Developments

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the United States responded swiftly and decisively. U.S. president Jimmy Carter condemned the invasion unequivocally and, in his 1980 State of the Union address, warned that the United States would use “any means necessary, including military force” to prevent the Soviets from gaining control of the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

A direct threat to the Persian Gulf remained hypothetical as the Soviets quickly encountered enough problems in Afghanistan to make moving further south a practical impossibility. The mujahideen proved themselves a powerful foe, and efforts to strengthen the Afghan national army often backfired as recruits enlisted, only to desert once they had received their weapons.

So Moscow’s original plan—for Soviet troops to simply provide security in a few big cities while the Afghan army rebuilt itself—was shelved in favor of a less defensive and more brutal plan. The principal aim of the new plan, which totally undermined any pretense that the occupation was occurring with the consent of the Afghan people, has been called “migratory genocide.”⁷

Essentially, this was an attempt to destroy the support network of the mujahideen by depopulating the countryside, where they could hide out. There was no subtlety in the Soviet strategy, which involved laying mines, burning agricultural land, and destroying entire villages by extensive shelling and massive aerial bombing attacks. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians were killed, and millions more fled their homes for refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran.

But, in one key respect, the success the Soviet troops had in depopulating the Afghan countryside proved their undoing. While the ethnic cleansing effort destroyed the mujahideen sanctuaries within Afghanistan, it led to their flourishing over the border in Pakistan. In Peshawar and other Pakistani Pashtun border towns, civilian refugee camps doubled as guerrilla recruitment centers. Afghans, who had seen Soviet troops destroy their homes, and poor Pakistanis, who had been taught to regard the Soviet Union as a nation of infidels, studied together in Islamic schools, or madrassas, the more militant of which had been set up by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) with Saudi funding. The ISI also ran paramilitary training camps to prepare men for the jihad.

The result was an explosive mix of Islamist militancy, Pashtun solidarity, and paramilitary expertise. Many of the young men that came out of the madrassas and the guerrilla training camps were desperate to cross the border and fight the Soviet occupiers—all they needed were weapons. This is where the United States came in.

From the moment the Soviets invaded in December 1979—and, according to President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, for months before that—the United States armed the mujahideen.

Mujahideen  eat together - Eastern Afghanistan, 1980
© 1980 Getty Images, Inc.

In order to conceal U.S. involvement, the U.S. government did not initially distribute any American-made military equipment and instead purchased assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, and missiles from Egypt and China. As a further precaution, all U.S. (and other foreign) military aid was channeled through Pakistan’s ISI to the seven groups of mujahideen that were camped on the Pakistani side of the border.

In addition to arming the Afghan mujahideen, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supported an ISI initiative to recruit Islamist radicals from all over the Arab and Muslim worlds. The initiative seemed to be a win-win for everyone: for the Afghan mujahideen, the recruitment of foreign Muslims obviously strengthened their resistance; for the United States, the participation of Muslims from numerous different countries gave the impression that most of the world opposed the Soviets; for pro-Western Arab states like Saudi Arabia, sending Islamist radicals to Afghanistan provided a convenient way of getting rid of troublemakers like Osama bin Laden; and for Pakistan, the more mujahideen there were depending on the ISI for weapons and aid, the more Pakistan’s influence was bolstered in a region long dominated by India.

The external powers’ vested interests ensured that aid to the mujahideen did not dry up. Indeed, in 1986, the United States gave up trying to hide American involvement and openly gave the mujahideen the latest in U.S. anti-aircraft technology, Stinger missiles. With their new weapons, the mujahideen threatened Soviet air supremacy and made occupation more painful to the Soviets.

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader on March 11, 1985, it marked the first time during the war in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union was not led by one of the men who had been in on the decision to invade. After a brief period of actually escalating Soviet military activity in Afghanistan, Gorbachev sought ways of ending the occupation. Certainly, from February 1986 onward, after Gorbachev had publicly called the war in Afghanistan a “bleeding wound,” he appeared determined to withdraw Soviet troops.

Just weeks after Gorbachev’s “bleeding wound” speech, the Soviets engineered the replacement of Babrak Karmal (who had reacted poorly to the news that the Soviet commitment to Afghanistan was not open-ended) with Muhammad Najibullah. Moscow believed Najibullah, also a Pashtun, could command greater support from the Afghan people and thus was more likely to ensure the continuation of a communist government in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Then, late in 1986, high-level Soviet ministers voted in principle to end the occupation. The decision was made official on April 14, 1988, when Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, Pakistan, and the United States signed an accord in Geneva, pledging not to interfere in Afghan politics. The last Soviet troops withdrew on February 15, 1989.

There was a widespread feeling after the Soviet withdrawal that President Najibullah would fall. But that didn’t happen. Najibullah’s government remained in power partly because the Soviets, in defiance of the Geneva Accords, continued to provide massive military and economic aid and partly because he made a few popular reforms, such as allowing for the creation of other political parties. But, perhaps even more importantly, Najibullah remained in power because ordinary Afghans feared that the assumption of power by the mujahideen would lead to violent reprisals against communist sympathizers and even more intense infighting among the various factions of mujahideen. Residents of Kabul and some of the more cosmopolitan elements of Afghan society also feared that Najibullah’s fall could lead to the imposition of an extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

A double-amputee begs during the last days of the Najibullah regime - Kabul
© 1992 Getty Images, Inc.

If some Afghans caught a glimpse of the future, then Najibullah appeared to see the whole thing. Shortly before he lost power, he said to a U.S. journalist: “We have a common task—Afghanistan, the USA and the civilized world—to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism. If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a centre of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a centre for terrorism.”⁹

But Najibulla’s warning went unheeded, as the United States, Russia (the Soviet Union having disbanded in 1991), and most of the rest of the world turned away from Afghanistan, leaving it in ruins and awash with guns.