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

But Leonid Shebarshin would come to know another side—and there were many—of Massoud. For one thing, he knew about Massoud’s secret contacts with Soviet military intelligence through a GRU officer operating under the pseudonym “Adviser.” Over the last three years of the Soviet occupation, Massoud’s back channel to the Soviets would serve him well. Always just one step away from a final agreement to cease hostilities, the 40th Army command held back from launching major assaults into Massoud’s stronghold until the final stages of their withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.

Shebarshin learned another lesson on that first trip to Afghanistan—the Soviet Army’s formula for determining enemy casualties. The calculation was derived from a mathematical equation in which the total number of rounds fired at the enemy was divided by a predetermined factor provided by Defense Ministry analysts. The resulting quotient was the official enemy body, regardless of whether any dead were actually found on the battlefield. It was this formula that produced the number of thirty thousand bandits killed in action each year for the last four years. Simple and structured, Shebarshin thought back in 1984. But with absolutely no relationship to reality.

Islamabad, September 1986

The air conditioner in the teak-paneled reception room whirred softly in the background, its gentle hum a welcome damper to the tension generated by the silence in the room. The room was sterile, void of decoration, save for the elegant, framed calligraphy from the Koran hanging in all four corners where the paneled walls met the ceiling. We were in Islamabad, in the inner sanctum of Pakistan’s secret intelligence services.

I studied the leaders of the seven resistance parties sitting impassively, even sullenly, in the awkward silence. Their appearance was as varied as their personalities, ranging from unkempt mullah to radical Islamic chic. Sitting there in silence, the seven Afghan leaders cast sidelong glances in my direction, sizing me up one by one as they waited. We were all waiting for Major General Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, known universally as ISI. There had been no introductions—they would have to wait for Akhtar’s grand entrance.

My view of the war, after two months on the scene, was uncomplicated. It was clear that of all the confrontations in the mountains, valleys, and deserts of that tortured country over the millennia, few were ever about Afghanistan itself or its people. Whether it was Alexander the Great, or a string of Mogul emperors, or imperial Britain and Russia jockeying for advantage in the great game, the clashing of armies in Afghanistan was always a derivative of some larger campaign of conquest. The people living between the Oxus and the Indus Rivers were secondary, almost incidental, to the goals of the great empires as their armies marched into or passed through Afghanistan.

This latest round of conflict was no exception. Regardless of the moral underpinnings of Jimmy Carter’s initial stand on the Soviet invasion, American goals had moved beyond Carter’s early vision of right and wrong. Our effort in Afghanistan had now become a central component of the endgame of the Cold War. Driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan was the goal; the welfare of the people of Afghanistan would be improved along the way, it was hoped, but that was not essential.

These Afghan leaders, too, knew how secondary their aspirations and sufferings were to our seemingly common goal of fighting the Soviet 40th Army. While the Afghan people might have reason to respect or possibly even like their fleeting American allies, their leaders would never trust our motives, nor would they expect us to trust theirs. We might share a few goals, but only a fool would think we shared real values. All in all, I thought it was an honest enough way to do business.

Akhtar breezed into the room with his interpreter, a Pashto-speaking colonel known by the camp name “Bacha.” The general shook hands around the room and immediately launched into an opening monologue, enlightening the assembled Afghan leaders on the importance of America’s new contribution to the war and the courage of the Pakistani president for raising the struggle against the Soviets to a new level. Somewhere in the middle of his more than a little imperious opening he introduced me as the new American in charge of the arms pipeline to the fighters. Overdone, I thought, but good theater.

Akhtar, Zia’s point man on Afghanistan, was the only serving general officer in the Pakistani Army other than the president himself, who had begun his career in the British Indian Army almost four decades earlier. At sixty-one he was slim and fit, an image he worked hard to maintain. His khakis were crisply starched, and his eyes were clear and commanding, but with a secretive cast that left me wondering where the truth might be found, or even if it could be found. In the official pecking order of the Pakistani Army, Akhtar ranked below the generals who commanded the key army corps garrisoned throughout Pakistan and below the service chiefs. But in real terms, Akhtar was as close to Zia as any general in the Army, and he made a point of reminding all who might have questioned his authority that he was quartered in Rawalpindi Cantonment practically next door to his friend. A man of unquestioned loyalty to Zia, Akhtar had been running his Afghan effort since its inception. His approach to the Afghan leaders swung between patronizing and paternal.

To my right was Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, leader of the “moderate” Front for the Rescue of Afghanistan. A small man with a medium-cropped beard mostly gone gray, Mojaddedi was a revered leader of the Naqshbandi Sufi sect and the head of a family of religious leaders with long involvement in modern Afghan politics. He had been imprisoned in Kabul a number of times, once for plotting to assassinate Khrushchev in the early 1960s on a state visit to Afghanistan. His party had a