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

Kharga attack were still being felt a week after the strike, partly thanks to the media, who’d had a chance to watch the fireworks from the rooftops in Kabul, and partly because the CIA managed to show the resistance the fruits of their work in the form of satellite imagery couriered to Pakistan a few days later. Within the week, I briefed the Pakistanis and a few Afghan commanders using the satellite photos of the attack.

The first set of images showed the 8th Army ammunition dump at Kharga five days before the attack, the storage bunkers full of neatly stacked ammunition and equipment. A careful inspection of the one-meter resolution imagery would enable us to distinguish stacked boxes of mortar rounds from the larger wooden boxes containing rockets. The site was jam-packed and waiting to blow.

The next set of photos were of the morning after the attack. When they were held up to the earlier shots, the effect was dramatic. Every bunker and revetment in the earlier photo seemed to have been torched, leaving behind an empty, blackened scar. Wispy smoke trails, still drifting up in corkscrews, were frozen reminders of the seething devastation.

Early assessments led our analysts to conclude that the Soviets would have trouble replacing the losses. With unstable ammunition cooking off unpredictably for weeks, Kharga was out of commission indefinitely. And resupply would challenge an already strained Soviet logistics system, all of which meant that operations would have to be seriously curtailed. This break couldn’t have come at a better time. It wouldn’t be long before the snows started filling the high passes and the war would settle down again to its dormant winter mode. When the fighting season kicked off the next spring, the mujahideen would have at least one advantage.

And for dramatic effect we calculated the cost-effectiveness of the attack, sharing the results with Pakistan’s intelligence service and the resistance leaders. The price of the rockets used in the attack was $110 each, for a total of less than $1,500. The cost to the Soviet patrons of the Afghan Army must have been about $250 million, not counting the even greater cost of their morale.

So as I finished my first month in Islamabad, I decided that with everything else in place, a little bit of extra luck would indeed help. Never mind that Kharga was a fluke; you take what you can get. It had given a new energy to the resistance and had taught me how even the smallest of breaks could be parlayed into events that could alter the course of a war.

First Chief Directorate Headquarters, Yasenevo, September 3, 1986

Leonid Shebarshin had read the reports. There was no hard evidence on the cause of the explosions, but speculation in Kabul pointed to two possibilities—a lucky rocket strike or an accident. He had learned that there were rarely clear-cut answers to any questions in Afghanistan, that truth and reality were always mixed with myth and, often enough, with sheer fantasy. The possible explanations for any occurrence were never separated by mere degrees; they were always poles apart.

The first of his Afghan reality lessons was driven home during his trip in the spring of 1984, just after what had been touted in the 40th Army command as the heaviest and most successful joint strike in the war by the Soviet and allied Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) forces against the stronghold of Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. Deputy Defense Minister Marshal S. L. Sokolov, a rugged old-line tank officer, wanted to look over the battleground himself. He choppered the sixty miles north from Kabul with Shebarshin as part of his inspection team.

The team found nothing, absolutely nothing, to observe. There was no populace to be won over by propaganda teams in the valley, no opposing forces to fight, just ripened, unharvested wheat fields dotted with Soviet and Afghan tanks. The optimistic Soviet generals welcoming Sokolov had provided a splendid, perfectly ordered briefing on the battle for the Panjshir Valley and the current security situation. As Shebarshin listened to the briefing, he wondered how any army could lose a war when it had such a meticulous battle plan as was shown there on the maps all covered with colored triangles, squares, and circles. Victory seemed very much in reach.

But in the course of the briefing, Shebarshin spotted signs of concern on the face of Marshal Sokolov. “Where is the enemy?” the chain-smoking Sokolov—he preferred American More kings—asked in his calm, fatherly manner. “Is he hiding in the nearby gorges?”

“Yes, Comrade Marshal of the Soviet Union,” the briefing officer responded confidently. “We have outposts, patrols, and choppers to follow his movements.”

Shebarshin found the briefing incomprehensible, but not because he lacked a military background. It just didn’t pass the logic test. The briefing officer stated with cool detachment that of the three thousand enemy bandits in the operation, seventeen hundred had been killed. The remainder withdrew from the battle, taking with them their dead and their weapons. “How can thirteen hundred rebels carry off seventeen hundred of their dead—and their weapons?” Shebarshin asked naively. “And can such a force represent a threat again after such a defeat?”

The briefer chose to ignore his question, but Shebarshin would soon have an answer from his own sources. There had been almost no enemy casualties in the battle—perhaps fifteen had been killed. Ahmad Shah Massoud had been forewarned of the Soviet thrust into the Panjshir Valley and had pulled out his troops and much of the population of the valley ahead of the attack. Shebarshin would never know for certain who had tipped off Massoud to the assault, but his suspicions pointed to senior officers within the DRA Defense Ministry in Kabul. At any rate, the Soviet sweep into the Panjshir Valley in 1984 created the myth of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the invincible “Lion of the Panjshir.” The myth would take on a life of its own as Massoud became the idol of the French and the odds-on darling