The end of the 1980s marked the end of an era. Millions around the world watched as the Berlin Wall, perhaps the most powerful symbol of the Cold War, fell in 1989. But Europe was not the only region in the midst of a transformation. Between 1988 and 1990, the wars in the Middle East each came to an end, their termination coinciding with the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The end of the superpower struggle overshadowed the last stages of fighting in the Middle East, and as the world looked toward a new, post–Cold War order, the conflicts in Lebanon, Iran-Iraq, and Afghanistan were largely forgotten. But the end of the wars did not ultimately bring peace. The Middle Eastern wars of the 1980s ravaged local societies, radicalized political factions, created highly militarized states, and left bitter sectarian divisions. These troubling legacies would not long remain submerged.
By the end of 1987, CIA analysts had concluded that the “Islamic resurgence is likely to be the most powerful, widespread political force in the Arab world for the remainder of this century.” Islamic revivalism stemmed in part from the “failure of various nationalist and socialist ideologies.” By the 1970s, many Arabs had soured on “secular ideologies and institutions.” Meanwhile, the Iranian Revolution and the supposed success of Islamic militants in forcing both Israel and the United States out of Lebanon seemed to demonstrate the power of religious revolutionaries to overcome secular governments. Increasing numbers of people in the region had come to blame outside powers for the clash between modernization and tradition, sectarian tensions, and the ongoing Palestinian problem. Because Islamic fundamentalists sought to push both U.S. and Soviet influence out of the region, Moscow had been unable to capitalize on these upheavals. Further, CIA analysts noted, the Kremlin “worried that the resurgence will spread among its Muslim minorities—some 45 million strong.” Ultimately, the report argued, the Islamic resurgence created both dangers of further upheaval and anti-Americanism and opportunities for Washington to highlight “the incompatibilities between the Soviet Union and Islam.”1
“LIKE DRINKING HEMLOCK”
The Iran-Iraq War was the first of the great Middle Eastern conflicts to come to an end. While American warships clashed with Iranian forces in the waters of the Persian Gulf over the course of 1987, the land war dragged on. The areas along Iraq’s southern frontier continued to witness some of the heaviest fighting. In an effort to bolster their defenses, the Iraqis had flooded a large, shallow basin at the front, which became known as Fish Lake. A mere three feet deep, it was deep enough to slow infantry but too shallow for most boats. In addition to flooded marshes, the Iraqis maintained multiple lines of earthworks, bunkers, and gun positions, laced with barbed wire, each separated by a kilometer. If the first line fell, Iraqi forces could retreat to the second line and direct their fire on advancing Iranian infantry. Farther north, outside the Iraqi city of Amarah, Iraqi forces occupied a four-hundred-foot-tall ridge with commanding views of the marshes below. Western journalists described scenes reminiscent of First World War battlefields with winding trenches, barbed wire, sandbags, minefields, and field hospitals. Behind fifteen-foot-tall barriers, a network of roads allowed Iraqi commanders to rapidly bring reinforcements to embattled sectors. Soldiers at the front—some of whom had been fighting for the entire seven years of the war—carried AK-47s and gas masks. On the other side of no-man’s-land, Iranian troops, many only teenagers, huddled in trenches and foxholes captured from the Iraqis. Toyota pickup trucks vastly outnumbered the tanks and armored transports.2
In late winter 1988, the Iraqis launched a ferocious assault on Iran’s population centers and petroleum facilities. The so-called War of the Cities had begun three years before with bombing raids and occasional missile strikes aimed at demoralizing the civilian population. Since that time, each side had staged sporadic attacks on the other’s cities. On February 29, 1988, Baghdad intensified its attacks, firing a barrage of Scud-B missiles at Tehran. In the next seven weeks, Baghdad launched an estimated 160 missiles aimed at the Iranian capital, in a brutal campaign that rocked the city.3 Despite the damage, State Department analysts doubted the Scud attacks would have much effect on the war. The “basic nature of the war is unchanged,” they noted. “Iraq can’t win, but need not lose. Iran can win, but probably won’t.”4
