Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [197]
One after another, Soviet soldiers boarded military convoys. Their final withdrawal from Afghanistan was underway. A few waved good-bye as they looked at that country for the last time. Just across the border, in Uzbekistan, the returning troops received flowers, were serenaded by a military band, and sat at long, linen-draped tables for a banquet in their honor.1 Though it was likely not lost on any of the soldiers that the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan had ended in failure, their commander, General Boris Gromov, saluted his men for fulfilling their “internationalist duty.”2
General Gromov had arranged to be taken back into Afghanistan by helicopter so he could be the last member of the Soviet military to depart the country, making a dramatic exit by walking alone across the inaptly named Friendship Bridge that connected Afghanistan to the Soviet Union. “There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me,” he declared. “Our nine-year stay ends with this.”3 The Soviet “stay” in Afghanistan officially came to a close on February 15, 1989, at five minutes before noon local time. Appropriately, the USSR’s final act in the war was another miscalculation: Gromov’s choreographed departure occurred two hours later than had been planned.4
The Soviet Union put a brave face on its humiliation. But it was obvious to people around the world—and to the Soviet people in particular—that Afghanistan was the rock on which the last empire of the twentieth century had foundered. Lasting just less than a decade, the war had claimed the lives of fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers.5 It disillusioned a generation of young Russians who had been led to believe that the Soviet Army was invincible. Even General Gromov, while distancing his military from the failure, later acknowledged the depth of the calamity, admitting that “the war was a huge and in many respects irreparable political mistake.”6
The legacy of the decade-long Soviet misadventure would not be erased easily. The Soviets had brutalized the country’s people, killing one million and displacing five million more. They had also destroyed much of the land, stripping its forests of trees. The prospects of survival for the puppet regime they left behind in Kabul were exceedingly poor. Once the Soviets withdrew, opposition forces, known collectively as the mujahideen (“holy warriors” in Arabic), quickly closed in on Kabul and seized power.
For most of the 1980s the U.S. government channeled funds and materiel to various mujahideen groups as part of the largest covert operation in CIA history.7 As the Soviets completed their retreat, the CIA station in Islamabad, Pakistan, cabled the headquarters at Langley, Virginia, two words: “We won.”8
Not long afterward, American activities in Afghanistan ended. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton turned their attention away from Cold War preoccupations. In the chaos and civil war that consumed the country after the Soviet departure, the United States embassy in Kabul closed its doors. As America lost interest in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan poured in millions of dollars to fund roads, clinics, radical Wahhabi madrassas and mosques. The Pakistani government cultivated Afghanistan’s Pashtun warlords and, beginning in 1996, supported the regime that became known as the Taliban. None of this caused any noticeable concern at the senior levels of the U.S. government. Few American policy or intelligence officials imagined that they would ever have to concern themselves again with that distant, poor, and abused land.
CHAPTER 27
Special Operations
When U.S. military action against the Taliban regime and its al-Qaida guests was imminent in late 2001, I mulled over the lessons of the Soviet defeat. The Red Army was only the most recent in a long line of foreign forces that had attempted to secure the country. Afghanistan’s tough, martial people and land-locked, mountainous terrain had undone the plans of even the most intrepid invaders. Alexander the