The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

to the Pakistani outpost at Michni Point, where he was photographed squinting along the sights of a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle, its muzzle elevated and pointing into Afghanistan. In that moment, the President’s national security adviser became the symbol of the impending U.S. involvement in Afghanistan’s endless martial history.

Zia, from the outset, believed his generals could work with the CIA, whose history in Pakistan dated back to the 1950s, when it flew high-altitude U-2 surveillance flights over the Soviet Union from northwest Pakistan. The massive hangar at the military side of the Peshawar airport was still nostalgically called the “CIA hangar” a quarter century after CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was brought down by Soviet air defenses over Sverdlovsk. There was a record of cooperation with the CIA, and the Pakistanis felt comfortable with it.

But Zia drew the line at allowing the American hand to show. Keep it covert, he had insisted. The Pakistani leader had come to associate the introduction of American-made weapons, especially antiaircraft missiles, as a first step toward bringing in the Pentagon. He was concerned, possibly rightly, that if the Pentagon got its nose under the tent, it would be only a short time before the American involvement in the war had slipped from his control.

Though Zia admired the United States, he knew that no Pakistani leader should invest too deeply in the American relationship. The good times were very good for Pakistan, but they were always followed by estrangement. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Zia calculated that with the conservative, anti-Soviet Republican in the White House, he might expect a consistent American policy toward Pakistan as long as the Soviets remained in Afghanistan. When Reagan was reelected four years later, the Pakistani president rightly decided that the U.S.-Pakistani relationship might actually carry through to the end of the Soviet adventure. But even as he deepened Pakistan’s involvement with the United States in Afghanistan, he always kept a finger to the wind and a sharp eye on the mood of the American Congress.

The United States had entered the fray for a combination of moral and geopolitical reasons for what seemed like the long haul. Some in Congress thought that the war could happily last forever, that the Soviets could be bled the way the United States had been for over a decade in Vietnam. Others, by the sixth year of the war, were less comfortable with what seemed to them a cynical strategy of fighting the Soviets down to the last Afghan. Still other lawmakers saw the Afghan adventure as the Soviet Union’s fatal weakness. These hawks no longer wanted just to mire the Soviets in the Afghan bog; they wanted to defeat them and believed they could if the United States would only stop pulling its punches. Thus, an alliance of congressional hawks and moralists formed in early 1985, the bloodiest year of the Soviet occupation, and together they would force a change in the rules.

Until 1985, the Soviets had focused their efforts on attempting to eliminate popular support of the mujahideen in the countryside; it was a scorched-earth policy that accomplished nothing beyond forcing millions of Afghans to seek refuge in Pakistan and Iran. The mujahideen still owned the countryside. After 1985, when Gorbachev signaled his tacit agreement to give the Army its head for one more year, Soviet tactics shifted to the use of helicopter-borne special operations troops—Spetsnaz—against resistance strongholds and infiltration routes. The casualties mounted on both sides, but the advantage seemed to have shifted to the Soviets.

Reagan responded to the pressures from Congress and the Soviet escalations by signing National Security Decision Directive 166, a presidential order that redefined U.S. goals in Afghanistan in unambiguous terms—push the Soviets back across the Amu Dar’ya, the river that marked the border between the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The CIA’s covert action role in Afghanistan dating back to the Carter administration called for “harassing” the Soviets, not driving them out. Reagan was upping the ante, and now he actually believed he could win. But the question of the Stinger, which many saw as vital to this new phase of the war, had yet to be resolved. The CIA consistently reported to Congress that the Pakistani president simply wouldn’t countenance the escalation that was sure to follow the introduction of American missile systems. Piekney was the third in a line of Islamabad chiefs to be shackled by Zia’s policy since 1979, and he had never thought the Pakistani president would waver from that course.

Now, as he sat stunned in Zia’s private office, tucked away at the rear of the old colonial governor’s residence, Piekney felt as if he had been the victim of a political ambush—which, of course, was exactly what he was.

Orrin Hatch had come to Rawalpindi to test Zia one more time and to hear his objections for himself. Accompanying the senator was Michael Pillsbury, a policy provocateur who bounced between congressional staff jobs and political positions in the Pentagon and who had persuaded Hatch to push for Stingers. At the CIA, Pillsbury was seen as a noisome gadfly, a persistent pest who inserted himself into policy debates without really understanding the nature of intelligence or the ground rules for covert action. But people like Pillsbury might not have mattered if the Stinger issue had been receiving high-level attention at the White House or State Department. It was precisely because top-level Reagan administration officials weren’t focusing much attention on Afghanistan that midlevel bureaucrats like Pillsbury were able to step into the policy vacuum. Tensions between the CIA and Pillsbury provided much of the drama behind Hatch’s meeting with Zia.

As he traveled to Pakistan, Pillsbury had a problem: CIA Director Bill Casey was determined to prevent him from sitting in on Hatch’s meeting with Zia to discuss the CIA’s covert action program in Afghanistan. Days before the congressional delegation arrived in the country, Piekney had received a cable from Langley passing on an order from Casey blocking Pillsbury from attending