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

Not only was it holding on, but the resistance had turned to deadly squabbling, splitting sharply along ethnic and regional lines. In the process, the warring parties made it nearly impossible for the international aid agencies to deliver desperately needed humanitarian assistance inside Afghanistan, and the bitter internecine fighting discouraged the millions of refugees piled up in Pakistan and Iran from returning home. The international community tired of the replay of the old Afghan drama and began to disengage.

There were few workable ideas of how to make the place whole again, and absent a major international effort—a waning possibility—Afghanistan would revert to its old unruly ways, this time armed to the teeth with the leftovers of a decade of proxy superpower warfare. Already the Afghan resistance, whose struggle against the overwhelming strength of a superpower had captured the West’s imagination, was losing even its most devoted supporters. Yesterday’s romantic freedom fighters were today’s scruffy thugs.

The Western media closed up shop in neighboring Pakistan to chase new and more dramatic stories in places like Tiananmen Square, where a new hero was born, a Chinese student staring down a People’s Liberation Army tank. The media’s departure was followed by the so-called Afghan Arabs, who began to trickle back to their homes in the Middle East, filled with a profound sense of accomplishment and with ideas for radical change at home. Among them was the son of a Saudi billionaire, Osama bin Laden, a construction engineer who had built a number of orphanages and homes for the widows of resistance fighters in North-West Frontier Province, as well as tunnels and ordnance depots burrowed into the mountains of Nangarhar and Paktia.

By the mid-1980s, the call to jihad had reached all corners of the Islamic world, attracting Arabs young and old and with a variety of motivations to travel to Pakistan to take up arms against the Soviet invaders. There were the genuine volunteers on missions of humanitarian value; there were the adventure seekers on the paths of glory; and there were the psychopaths. As the war dragged on, a number of Arab states quietly emptied their prisons of their homegrown troublemakers and sent them off to the Afghan jihad with the hope that they might not return. By the end of the war, we had estimated that as many as twenty thousand Arabs may have passed through Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Afghan Arabs occasionally saw combat against Soviet and DRA forces, but their military role in the war would be greatly inflated after the Soviets withdrew. As fund-raisers, however, the Arabs played a positive, often critical, role in the rear areas. By 1989, the CIA estimated that Gulf Arabs raised as much as $20 million to $25 million each month for their humanitarian and construction projects. There was little concern at the time over the role of the Afghan Arabs in Pakistan or Afghanistan, with the exception of localized criticism by Western nongovernmental organizations of the harsh fundamentalism of the Saudi Wahhabis, whose influence in the refugee camps in Pakistan was pervasive. It was in these squalid camps that a generation of young Afghan males would be born into and raised in the strictest fundamentalism of the Deobandi and Wahhabi Islamic schools, the madrassas, setting the stage for new problems a decade later.

Thus, after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the interests of Western governments turned to East-Central Europe as the drama of 1989 began to play out. Pretty soon the world would lose interest in Afghanistan. And the Pakistan government, now bringing to an end another of its experiments with democracy, would rapidly discover that it could no longer escape the mood swings of the U.S. Congress. As soon as Benazir Bhutto was dismissed on charges of gross corruption in 1990, the United States would impose new sanctions on Pakistan as a nuclear proliferator, a program even Benazir endorsed. After Boris Gromov crossed the Amu Dar’ya, less than two years passed before the old friends, Pakistan and the United States, went their separate ways as the United States directed its attention elsewhere.

In my last meeting with Hamid Gul, the plucky little general had high hopes for both Pakistan and the United States jointly building a new Afghanistan, adding stability and strategic depth to Pakistan’s rear area as the Islamic republic turned its attention once again to India, its permanent foe to the east. As a parting gift, I would present Gul with a U.S. cavalry sword, and during my last days in Islamabad, I would help him choose an American university for his oldest son. Together we decided on Texas A&M University. It would be just right for the boy, I thought. But it wouldn’t happen. The man Arnie Raphel dubbed “the PLG” would soon turn against us, convinced that we had used and then betrayed Pakistan and its people. In a way, he would be right. And some years later, the CIA would describe the plucky little general as “the most dangerous man in Pakistan.” And that, too, would be right.

But for now, the time and place for the endgame of the contest with the USSR had shifted far to the west of the Eastern Mountains. The action now was closer to home for the Soviets.

   PART THREE   

ENDGAME

   1   

Vienna, Austria, April 27, 1989

Patience is sometimes rewarded, Ted Price thought with satisfaction. The quiet little Austrian home, complete with hausfrau, looked innocent enough. But every so often, unnoticed by neighbors, the little house had a strange visitor who would make an important telephone call and then leave again. The stranger was a man named Reino Gikman, a KGB “illegal,” or deep cover operator, and once the CIA discovered this pattern, they began to watch the house and listen to the telephone—and, with great patience, to wait.

When Gikman arrived on April 27, he dialed a telephone number in the United States—in the 202 area code for Washington, D.C.—and Ted Price, deputy chief of the counterintelligence center at CIA, knew that he finally had