Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

Skinny — During World War II, he ran the U.S. spy program inside Germany.

Props — Mumbled so badly that few understood what he was saying. Turns out this is a great way to get what you want.

Pros — Killing godless Communists brought him to a state of grace.

Cons — Thought it was a good game plan to team up with the devout mujahideen.

Mohammed Zia-ul Haq —Dictator of Pakistan and the gatekeeper for the anti-Soviet operations. After spotting the opportunity, he enriched himself like a good ole American vulture capitalist.

Skinny — Started his life as an officer in the British colonial army.

Props — Murdered his predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, made himself dictator, and created an Islamic state. This earned him status as a moderate in the region.

Pros — Spoke with British accent.

Cons — Looked the other way as a mob of students ransacked and burned the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in early 1979. Miraculously only a handful of the 139 employees died.

Ahmed Shah Massoud— The “Lion of the Panjshir,” he was perhaps the most successful and famous Afghan to fight the Soviet invasion.

Skinny — Fought the Soviets, the Taliban, and al Qaeda and yet there is no statue of him in Washington, D.C.

Props — Started his jihad against the Soviets with thirty supporters and seventeen rifles.

Pros — Took the Russians’ best shots and withstood six direct Soviet campaigns to wipe them out.

Cons — Declared a truce with the Soviets in 1983.

The Soviet Union’s best export was always puppets. At every opportunity, the tireless revolutionaries in the Kremlin grabbed territory and installed puppet regimes to run the show. And when things went bad, as they usually did, such as the local people realizing they didn’t like being an abused and overlorded nook of the Soviet empire, the Russians knee-jerked in their second most successful export, the army.

The knee-jerk strategy became so ingrained in Soviet thinking that it even had a name, “the Brezhnev Doctrine,” bathing it in a gloss of scholarship as if produced by profes­sors at Invasion State University. And of course once you create a doctrine, it needs to hit the road every few years so the battery won’t die. It morphed into a doctrine looking for a target.

This one popped onto the Soviet radar in the 1970s along its southern border. For the first decades after the end of World War II, Afghanistan, isolated and poor, occupied a minor place in the Cold War. Both the Americans and the Soviets, however, shipped in small amounts of money and advisors to curry favor with Afghan ruler King Zahir.

Earlier, during the 1960s, two competing philosophies swept through Afghan schools and universities — Commu­nism and Islamic fundamentalism. At the same time, the economy started to crumble. As the 1970s dawned, the United States had almost totally withdrawn to focus its nation-building energy on Vietnam. In 1973, while on a trip to Italy, King Zahir was over­thrown by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, who leaned toward the Communists. The Soviets had, by this time, spent years training and equipping the Afghan army and held con­siderable influence in the country. And Daoud, seeing that his real opposition came from the Islamists, cracked down on them, and thousands fled to Pakistan. But much to the displeasure of the Soviets, who were expecting to control Daoud, he continued to exert an independent streak, insist­ing on such radical ideas as Afghans ruling themselves. This was too much for the Soviets. In April 1978, Soviet toadies in the army killed him.

Now the Afghan Communists, led by Nur Mohammed Taraki, took formal command of the country. He began im­mediately to create a cult of personality and insisted that the people call him the “Great Teacher.” To the shock of the Soviet leaders, Taraki took Russian propaganda seriously. He was not content to create a “Brezhnev-style” dictatorship of leaders brooding over a stagnant economy. Instead, he took Lenin’s most radical writings literally and began impris­oning and killing his political opponents. Caught by surprise that someone actually believed their own drivel, the Soviet leaders, especially KGB chief Yuri Andropov, cast about for a replacement.

What really alarmed the Soviets was the rise in power of the Islamists. The precocious mountain rebels announced them­selves in February 1979 by kidnapping Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Taraki’s troops, aided by the always-helpful KGB, succeeded in rescuing him but then man­aged to get him killed in the same raid. The United States re­sponded by vigorously doing nothing. Taraki still didn’t get it. He was too focused on choosing which glorious pose should adorn posters extolling his greatness to realize the Islamic fun­damentalists represented his true threat. By early 1979 the Islamic leaders had started to revolt, and the Afghan army, more loyal to their tribal leaders than Taraki, slowly dissolved to join the rebels. Taraki responded by waging a fight against his fellow Communist goon Hafizullah Amin, the country’s prime minister, who contested Taraki for supremacy in the party. In September 1979 Taraki flew to Moscow for meetings with Soviet leaders. Upon his return Amin and his “elite guards” ambushed Taraki, took him prisoner, and had him executed.

Amin, the third to violently take over the country in six years, became its shortest lived. Everyone hated him. The So­viets, perhaps believing their own rumors, thought he was a CIA agent who had successfully infiltrated the Afghan Com­munist Party. The Afghans saw him as another tool of the Soviets. Amin hated the United States because he failed his PhD exams while a graduate student at Columbia University. The Americans hated him because he hated the United States. Another prime example of knee jerk.

Alarmed by the deteriorating condition of its Communist ally, the Soviets thought of ways to bail Amin out. A jolt of urgency hit their talks when radical students in Iran seized the U.S. embassy, taking fifty Americans as hostages. The Soviets saw the United States had now lost its most strategic ally on the southern rim of the USSR. The Soviets’ knee-jerk reaction was to believe the United States would take over Afghanistan as a replacement.

With their usual dearth of planning, Andropov pulled out the KGB invasion template. It would be along the lines of Hungary and Czechoslovakia: some lightning strikes at key installations in the capital — key media posts, government min­istries, military bases — a quick change of leadership and long tank columns to enforce the new law and order. After a short time the Soviets would leave and their puppet would rule un­opposed. Pull out the old playbook and change the names. The Soviets, however, were not the first country to invade Afghanistan. Geographically, the country lies between the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, and throughout history it has served as an entry point for invading armies to pass through, looking for someplace better to conquer. First the Persians, and later the Greeks and Mongols swept through the country’s steep mountain passes while the hardy tribes­men remained unbowed.

In 1838 the British invaded Afghanistan with an enormous army from India. The goal was to grab Afghanistan before the Russians could, and thereby create a buffer between the sprawling Russian empire and India, the crown jewel of the British Empire. The British quickly captured the major cities of Afghanistan and installed their man as the country’s new king. But the Afghans despised their new rulers; they buried their tribal feuds and hatched plans to oust the British in an eerie foreshadow of the Soviet invasion to come.