It was a win-win bet, Gates told his colleagues. “I would get twenty-five dollars or have the pleasure of paying twenty-five dollars on the occasion of an early Soviet withdrawal. A small price to pay for a large victory.”
Gates was fond of quoting an old Chinese proverb: “What the bear has eaten, he never spits out.” But he lost the bet. Mikhail Gorbachev announced in February 1988, before a nationwide audience, that Soviet withdrawals from Afghanistan would begin that May, and they were completed by December 1989.
“I paid Mike Armacost the twenty-five dollars—the best money I ever spent,” Gates said. “I also told myself it would be the last time I’d make an intelligence forecast based on fortune cookie wisdom.”1
A Patchwork of Competing Groups
The initial U.S. reaction to the Soviet withdrawal was referred to as “positive symmetry.” According to Robert Oakley, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, this meant that “the United States would keep funding the mujahideen as long as the Soviets provided assistance to the Najibullah government.”2 The Soviet withdrawal had raised hopes that an end to the conflict might be near, but the situation grew worse as Afghanistan disintegrated into a patchwork of competing groups, with Washington and Moscow backing competing sides.
“Ultimately, the insurgent forces will cause the demise of the Communist government,” reported a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of the Soviet withdrawal. “The successor government will probably be an uneasy coalition of traditionalist and fundamentalist groups, and its control will not extend far beyond Kabul.”3 The CIA had reached a similar conclusion and predicted the imminent collapse of the Najibullah government: “We judge that Mohammed Najibullah’s regime will not long survive the completion of Soviet withdrawal even with continued Soviet assistance…. The regime may fall before withdrawal is complete.”4 Other U.S. experts on Afghanistan, such as Zalmay Khalilzad, predicted “the quick overthrow of the Najibullah government by the mujaheddin. Without the Soviets,” he wrote, “the Kabul government’s morale would plummet, the regime would disintegrate and the mujaheddin would sweep victoriously forward.”5
Even Soviet assessments were bleak. According to a Top Secret report to the Politburo, political and economic conditions in Afghanistan were spiraling out of controclass="underline" “The chief question on which depends the continuing evolution of the situation boils down to this: will the government be able to maintain Kabul and other large cities in the country, though above all the capital?”6
Unfortunately, the answer was no. Since Afghan state authority was too weak to provide order and deliver services, the objectives of opposition groups came to resemble those of competitive state-builders. Each mujahideen leader aspired to build an army and a financial apparatus capable of supporting it. The relative success of each group depended upon its access to resources and skills in organization and leadership.7 Rival ethnic and political interests splintered the anti-Soviet mujahideen coalition into competing factions, and fighting soon broke out. As a result, President Najibullah was able to cling to power for a further three years after the Soviet withdrawal. Though it held Kabul, the Najibullah government was unable to overcome its most significant challenge: to expand its reach into rural areas without the support of Soviet troops. Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin wrote, “The loss of Soviet military support, along with increased availability of arms for the resistance, led the state to lose autonomy from society in one area after another. Society, however, proved unable to organize itself to provide an alternative form of state.”8 The Soviets continued to provide assistance, and in the six months following the Soviet withdrawal, they flew nearly 4,000 planeloads of weapons and supplies into Afghanistan.9
Khalilzad, who began working at RAND in 1989, wrote a provocative paper titled Prospects for the Afghan Interim Government. The U.S. State Department had initiated and supported the report, for which Khalilzad interviewed such key Afghan figures as Sibghatullah Mujadiddi, Yunus Khalis, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Muhammad Zahir Shah. His conclusions were bleak. Despite the creation of an Afghan interim government (AIG), he argued, “its prospects are not good. It has failed to achieve its objective, and its relative importance, never great, has declined.” In addition, Khalilzad pointed out that the personal rivalries among these commanders created an untenable situation: “Instead of developing greater cohesion among the mujahedin, the AIG has intensified the political power struggle among noncommunist Afghans and therefore has had a negative effect on the struggle between the mujahedin and the regime.”10
In January 1992, Abdul Rashid Dostum turned against the disintegrating Afghan government, which had previously supplied him with arms. Born to a poor Uzbek family in Khvajeh Do Kuh in the northern Afghan province of Jowzjan, Dostum had a distinctive look, with short-cropped hair, bushy eyebrows, and a thick mustache. In 1970, he began to work in a state-owned gas refinery. When the Soviets invaded in 1979, he supported the Soviet-backed Najibullah government and led the Afghan Army’s 53rd Infantry Division against mujahideen forces. By the mid-1980s, Dostum commanded a 20,000-strong militia controlling the northern provinces of Afghanistan. His followers gave him the title of pasha, an honor given to the region’s ancient kings. Some thought he had ambitions to emerge as the new ruler of Afghanistan, and one Western diplomat mused, “He regarded himself as a new Tamerlane.”11
In April 1992, Dostum and his forces, who had deserted the Afghan Communists, took the city of Mazar-e-Sharif with assistance from Ahmed Shah Massoud. When Democratic Republic of Afghanistan troops in Herat and Kandahar began to falter, the mujahideen closed in on Kabul. Massoud and Dostum (from the north) and Hekmatyar (from the south) converged on the capital. The Soviet Union and the United States had cut off all assistance several months earlier, and Najibullah resigned in April 1992. Sibghatullah Mujadiddi, leader of the Afghanistan National Liberation Front, reached an agreement with the mujahideen forces in Pakistan and took power. After a two-month term, Mujadiddi transferred power to Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Son of the Water Carrier
There had been only two recent periods in Afghan history when the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, did not rule. The first was in 1929, when a Tajik, Habibullah Kalakani, seized power for several months. Some Pashtuns derisively referred to him as Bacha-ye Saqqow, which means “Son of the Water Carrier,” since his father supposedly had carried water in the Afghan Army.
The second began in 1992, when Burhanuddin Rabbani, also a Tajik, became president of Afghanistan. A wiry man with a flowing white beard, turban, and a soft impassive voice, Rabbani was more of a religious figure than a politician. He was born in 1940 in Badakhshan Province in northern Afghanistan, home to the mammoth Marco Polo sheep that Ronald Neumann tracked in 1967. After finishing school, he went to Darul-uloom-e-Sharia, a religious school in Kabul, then to Kabul University to study Islamic law and theology. In 1966, he moved to Cairo to attend Al-Azhar University, where Abdullah Azzam, the jihadi leader and onetime mentor of Osama bin Laden, had attended. In 1968, when Rabbani returned to Afghanistan, the high council of Jamiat-e-Islami (Islamic Society) asked him to organize university students. Considering his training, then, it was no surprise that Rabbani’s government imposed severe restrictions on women and sought to exclude them from public life.