After bombarding Tehran with long-range missiles, Baghdad launched a new campaign to retake the al-Faw Peninsula. On the night of April 16, 1988, Iraqi artillery opened up on Iranian positions on the northern edge of the peninsula. Using chemical weapons, the Iraqi guns pounded Iranian defenses while helicopters dropped commandos in the south. Iranian troops found themselves battling amid clouds of toxic gas and flanked by Iraqi forces to their rear. Facing collapse, the Iranians staged a harried retreat across the Shatt al-Arab, giving the Iraqis a stunning victory after some thirty-six hours of fighting. Baghdad had, for the first time in six years, retaken the offensive in the war. Ba’athist leaders judged correctly that American naval operations in the Gulf and contested parliamentary elections at home would distract Tehran from its land operations. State Department officials in Baghdad reported celebratory gunfire in the streets as news of the victory on al-Faw circulated. “The Iraqis won a crucial battle and the war will not be the same henceforward,” they wrote. Though the events were kept out of the newspapers, the regime eagerly followed news of U.S.-Iranian clashes in the Gulf. “Iraqi officials are delighted at the bloody nose we have given the Iranians,” the State Department noted. On May 23, Saddam’s forces launched another assault along three points. Using chemical weapons and cluster bombs, Republican Guard units devastated Iranian defenders in Shalamche, east of Basra. By dropping mustard gas behind the front lines, the Iraqis prevented Iranian attempts to move up reinforcements.5
As Iraqi forces seized territory on land, the clashes in the Gulf erupted in tragedy. On the morning of July 3, 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 lifted off from Bandar Abbas on a regular flight to Dubai with 290 passengers and crew. Thousands of feet below, an American missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes, was sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. As the passenger jet closed to within forty kilometers of the Vincennes, the ship’s captain, William C. Rogers III, sent a warning for the aircraft to change course. The ship’s crew had mistaken the commercial aircraft for an F-14 fighter jet. As the airliner continued on its course, Rogers sent a second warning. Receiving no response, he launched two antiaircraft missiles that slammed into the jet’s engines twenty-one seconds later. Sailors on the nearby frigate USS Sides claimed to have seen bodies falling from the sky. In the following days, Tehran invited international media to survey the wreckage and the row upon row of coffins on display at Bandar Abbas. Everyone on board the plane perished—including sixty-six children and an Iranian family of sixteen on their way to a wedding. Although it would never issue a formal apology for the incident, Washington eventually paid seventy million dollars to the airline and the victims’ families.6
Facing crippling assaults from American ships in the Gulf and chemical attacks from Iraqi forces on land, Iranian leaders decided the time had come to seek peace. Though Khomeini had pledged never to accept a cease-fire with the reviled Ba’athists, eight years of war followed by the entry of the United States had driven the price of victory too high. In a letter to the Iranian people dated July 16, 1988, Khomeini explained his decision. Iran’s generals anticipated that, due to the massive Western military aid it was receiving, Baghdad could not be defeated in the next five years. Moreover, Iran could not achieve its ultimate goals without the expulsion of U.S. forces from the Gulf—an unlikely prospect at best. Iraq’s use of chemical weapons compounded Tehran’s dilemma. “For all these reasons,” Khomeini announced, “I am now inclined to agree to a full cease-fire. I trust you know that making this decision is like drinking hemlock for me.” Iranian generals were convinced that Washington had virtually declared war on Tehran and that the United States was effectively running Iraq’s war effort. Iranian leaders also feared that, due to the clashes in the Gulf, the Reagan administration was on the brink of a full-scale intervention in the war. Should this happen, it could bring about the fall of the regime and the end of Khomeini’s revolution. On August 8, 1988, a UN-brokered cease-fire went into effect, bringing about an end to the open war between Iran and Iraq. But the truce would not stop the bloodshed in Mesopotamia.7
ANFAL
In the shadow of the Iran-Iraq War, another nightmare was already under way. If nothing else, the war with Iran had convinced Saddam of the need to consolidate his control over the Iraqi state. Potential sources of rebellion must be crushed. At the top of Saddam’s list sat the Kurdish peoples of northern Iraq. The Kurds were an ancient population spread across the frontiers of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. When the great European powers drew up the map of the post-Ottoman Middle East after the First World War, the Kurds had been one of the peoples left stateless. Ever since, their national ambitions and tribal politics had been a concern for central governments in Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, and Ankara. The Kurds of Iraq had staged three rebellions against the Ba’athist regime—in 1961–70, 1974–75, and 1983–85. During the war with Iran, the Kurdish areas in the north were exposed as a weak point in the Iraqi frontier. With the cessation of hostilities against Iran, Saddam found himself with an opportunity to put his legions of battle-hardened soldiers to a new task. Iraqi forces would wage a brutal campaign against the Kurds that butchered tens of thousands of men, women, and children.
