Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

At any rate, Brezhnev in the 1970s could look on the world with a certain confidence. The West had done nothing about the Prague events, and the Germans especially were now running to Moscow, offering considerable amounts of money; they had in effect recognized East Germany and given it money, too. China was always a question mark, but Mao had left her in a very enfeebled condition, and she was even lured into a war with Vietnam. Now, events in the Middle East did call for action, and at Christmas 1979 came a clumsy lurch, one that was to prove fateful.

The Turkish generals’ coup had happened at a moment of great turmoil in the Middle East. The Shah of Iran had fallen; oil prices had doubled; and the ruler of Iraq, the Stalin-worshipping Saddam Hussein, was planning to fall on Iran, to make himself master of the whole region. Meanwhile, the Americans, under the feeble Carter, seemed to be fair game, and their diplomatic staff in Teheran were taken hostage by a mob of angry students; in spring 1980 a pathetic attempt was made to rescue them by helicopter mission, which went wrong in classic Bay of Pigs style, with sand blocking the engines, and machines crashing into each other. Old men in Moscow chuckled, and moved into Afghanistan.

The last act of the USSR began very professionally, with a mixture of brute force and low cunning. On Christmas Eve, 1979, Soviet troops took over the airport at Kabul, and three days later six Soviet divisions crossed the border. The rulers of Afghanistan knew that power was precarious, and in 1979 the Tadj-Bek palace in Kabul was very well guarded — 2,500 special troops, dug-in tanks and a private guard consisting of relatives of the president. President Hafizullah Amin had himself seized power a few months before, in a coup, and had called in a special Soviet force of 500 men to complete the security system. It had been recruited among Central Asians wearing a uniform that made them resemble local, Afghan, forces. But they were in fact from the KGB and Spetsnaz , its ‘special purpose’ troops, men (Uzbeks and Tadzhiks) trained to the highest degree of physical fitness. Amin never thought that they would be a threat. He was quite wrong: there had been 343 flights into Kabul in forty-eight hours and their mission was in fact to overthrow him.

The affair was, militarily, very well prepared. The palace had been studied with a view to assault, but much care was taken to disguise the Soviet intent. The night before, the Soviet forces attended a banquet with the Afghan defenders. President Amin was extremely careful as to what he ate, but he did trust his own cooks, who were Soviet Uzbeks. On 26 December 1979, in the middle of the dinner, all who had touched the food began to roll around in extreme pain. Soviet doctors were summoned, and revived Amin with injections and a drip-feed. But they were soon followed by Soviet assault troops, who blasted their way, with foul language, through the defences, hurling grenades into the private rooms and even the lifts. Amin wrenched himself from his bed, and, in his underwear, with tubes dangling from his body, went down to the main hall to see what was happening. His five-year-old son, crying, rushed up to him, clutching his father’s legs. One of the Soviet doctors said, ‘I can’t look at this.’ Amin was killed shortly afterwards. The affair was all over by midnight, and at 12.30 a.m. on 28 December, a telephone call came through to the new Afghan leader, Babrak Karmal, from the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. Soviet troops were coming in to reinforce Karmal’s position. They were already in control of the airports and the main roads into Kabul, the capital. All very easy: but in the next twelve years Afghanistan was wrecked as a country, and so, too, was the Soviet Union itself. Almost no-one in a senior position in Moscow seems to have recognized that this would happen. On the contrary, the decision to invade Afghanistan was taken quite casually, and was hardly even minuted. Old Brezhnev, Andropov and the senior military simply went into ‘country A’, as it was called. Other Politburo signatures, willing or unwilling, were collected afterwards.

They thought that they had the measure, not just of Afghanistan, but of Central Asia in general. The whole area was very backward, and when the Russian Revolution happened, the Bolsheviks found that they could rely on some elements within the Islamic world, including even the Chechens in the northern part of the Caucasus. The USSR was progress. It freed the education system from obsolete nonsense — a teacher who did not know Arabic (let alone early medieval Arabic) forcing, with terrible punishments, rote-learning of the Koran on small boys who had no notion of what they were having to memorize. Women were emancipated, and local languages were given some encouragement; customs such as month-long fasting, or circumcision, were discouraged (or worse). It was true that, as time went by, Moscow found itself relying on local power-wielders. The tribal system was tenacious, and there were also religious orders ( Sufi ) with a leader, Sheikh , who exercised a great deal of informal authority. When, after Khrushchev, the Russians started to deal through locals rather than Russians, these informal networks came into their own, together with a corruption that oiled the wheels. When the USSR finally collapsed, the last generation of Communist bosses quite easily took on national dress, and religion, to become presidents of the new Central Asian republics. At any rate, no-one in Moscow seems to have thought that running Afghanistan would be especially difficult. As regards her foreign affairs, the country was a sort of Asiatic Finland. Her ruler had been grateful for support against the British, and had recognized the Bolsheviks early on. He then initiated a modernization drive not unlike Atatürk’s in Turkey, and since the USSR was also modernizing backward Central Asian tribal peoples, there was much over which to collaborate. In the sixties aid came from the USSR, the usual cement and chemical works, and a gas pipeline took two thirds of Afghan natural gas to the north.

Even its considerable internal problems were familiar, in the sense that, with every Islamic society, you feel you are dealing with the same pack of cards, though the distribution of suits and honour cards greatly varies. Here, in a population of 15 million, modernization brought about the usual troubles. There was a Persian-speaking upper class, which was eroded by population growth and the de — localization of politics. Women’s emancipation in a Sunni Islam context of, in places, considerable conservatism was not straightforward: in Herat the men used henna as make-up (the Turkish slang for ‘homosexual’ is pusht , from ‘Pushtun’, the more accurate version of the English ‘Pathan’, the dominant group) and the women had to wear the clumsy burka , which hardly showed even their eyes. There were troubles between Pathans, semi-Iranian Baluchis and Turkic Uzbeks of the north, each with a different language; tribal matters counted as well, and even divided the Communists (the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set up in 1965) into two rival groups. There were also secular army officers who sympathized with Moscow, where many of them had been trained, and despised the native traditions. The party in effect depended upon university students, the intelligentsia and some administrators for its membership, and these, vain and isolated from society at large, split. On top of everything else, the Pathans were not confined to Afghanistan. In 1947, when Pakistan was established, 6 million of them lived there, and accounted for several Pakistani leaders; there was agitation for a ‘Pushtunistan’ that would have caused secession, and the Pakistanis tried to control their neighbour’s affairs. Militarily speaking, Afghanistan was so mountainous that only a genius could conquer it; the northern and southern parts were even cut off from each other until a great tunnel was driven through, at 12,000 feet, in 1964, with Soviet aid, to connect them in winter.