But there were substantial disagreements about Soviet intentions. The CIA sent an Eyes Only memo to President Carter and other members of the National Security Council, concluding that it was “unlikely that the Soviet occupation is a preplanned first step in the implementation of a highly articulated grand design for the rapid establishment of hegemonic control over all of southwest Asia.” Rather, it explained that the Soviets were mainly concerned about the collapse of a state in its sphere of influence. Arnold Horelick tried to split the difference. In a paper for Brzezinski, he wrote that the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan represented a “qualitative turn in Soviet foreign policy in the region and toward the third world.” Stansfield Turner included a personal cover note to Brzezinski when he forwarded the memo:
I would only add a personal comment that I would be a bit more categoric than the paper in stating that the Soviets’ behavior in Afghanistan was not an aberration. I agree we do not have the evidence that the Soviets are firmly committed to continuing as aggressive a policy in the third world…. Yet, I do believe that the Soviet track record over the past five or six years indicates a definitely greater willingness to probe the limits of our tolerance. “Détente” was not a bar to this greater assertiveness in Angola, Ethiopia, Kampuchea and Yemen. It need not be so again, even if we return to détente. As the paper concludes, how assertive the Soviets will be in the future will very likely depend upon how “successful” the Soviet leadership views their intervention in Afghanistan to have been.62
Despite the conflicting assessments, there is little credible evidence that Soviet leaders wanted to expand their reach into Pakistan and Iran and to the Indian Ocean. Rather, they were concerned by the collapse of governance in Afghanistan and suspicious that the United States and Afghanistan’s neighbors would try to move into the vacuum.
It seems unlikely that the Soviets would have gotten involved had the Afghan state not collapsed in the first place. As Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin argues in his book The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, “In the end, the persistence of revolt and the concomitant breakdown of the state resulted from its own internal weaknesses.” He continues: “The main reason the revolt spread so widely was that the army disintegrated in a series of insurrections, from unrecorded defections of small posts to mutinies in nearly all the major garrisons.”63 The uprising engulfed Afghan cities, including Herat in the west, Jalalabad in the east, and eventually Kabul itself. Some of the Afghan leaders who mutinied—such as Ismail Khan and Abdul Rauf—escaped and joined the resistance. Indeed, the dissolution of the Afghan Army in the late 1970s, rather than the strength of the insurgents, allowed the resistance to spread.64 The Afghan state had failed to establish basic law and order and to deliver basic services. The Soviet Union stepped in to help fill this void.
CHAPTER TWO The Mujahideen Era
IN 1979, the year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, who would play a key role in U.S. efforts in Afghanistan after the September 2001 attacks, finished his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. In 1974, he had arrived in Hyde Park, a racially diverse community situated along Lake Michigan on Chicago’s South Side. The university was founded there in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, who described his role as “the best investment I ever made.” “Zal,” as Khalilzad was known to his colleagues, was a resident floor adviser at the International House, an oversize Gothic building where many of the university’s foreign students lived. A contemporary photograph of Khalilzad—which International House sent to him when he became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—shows a young man in his early twenties with shoulder-length hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a flowery Hawaiian shirt. Already one can see the relaxed, almost unassuming aura that would become his trademark during his years as a diplomat.
Khalilzad was born in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where his father worked in the Ministry of Finance for King Zahir Shah’s government. The setting for his childhood was appropriately grand. Mazar-e-Sharif means “noble shrine,” a reference to the magnificent blue-tiled mosque that dominates the city’s skyline and is said by some Muslims to house the tomb of the caliph Ali ibn Abu Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. Khalilzad’s mother, he told The New Yorker in an interview, “did not have a formal education yet she was very modern, always very informed. She could not read or write herself, but she would have the kids read the newspapers to her. I think if she had been born at a different time she would have been quite an established political figure.” He studied at the private Ghazi Lycée school in Kabul and spent a year in the United States as an exchange student, near Modesto, California. The year in California had a profound impact on him. “I had different values, greater interest in sports, a more pragmatic way of looking at things, and a broader horizon,” he recalled after finishing his time there. “I had a sense of how backward Afghanistan was. And I became more interested in how Afghanistan needed to change.”1
Khalilzad went on to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the American University of Beirut before going to Chicago to pursue a doctorate in political science. There he studied with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter, a prominent international relations scholar who led groundbreaking work on nuclear deterrence. Wohlstetter influenced the design and deployment of U.S. strategic forces through his research, developed the “second-strike” theory for deterring nuclear war, and originated “fail safe” and other methods for reducing the probability of accidental nuclear war.2 Wohlstetter served as a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, and, beginning in 1964, as a professor at the University of Chicago. He had a significant influence on Khalilzad and helped him make contacts in Washington. After leaving Chicago in 1979, Khalilzad moved to New York to become a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.3
The Brutal-Hearted Mountain Tribes
During his studies with Wohlstetter, Khalilzad continued to monitor events in Afghanistan and, with his academic training completed, he began writing articles on the invasion using a pseudonym to protect members of his family who were still there. Khalilzad observed a military operation that proved more costly in terms of blood or money than the Soviets had bargained for. Over the three previous decades, the Soviets had tried to prop up a range of Afghan governments, providing a total of $1.3 billion in economic aid and $1.3 billion in military aid between 1955 and 1978.4 But these costs skyrocketed in the 1980s, and the CIA estimated that the Soviet Union spent an annual average of $7 billion between 1980 and 1986.5 When the Soviets finally withdrew in February 1989, after ten harrowing years, the country was devastated. An estimated one million Afghans had been killed, more than five million had fled abroad, and as many as three million were internally displaced. Nearly 15,000 Soviet soldiers were dead and 35,000 wounded.6 The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, expressed the anger of the Soviet loss, as well as the vaunted defiance of the Afghan warriors, in a poem titled “On the Talks in Kabul” (“Kperegovoram v Kabule”). He referred to the “brutal-hearted” mountain tribes defined by their “long beards,” “handcrafted rugs,” and “loud guttural names.”7 But he was most scathing in a 1982 interview with the Paris Review, seven years after he was expelled from the Soviet Union. “When I saw the first footage from Afghanistan on the TV screen a year ago, it was very short. It was tanks rolling on the plateau,” he remarked. “What I saw was basically a violation of the elements—because that plateau never saw a plough before, let alone a tank. So, it was a kind of existential nightmare…. This is absolutely meaningless, like subtracting from zero. And it is vile in a primordial sense, partly because of tanks’ resemblance to dinosaurs. It simply shouldn’t be.”8