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

I would have to deal with the Washington fan clubs of the three moderate parties for the rest of the war, and with the recurring suggestion that if we would only funnel more supplies to the moderates, not only would the war end sooner, but nice guys would be in charge at the finish. But the reality was that Islam, in its unique Afghan incarnation, was the one thing that held the fighters together. Trying to socially engineer Afghanistan through our distribution of weapons while the Soviets still had 120,000 troops on the ground was, I thought, a recipe for disaster, though the case would be made later that the war itself had done its own social reengineering.

   4   

Ojhri Camp, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, September 1986

The only illumination in the primitive classroom emanated from a pinpoint light source projecting from behind a white sheet draped across the front of the room. I stood in the back, watching as a group of mujahideen from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s party sat stiffly on benches and listened as a Pakistani officer drilled them one more time on the firing sequence of the Stinger. A handful of Pakistani officers had been taught how to use the missile in the United States a few months earlier, and they were now training the Afghans. Standing there taking in the scene, I mused about the cost differential between the massive multimillion-dollar Stinger training dome in Ft. Bliss, Texas, and this little classroom with its white bedsheet scrawled with a hand-painted scene of Afghan terrain. Behind the sheet, a Pakistani noncommissioned officer slowly moved a penlight whose light source the students would track and eventually “kill” with their Stinger training units. Primitive, but it did the job for about a hundred bucks.

Tight screening of candidates for training had been one of the conditions we set down in introducing the Stinger. The Afghan trainees in this and all subsequent groups would be vetted both for skill and reliability. Leading candidates were drawn from the pool of mujahideen gunners who had already brought down Soviet or DRA aircraft with SA-7 missiles, an inferior Soviet copy of a much older American missile that had been in the mujahideen arsenal for a few years but used with little success. The need for skill was obvious, but reliability was equally important: There was still a great deal of concern that the Afghans might turn around and sell their Stingers. And with Iran and the Soviet Union bordering Afghanistan, there would be no shortage of bidders. Like all other programs in which we were involved, only Afghan fighters were to be trained. No foreign volunteers would be included in the program; they were a motley lot, increasingly the dredges of the prison populations of the Arab world.

At one time, the CIA had mulled over the idea of training volunteer Arab legions to take part in the war, but the idea was immediately scrapped as unwise and unworkable. Contrary to what people have come to imagine, the CIA never recruited, trained, or otherwise used Arab volunteers. The Afghans were more than happy to do their own fighting—we saw no reason not to satisfy them on this point.

“Lights!” the chief instructor said in Dari from the rear of the room, and the classroom quickly lit up, revealing a collection of a dozen mujahideen. In their midst was Engineer Ghaffar, a heavily bearded man clearly in charge of the group. I had been fully briefed on the fighters being trained—including Ghaffar, who had two confirmed kills using SA-7s. The fighters, to a man, wore regulation full-length beards. All wore gray or beige shalwar kameez and rolled Chitrali hats.

“Ready for a final two-man drill?” the officer asked his unconventional students.

Ghaffar, Stinger training unit in hand, was now joined by his second gunner. He nodded without comment.

“Lights out! Procedure drill!” the instructor barked, handing a second Stinger training unit to the second gunner. He shouted a few orders to his assistants behind the sheet, alternating between Dari and English for my benefit. It appeared the group had been prepared well for my visit. Having undergone inspections myself back when I was in uniform, I had no reason to expect the game would be played differently here.

“Give us two targets. High left and center right!”

“Ready?”

“Ready,” answered the two gunners in unison.

“First step?”

“Stinger on the shoulder!” came the instant reply.

“Second step?”

“Knock off the front cover and pop up the sight!”

“Third?”

“Screw the battery cooling unit into the well, start the gyro motor with the thumb switch,” Ghaffar announced without hesitation. I got a running translation from the Pakistani brigadier escorting me through the camp.

“Start tracking! Ghaffar high left target, Gul the right target!” the Pakistani officer ordered.

The gyro motor noise grew louder as the two units tracked their targets and the cheek-to-bone vibrators began to kick in, reverberating against the gunners’ cheeks. Each time the training units locked on to the infrared target, the room was enveloped by the shrill screech of the “identification friend or foe” alarm. There had been some debate as to whether the Stingers issued to the mujahideen should even have the IFF feature, since there were no friends in the skies of Afghanistan. In the end, the IFF stayed—and the fighters simply considered it another part of the sound-and-light show they valued so highly. Cheek-to-bone vibrators were a useful complement to the shrill siren of the IFF, in that they sent a physical confirmation that the gunner was on target when he might not be able to hear the IFF in the din of battle.

“What’s next?” the instructor shouted.

“Uncage!” came the instant response from both commanders as both men hit the black rubber-covered “uncage” button on the left side and at the forward end of the grip stock.

A loud siren filled the room, and the vibration told both gunners that they were ready to fire.

“What’s next?”

“Superelevate. Place the target in the sight. Pull the trigger.” Two voices spoke as one.

“Your targets are MI-24Ds.