Ghost Wars (21 page)

Massoud played the Afghan government soldiers off against their Soviet allies. A staggeringly large percentage of the army felt more allegiance to rebel leaders such as Massoud than they did to their Soviet handlers. In some cases Massoud even had to persuade sympathizers within the Afghan army
not
to defect because they were more valuable to him as informers than they were as fighters. During Panjshir invasions the Soviets often sent Afghan units just ahead of Red Army units on the theory that their Afghan comrades would then bear the brunt of the mujahedin’s surprises. In time, Massoud picked up on this tactic and began to exploit it. When his lookouts spotted an enemy column advancing with Afghan forces in the lead, Massoud’s men would try to isolate the units by blasting gigantic rocks out of the cliffs and hurtling them toward the road, in between where the Afghan units ended and the Soviet units began. More often than not, rather than put up a fight, the Afghan army soldiers defected immediately, bringing to the mujahedin side whatever weapons and munitions they happened to be carrying.
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The Soviets did not have the luxury of surrendering. Asked why there were no Red Army soldiers in his prisons, Massoud replied, “Hatred for the Russians is just too great. Many mujahedin have lost their families or homes through communist terror. Their first reaction when coming across a Russian is to kill him.”
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By the time he repelled his sixth Soviet offensive, in 1982, Massoud had made a name for himself nationwide. He was the “Lion of the Panjshir.” The word
Panjshir
itself had become a rallying cry across Afghanistan and abroad, a symbol of hope for the anticommunist resistance. Within the narrow valley Massoud was a hero, popular enough to have his own cult of personality and exert dictatorial control. Instead, he operated his rebellion through councils that provided Panjshiri elders and civilians, as well as subordinate rebel commanders, a voice in his affairs. As a result he was more constrained by local public opinion than rebel leaders who operated out of ISI-funded offices in Pakistani exile. The Pakistan-based commanders took advantage of the refugee camps spreading around Peshawar and Quetta. Food rations were controlled by Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, Rabbani, and other ISI-supported mujahedin leaders. Hekmatyar, especially, used the camps as a blend of civilian refuge, military encampment, and political operations center. Massoud, on the other hand, ran his guerrilla army entirely inside Afghan territory and relied on the forbearance of Afghan civilians living under repeated vicious Soviet attacks. Massoud ran local police and civil affairs committees in the Panjshir and levied taxes on emerald and lapis miners. His militias depended directly on popular support. There were many other examples of indigenous revolutionary leadership emerging across Afghanistan, but Massoud was becoming the most prominent leader of what the French scholar Olivier Roy called “the only contemporary revivalist Muslim movement to take root among peasants.” In Massoud’s movement, “The fighting group is the civil society, with the same leadership and no professionalization of fighters.”
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Soviet scorched earth tactics began to lay the land and its people to waste. Relentless Soviet bombing claimed thousands of civilian lives. By the end of 1982 more than 80 percent of the Panjshir’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed. In an attempt to starve the valley out, the Soviets even resorted to that most infamous of Iron Curtain tactics: They built a wall. The six-foot-high concrete barrier at the southern mouth of the valley was intended to keep food and clothing from getting to the Panjshiris. It didn’t work. The mujahedin managed to smuggle in everything from biscuits to chewing gum to transistor radios. But with their crops in ruins, their livestock slaughtered, and no end to the fighting in sight, it was unclear how much more hardship the valley’s population could bear.

Massoud decided to cut a deal. In the spring of 1983 he announced an unprecedented truce. Under its terms the Soviets would stop attacking in the Panjshir if Massoud allowed the Afghan army to operate a base at the southern end of the valley. The truce followed three years of secret negotiations. For as long as Massoud had been fighting the Soviets, most Afghans outside the Panjshir Valley were shocked to learn, he also had been talking with them. The conversation started as letters exchanged with Soviet commanders across the front lines. In these Massoud and his enemy counterparts conversed like colleagues. Later they held face-to-face meetings. In the final two sessions Massoud brokered the terms personally.Writing from Moscow, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief and now Brezhnev’s successor as general secretary of the Communist Party, formally endorsed the agreement for the Soviets.
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Many in Afghanistan and abroad saw the truce as a craven capitulation. Massoud’s deal was a blow to the mujahedin just “as Benedict Arnold was a blow to the Americans,” one American pundit declared.
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Leaders of Jamaat, Massoud’s own party, felt particularly betrayed since Massoud had not bothered to consult them beforehand.

