The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

hadn’t quite gotten the message when he passed through Moscow a few weeks earlier, when he’d been told that his time to let go of power had come. Shebarshin was sent to Kabul to help Karmal exit gracefully. He had actually edited the text of Karmal’s abdication speech, a most dishonorable task, he thought, one that at times brought bitter outbursts from the Afghan leader: “Who knows Dari, General, you or I?”

Shebarshin knew he had compromised his own conscience and that Karmal’s premonitions of “bad times” for both Afghanistan and the Soviet Union were not based on personal hysteria. The old man threatened and cursed, and at no point did he yield to the temptation of pitying his “soulless opponents.” If Karmal had been a Russian, Shebarshin thought as he slugged it out verbally with the old man, he’d have simply said, “Fuck you! Do what you want.” But Karmal was Afghan, and in the end he did yield, and he made his speech, handing over to Moscow’s new “chosen one,” Najibullah.

And now it was over. Shebarshin thought he should be recovering from his own sense of dishonor. But he wasn’t. The small wound that had been inflicted so long ago by the proud old man had grown into an ulcer. And it would continue to grow. Shebarshin would add the betrayal of Najibullah to that of Babrak Karmal, a disloyalty that had even greater consequences for Afghanistan and the USSR.

Shebarshin, along with the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had been the two strongest voices saying that Najib would hold on much longer than the naysayers suggested. The pessimists gave the Afghan leader a month or two before his Army would collapse, mutiny, and then turn on him. But Shebarshin knew Najib well and was convinced that if there was any form of aftercare by the withdrawing superpowers, Najib might even pull off a few deals and survive over the long run.

He had spent enough time with the big bear of a man to appreciate his quick mind and flexibility. He might even make it, Shebarshin thought. But deep down he knew the USSR would let him down. It was one of the reasons he tried to avoid becoming personally involved with the likable Afghan, a thirsty man with a quick wit—he favored Chivas Regal Scotch. Shebarshin had been to Najibullah’s home on the grounds of the old palace. He had met Fatan, his dutiful wife, and their three daughters, who always seemed to be giggling about something, maybe just about the KGB man’s presence in the family home. Shebarshin steeled himself to resist any instinct of developing a personal friendship with the Afghan president, though they would have been friends under almost any other circumstances. He even decided against asking him to autograph a photograph of the two men together. That might imply a connection he didn’t want to have to deal with later. No, Shebarshin decided, he’d keep it strictly business with the Afghan leader. That way it would be easier to betray the man when the time came.

Karmal had made his peace with Afghanistan. Fate had moved him from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif and the protection of General Dostum, and finally to Moscow, where he would live out his last years, all but forgotten. Shebarshin would never see him in Moscow. He was too ashamed. And he was deeply ashamed to see the way the Afghan affair would end, with the Soviets betraying their old friends and the Americans pressing for their usual unconditional victory, whatever that would mean. Shebarshin was convinced that the Americans could, if they were realists, make a deal with Najib that would have a better chance than any other approach to peace. But he was also convinced that the Americans would have nothing to do with such a deal. They’d eventually come to regret it, he thought. The only other possible statesman on the Afghan scene, the only other man who might look beyond the dangerous, narrow view of ethnic conflict, was Ahmad Shah Massoud. The Soviet side could live with Massoud, Shebarshin thought, but could the Pakistanis and the Americans? Probably not, he decided. And they’d come to regret that, too.

Islamabad, May 1989

The 40th Army was a fading memory as spring gave way to summer, but Najibullah was hanging tough as ever. Far from collapsing as soon as darkness fell on the Soviet withdrawal, the Soviet puppet leader held on, and the confrontation between the mujahideen and the Najibullah regime was settling into a low-attrition standoff as all sides jockeyed for advantage, none willing to commit to a major engagement.

Pakistan was off on another of its infrequent experiments with democracy, having elected as prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the man Zia had hanged a decade earlier. In the late spring, the fledgling government of the Radcliffe- and Oxford-educated Bhutto pushed ISI to mount a major attack on Jalalabad, hoping to seize the city in what was hoped would be the first of a series of victories. The Peshawar Seven had been against it, as had most of the commanders in eastern Afghanistan, but the prime minister was eager for a victory to coincide with her attendance at the Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting that spring. So the assault on the provincial capital went forward.

The battle turned into a fiasco; the failure of the resistance to take the city gave Najibullah a psychological second wind. I made a few trips through the Khyber Agency during the Jalalabad campaign and found the siege a halfhearted effort that senselessly piled up casualties on both sides. Pickup trucks smeared with mud in hand-painted camouflage raced toward Jalalabad, their beds jammed with fighters and weapons. Threading their way back along the old Grand Trunk Road more slowly toward Torkham, the same trucks carried the wounded and the stacks of dead from the stalemated battle.

On one trip to Torkham while Jalalabad was under siege, I took along the visiting DDO, Richard Stolz. While viewing the