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

It all came together here in the western reaches of Pakistan’s Punjab province, the past, the present, and the future, all the tectonic forces of nature and of politics. In Afghanistan the Soviets were in their sixth year of occupation, still struggling against an undiminished rebellion. Though it would be another few years before the toll was known, casualties among the Afghan population were approaching one million killed. There were no firm estimates as to the numbers of injured, other than the reasonable guess that they outnumbered the dead. Another five million had been driven from their homes into exile either in Iran or Pakistan, and millions more were refugees in their own country, displaced by the Soviet invaders. The Soviets were on their way to losing almost fifteen thousand men, triple that wounded, and hundreds of thousands incapacitated by disease. And there seemed no end in sight.

The bitter Washington debate over our Afghan policy that took up much of 1985 and early 1986 had ended by the time I arrived on the scene in Pakistan. There was no more dispute over our mission. The congressional hawks had been calmed and the moralists assuaged. We were in it to win. Those had been my instructions from Bill Casey and, he’d assured me, from the President.

In 1986, there were few in the Congress or the administration who believed the Soviets were seriously seeking an exit strategy. Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze had told U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz the previous year that Gorbachev wanted to get out of Afghanistan, but there was no evidence on the ground to back up that view; nor was there any evidence that the Georgian Foreign Minister’s comments represented a consensus in the Politburo. On the contrary, it still looked as though the war might just go on indefinitely or that the Soviets might even be on the verge of winning it. In the summer of 1986, there was no talk of going easy on the Soviets to give them a breather so they could get out. The talk, instead, was of going full tilt and making sure that the loose coalition of countries supporting the resistance didn’t wobble.

Allied with the United States in the effort to assist the Afghan people in their struggle were China, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and Egypt, all major players and all, like the United States, with their own national agendas for entering the fight. For the first six years of the struggle, those complex agendas were more or less in concert. They wouldn’t always be that way.

China, characteristically, took the long-term view. Beijing wanted to prevent the USSR from expanding its empire into Afghanistan, within easy reach of the Gulf of Oman, where it could serve as anvil to India’s hammer on Pakistan, wedged uncomfortably in between. China had fought one brief war with India a quarter century earlier and still had unresolved border disputes with the Soviet Union that on more than one occasion had come close to serious eruption in the far northeast. China’s relationship with Pakistan had been one of the few constants in the ever shifting alliances of the region. So from the start, China was in it to win, but it was also patient.

Saudi Arabia, in particular its Wahhabi clerical structure, was distracted at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by the Iranian revolution and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and Shia militancy. The Saudis were more than bystanders in the Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s, and thus their involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan was just another important facet of Saudi policy in the region. They had been independently supporting the Afghan resistance in the period just before the Soviet invasion, and the decision to join with the United States after the invasion was a rational extension of their consuming concern with Iran’s spreading influence. And not a few in the royal family thought lending a hand to the Afghan resistance gave the powerful Wahhabi clerics something important to do farther from home. Pakistan’s leader, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, was a pious man who had opened up Pakistan to the Wahhabis, who were establishing Koranic schools, madrassas, in growing numbers. And at that time, with oil prices in the $40-a-barrel range, the costs of working with the Americans seemed manageable.

The United Kingdom, under Margaret Thatcher, was never far from the United States in dealing head-on with Soviet expansionism. And with an inside track on the rules of “the great game,” the British were a natural ally, though there was always an underlying prickliness about the come-lately Americans taking the lead in their old backyard.

Egypt was a well-compensated quartermaster and armorer, supplying tens of thousands of tons of Soviet/Warsaw Pact–design weapons to the Afghans and in the process fulfilling its duty to the jihad. Later in the conflict, Egypt and many other Islamic nations found Afghanistan a convenient dumping ground for homegrown troublemakers. Egypt quietly emptied its prisons of its political activists and psychotics and sent them off to the war in Afghanistan, with the fondest hopes that they might never return.

The CIA program had grown over the last six years, from a few tens of millions of dollars under President Carter to hundreds of millions in the early 1980s. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had in 1980 secured an agreement from the Saudi king to match American contributions to the Afghan effort dollar for dollar, and Bill Casey kept that agreement going over the years. Thus, the budget for the new fiscal year beginning on October 1, 1986, would approach half a billion from Riyadh and half a billion from U.S public coffers. These funds would be spent on everything from Chinese- and Egyptian-made small arms, mortars, and rockets to recoilless rifles and the thousands of Japanese trucks and Chinese mules required to carry it all across zero line, as the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan was called.

It seemed to me, as I took stock of the