The shock of Massoud’s truce helped strengthen his rival Hekmatyar. Pakistani intelligence, for years disdainful of non-Pashtun clients in northern Afghanistan, cited the deal when explaining to CIA counterparts why Massoud had to be cut off completely. “He set a policy of local cease-fire,” recalled Brigadier General Syed Raza Ali, who worked in ISI’s Afghan bureau throughout the 1980s. “So a man who’s working against the Afghan war, why should we deal with him?”
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ALREADY STRONG, Hekmatyar emerged as the most powerful of ISI’s Pakistan-based mujahedin clients just as Charlie Wilson and Bill Casey, along with Prince Turki, suddenly poured hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new and more lethal supplies into ISI warehouses.

Hekmatyar had matured into a cold, ruthless, effective leader who tolerated no dissent and readily ordered the deaths of his opponents. He enhanced his power by running the tightest, most militaristic organization in Peshawar and in the refugee camps. “One could rely on them blindly,” recalled the ISI brigadier Yousaf, who worked closely with Hekmatyar. “By giving them the weapons you were sure that weapons will not be sold in Pakistan because he was strict to the extent of being ruthless.” Chuckling morbidly, Yousaf added: “Once you join his party it was difficult to leave.” Hekmatyar “followed the totalitarian model of integrating all powers into the party,” as the American scholar Barnett Rubin put it.
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Hekmatyar’s Pashtun family came from a lesser tribal federation forcibly removed during the nineteenth century from the Pakistani border areas to a northern province of Afghanistan, Kunduz, not far from the Panjshir. That his family’s tribal roots were of minority status within the Pashtun community made Hekmatyar attractive to Pakistani intelligence, which wanted to build up Pashtun clients outside of Afghanistan’s traditional royal tribes. Hekmatyar attended high school in Kunduz and military school in Kabul before enrolling in the prestigious Faculty of Engineering at Kabul University. Once in Pakistani exile he gathered around him the most radical, anti-Western, transnational Islamists fighting in the jihad—including bin Laden and other Arabs who arrived as volunteers.

The older Muslim Brotherhood–influenced leaders such as Rabbani and Sayyaf regarded Hekmatyar’s group as a rash offshoot. The more professorial Afghan Islamists spoke of broad, global Islamic communities and gradual moral evolution. Not Hekmatyar: He was focused on power. His Islamic Party organization became the closest thing to an exiled army in the otherwise diverse, dispersed jihad. He adhered to Qutb’s views about the need to vanquish corrupt Muslim leaders in order to establish true Islamic government. He took it upon himself to decide who was a true believer and who was an apostate. Over the centuries Afghan warfare had aimed at “restoring the balance of power, not at destroying the enemy,” as the scholar Olivier Roy put it. Hekmatyar, on the other hand, wanted to destroy his enemies. These included not only communist and Soviet occupation forces but mujahedin competitors.

He recognized Massoud as his most formidable military rival and began early on to attack him in the field and through maneuverings in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. “We have a saying in Pashto,” Hekmatyar told an Arab supporter who worried about the growing intensity of his rivalry with Massoud. “‘There is a rooster who is so conceited it walks on the ceiling on his toes, because he’s afraid that the roof would fall.’ That rooster is Massoud.”
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In his drive for power during the mid-1980s, Hekmatyar so often attacked Massoud and other mujahedin that intelligence analysts in Washington feared he might be a secret KGB plant whose mission was to sow disruption within the anticommunist resistance.
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Yet both at headquarters and in the field, CIA officers in the Near East Division who were running the Afghan program also embraced Hekmatyar as their most dependable and effective ally. ISI officers urged Hekmatyar upon the CIA, and the agency concluded independently that he was the most efficient at killing Soviets. They believed this because as they reviewed battlefield damage reports, tracked the movements of weapons shipments, and toured the refugee camps to check on organizational strength among mujahedin parties, “analytically, the best fighters—the best organized fighters—were the fun-damentalists,” led by Hekmatyar, as one officer then at headquarters put it.
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William Piekney, the CIA station chief, would drive down from Islamabad with ISI officers or visiting congressmen to meet with Hekmatyar in the rock-strewn border training camps. He admired Hekmatyar’s fighting ability, but among the mujahedin leaders it was also Hekmatyar who gave him the deepest chills. “I would put my arms around Gulbuddin and we’d hug, you know, like brothers in combat and stuff, and his coal black eyes would look back at you, and you just knew that there was only one thing holding this team together and that was the Soviet Union.”
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AT LEAST HEKMATYAR KNEW who the enemy was, the CIA’s officers and analysts assured themselves. Massoud’s truce with the Soviets, on the other hand, was his first public demonstration that in addition to being a military genius, he was also willing to cut a deal with anyone at any time and in any direction if he thought it would advance his goals.

