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

December, he honored me with distinguished officer rank, a tribute that went to one or two senior officers in each directorate at the end of each year. I never had a chance to thank him.

Bob Gates had been selected by Casey himself to succeed him as DCI, but after a congressional confirmation process marked by bitter accusations against Gates for every misdeed from cooking the books on assessments of the USSR to intentionally keeping himself out of the loop on the Iran-contra affair, Gates withdrew. It would take until May before FBI Director Judge William Webster would be nominated for the Langley job. He would be easily confirmed by a Congress still smarting over missing the chance to bring Bill Casey to heel.

Heading into my second fighting season, I was mercifully far from the politics of Washington and able to concentrate on the war. I was convinced that the now mystical triumph of the Stinger had to be followed by other powerful successes if we were to keep up the fragile momentum we’d established. To achieve this, we needed a succession of “silver bullets” to both sustain the high energy of the Afghan resistance and keep Moscow on the run. If the rebels were seen as growing in strength and determination, the Soviet leader’s hand could only be strengthened as he guided the USSR out of Afghanistan. There was no urging from Washington to ease up, as if that might encourage the Soviets to leave the field earlier. Thus, 1987 would be marked by all-out pressure.

Jack Devine had left to take over in Rome and was replaced by Frank Anderson, an officer with broad experience in the Near East. At forty-five, the tall, athletic Anderson had done service in rough-and-tumble Lebanon, where he had also studied Arabic early in his career. Serving in the wilds of Yemen and in a string of countries across the Maghreb, Anderson had come to understand the shifting realities of the world of Islam. But it was in Washington that he had developed his sharpest political skills. He was a natural for the Afghan Task Force, and to my great fortune, the handover from Jack Devine to Frank Anderson was seamless.

By the spring of 1987, the menace from the air had subsided, in large part because of the Soviet and DRA decision to fly above the Stinger’s ceiling. Soviet armor had become the new challenge. Though we’d been asked repeatedly over the years to provide something, anything, to give the resistance an edge over Soviet tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs), nothing had worked. The problem was range. The antiarmor weapons in the mujahideen arsenal—RPG-7s and the 75 mm and 82 mm recoilless rifles—were limited to about a three-hundred-yard killing radius as they were employed by the Afghans. A three-hundred-yard duel usually meant that a mujahideen gunner might get a shot off at a tank or APC, but as often as not he would be killed as soon as he fired.

To turn the tables, Anderson decided to deliver a new weapon, if possible, every few months. He concentrated on antiarmor systems that would foster the same jubilation among the Afghan fighters as the Stinger and cultivate the same sense of dread among the enemy forces. The results were magic. Within a few months, I took delivery of two new antitank weapons that did for armor what the Stinger had done for aviation. Anderson’s covert arms procurement team first came up with the French-made Milan antitank missile. The Milan, when fired, trailed behind it a thin copper wire through which the gunner sent electrical, course-correcting commands as the missile flew toward its target. With an effective range of at least three thousand yards, the Milan increased the killing range of the mujahideen tenfold, and soon reports of spectacular successes were flowing back from the battlefront, along with anecdotal reports of excited reactions among Soviet and, especially, DRA armor commanders upon discovering the telltale copper wires strung across the rugged battlefields. In one particularly spirited battle on the Jalalabad plain at the mouth of the Konar Valley, a Milan gunner brought down an MI-24D hovering low over the battlefield, an act that added new verses to the Afghan ballads of war. Eastern Afghanistan, where most of the Milans were deployed, was perfect ambush country, and soon after its deployment we saw fewer tank probes out into the field.

The next silver bullet came directly out of the Warsaw Pact arsenal. Anderson’s team acquired a supply of Soviet-designed SPG-9s, 73 mm recoilless rifles, and sent them by air to Pakistan. The SPG-9 had an effective range of about a thousand yards, roughly triple the killing range of the older recoilless rifles in the resistance inventory. As the mujahideen began to train on the new weapon, they couldn’t conceal their enthusiasm at being able to reach out to targets at three and four times the range they’d been limited to over the years. I even took a couple of shots myself at a white tank chalked onto a cliff about eleven hundred yards away. I got one bull’s-eye and one too close to call—but both worth a resounding “Allah hu Akhbar!” from the Afghan trainees gathered around me as I lay on the ground, firing the slender antitank round across the valley of the temporary training camp. All through the next fighting season the mujahideen kept up the pressure with hit-and-run ambushes, and in the major Soviet and DRA assaults of the season, the new systems were crucial.

But the introduction of each new silver bullet brought with it the problem of distribution to the resistance parties. Those who were issued the weapons were winners, and those who did not get the new weapons were the complainers. The new antitank systems were issued to commanders in eastern Afghanistan, where much of the fighting was taking place and where the systems would do the most good. Certainly they were of more use in Paktia and Nangarhar, where the Soviets were still mounting