamed POTOMOK, he had probably previously been recruited as a KGB agent.
15
Embarrassed by the reference to Allah in his surname, Najibullah asked to be known instead as ‘Comrade Najib’. Karmal gave a public assurance that KHAD, unlike its predecessor, would not ‘strangle, pressure or torture the people’:
On the contrary there will be established within the government framework an intelligence service to protect democratic freedoms, national independence and sovereignty, the interests of the revolution, the people and the state, as well as to neutralize under PDPA [Communist Party] leadership the plots hatched by external enemies of Afghanistan.
KHAD, however, proved even more brutal than its predecessor. In the cruel conditions of an unwinnable counter-insurgency war, the KGB revived on Afghan soil some of the horrors of its Stalinist past.
16
Amnesty International assembled evidence of ‘widespread and systematic torture of men, women and children’. A common theme in its reports was the presence of Soviet advisers directing the interrogations, much as they had done during the Stalinist purges in eastern Europe a generation earlier.
17
Najibullah sometimes executed prisoners himself. His preferred method, according to survivors of his prisons, was to beat his victims to the ground, then kick them to death.
18
As well as taking responsibility for Afghan security and intelligence, the KGB also played a direct part in the war through its special forces - especially the KASKAD (‘Cascade’) units, each of 145 men, set up to locate, penetrate and destabilize the
mujahideen
.
19
Probably their most successful tactic was to form bogus
mujahideen
groups, sometimes by persuading enemy commanders to change sides, and then to use them to ambush genuine
mujahideen
forces. Early in 1981, for example, a Cascade unit in Herat province made contact through agents with Khoja Shir-Aga Chungara, the Tajik leader of a 250-man enemy force which controlled forty-eight villages and important lines of communication. KGB officers from the unit went unarmed to a meeting with Chungara (henceforth codenamed ABAY) and persuaded him to take up arms against his former associates. Thereafter, Chungara ‘diligently carried out all KGB instructions’, taking part in twenty-one major joint operations with Cascade units and independently carrying out forty ambushes and killing thirty-one
mujahideen
commanders. Chungara’s forces increased to almost 900 and, in his first two years of collaboration with the KGB, were credited with killing 20,500 ‘enemy’ Afghans. In 1982 Cascade units succeeded in turning round four other
mujahideen
groups, who operated in ways similar to Chungara.
20
By the beginning of 1983 there were eighty-six of what the KGB called ‘false bands’ operating in Afghanistan, posing as
mujahideen
and disrupting the operations of the genuine resistance movement.
21
Some of the clashes between
mujahideen
which paved the way for the far more serious internecine warfare of the 1990s were generated by the KGB.
The long drawn-out Afghan War rescued Department 8 (Special Actions) of FCD Directorate S from the doldrums in which it had languished for most of the 1970s. In 1982 its Special Operations Training School at Balashikha set up a ‘Training Centre for Afghanistan’, headed by V. I. Kikot, previously a Line F officer in Havana, who was well informed on Cuban methods of irregular warfare. Department 8 also made a detailed study of methods used by Palestinian guerrillas and terrorists against Israeli targets as well as by the Israelis against Palestinian bases in Lebanon.
22
Balashikha made a significant, though unquantifiable, contribution to devising methods of terrorizing the Afghan civilian population - among them incendiary bombs, napalm, poison gas, miniature mines scattered from the air, and booby-trapped toys which were designed to maim the children who picked them up and so demoralize their parents.