Massoud felt the truce would raise his stature by placing him on equal footing with a superpower. “The Russians have negotiated with a valley,” his aide Massoud Khalili crowed. The deal also bought Massoud time to regroup for what he had determined would be a long, long fight ahead. He sought not only to resist the Soviets but to compete for power in Kabul and on a national stage, as the revolutionaries he admired from his reading had done. Despite the uncertainties of the war, he planned early for a conventional army that could occupy Kabul after the Soviets left.
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He used the period during the ceasefire—more than a year, as it turned out—to stockpile weapons and food for his critically malnourished and poorly armed troops. Panjshiri farmers, who hadn’t enjoyed a peaceful growing season in several years, harvested crops unmolested. And many of his troops ranged to other parts of the country, building alliances on Massoud’s behalf with mujahedin commanders who had never been to the Panjshir.

Massoud also capitalized on the calm to attack Hekmatyar’s forces. Before the truce, a group aligned with Hekmatyar’s party had been using an adjacent valley, the Andarab, to stage assaults on Massoud’s flank and cut off his supply lines. With one swift commando raid, Massoud drove these fighters out of the valley and, for the time being, off his back. It was an opening action in an emerging war within the Afghan war.

By the time the truce began to unravel in the spring of 1984, Massoud was breezing through the Panjshir in a distinguished new black Volga sedan. The car had been intended as a gift from the Soviets for the Afghan defense minister, but Massoud’s guerrillas picked it off on its way down the Salang Highway and hauled it back to the Panjshir in hundreds of pieces as a gift for their commander.
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The Soviets signaled their displeasure by sending an undercover Afghan agent into the Panjshir. The agent took a shot at Massoud from thirty feet away but missed. The assassination attempt exposed two other Afghan communist agents in the rebels’ midst, including a Massoud cousin who had also been one of his commanders.

Massoud’s own spy network remained a step ahead. In the spring of 1984 he learned that the Soviets intended to launch a twenty-thousand-man assault on the valley. Not only would the invasion be larger than anything seen before, but, according to Massoud’s sources, the tactics would be far more ruthless. The Soviets planned to subject the valley to a week’s worth of high-altitude aerial assaults and then sow the bomb-tilled soil with land mines to make it uninhabitable for years to come.

Massoud ordered the entire Panjshir Valley to evacuate in late April. Three days before Soviet bombers soared above its gorges, he led more than forty thousand Panjshiris out of the valley and into hiding. When Soviet ground troops—including numerous special forces units known as Spetsnaz—moved in a week later, they found the Panjshir Valley utterly ruined and almost completely deserted.

From the concealed caves surrounding the Panjshir where Massoud reestablished his organization, he cautiously plotted his return. His men launched operations from the ridgelines, shooting down at the helicopters that canvassed the valley floor. They ambushed the enemy, created diversions, and fought at night when the Soviets were most vulnerable.

But the introduction of the elite Spetsnaz, along with their advanced Mi-24D Hind attack helicopters and communications gear, gradually shifted war-fighting tactics in the Soviets’ favor. As many as two thousand Spetsnaz were deployed in Afghanistan during 1984, and the Mi-24’s armor-coated belly repulsed nearly all the antiaircraft guns available to the mujahedin. Massoud’s men found themselves pursued on foot by heavily armed Spetsnaz troops who could scramble up the valley’s rugged cliffs almost as fast as the locals. Kabul Radio reported that Massoud had been killed in action.When an interviewer late that spring asked Afghan President Babrak Karmal whether Massoud was alive or dead, Karmal dismissed the question. “Who is this Massoud that you speak of?” he asked contemptuously. “U.S. propaganda creates artificial personalities and false gods. . . . As an actor, Reagan knows well how to create puppets on the international stage. . . . These creations are clay idols that disintegrate just as fast. Massoud was an instrument of the imperialists. I don’t know if he is alive or dead and I don’t care. The Panjshir issue has been resolved.”
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