To lead this operation, Saddam selected his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid. “Chemical Ali,” as he came to be known, marshaled the powers of the military, security services, and civilian government to carry out a vicious campaign of genocidal proportions that lasted from March 1987 to April 1989. Al-Majid pledged “to solve the Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs.” The party issued orders demarcating prohibited zones and commanding the army “to carry out random bombardments, using artillery, helicopters and aircraft, at all times of the day or night, in order to kill the largest number of persons present in these prohibited zones.” Any individuals captured in these areas faced interrogation, and those between the ages of fifteen and seventy would be executed. In the meantime, al-Majid’s forces launched chemical weapons attacks against Kurdish strongholds as well as civilian villages. Between April 21 and June 20, 1987, Iraqi forces razed more than seven hundred villages to create buffer zones around major roads and government installations designed to isolate Kurdish rebels. On October 17, 1987, Baghdad conducted a national census that gave the residents of the prohibited zones the option of abandoning their villages and moving into government-controlled areas or being designated as rebels.8
With the lines drawn, the Ba’athists prepared for a focused military campaign aimed at eradicating those Kurds who remained defiant. On the night of February 23, 1988, al-Majid’s forces launched the Anfal campaign with an assault on the party headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan at Sergalou-Bergalou. In a series of eight stages, Human Rights Watch reported, “Iraqi troops tore through rural Kurdistan with the motion of a gigantic windshield wiper.” The assaults typically began with chemical attacks consisting of mustard and nerve gases designed to soften any potential resistance from Kurdish guerrillas. Civilian casualties, inevitable in such operations, were treated as acceptable. The largest such attack took place in the town of Halabja, where between three thousand and five thousand civilians were killed by chemical agents. After the clouds of poison gas drifted away, soldiers surrounded the area and razed all the buildings inside. Upon clearing the town, the military brought in demolition crews to level the area while truck convoys transported any survivors to concentration camps. While in September 1988 the regime released most of the women, children, and elderly being held in the camps, none of the captured men was set free. In at least two instances, the military staged summary executions of groups of men captured during the campaign. Human Rights Watch reported that “males from approximately fourteen to fifty were routinely killed en masse.” The group estimated that no fewer than fifty thousand Kurds died during the Anfal campaign—that figure included thousands of women and children and, in many cases, entire families.9
American leaders were well aware that their ostensible allies in Baghdad were using chemical weapons in a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. In early September 1988, State Department intelligence warned that Iraqi government forces were using helicopters, warplanes, artillery, and armored vehicles against the Kurds. The Iraqis were “likely to feel little restraint in using chemical weapons” in the conflict. Indeed, analysts warned that the regime had already employed such chemical agents in its operations in August. The Ba’athists intended to force the Kurdish population away from its ancestral homelands in the mountains and onto the plains, “where they can be more easily controlled.” This process would entail “considerable loss of life.” A report from mid-September estimated that no fewer than five hundred Kurdish villages had been wiped off the map, noting that the real number was “probably considerably higher.” One hundred thousand refugees had fled to Turkey, with another fifteen thousand moving into Iran.10
The White House and the State Department chose to look the other way, however. At the close of the Iran-Iraq War, a State Department paper from September 1988 reported that Iraq found itself as “the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, with a well-equipped battle-hardened army . . . and a new self-confidence bordering on arrogance.” Freed from the burden of fighting Iran, Baghdad would take a more active stance in regional politics. “Saddam Hussein,” the report warned, “is clever, ruthless and extremely ambitious.” The Ba’athist regime was disciplined and relatively free of corruption—Iraq was, in the authors’ words, “an Arab East Germany.” The regime’s human rights record was a cause for some concern and a “built-in-constraint” on closer relations between Washington and Baghdad. Though the two governments might not see eye to eye on the issues of human rights and chemical weapons, the report continued, they shared a number of interests: continued petroleum commerce, infrastructure development, and a desire to serve as a diplomatic “counterweight” to the influence of Libya and Syria. The Americans could use all the friends they could get in the Middle East, and with U.S.-Iranian relations in the gutter, the Reagan administration was in no hurry to alienate Saddam.11
Not all Americans were so ready to overlook the slaughter of the Kurds, however. On September 9, 1988, the U.S. Senate, in response to reports of Iraq’s chemical attacks against the Kurds, unanimously passed the Prevention of Genocide Act. The bill would impose heavy sanctions on Iraq, cutting off five hundred million dollars in imports to the United States and two hundred million in U.S. exports to Iraq. If the Reagan administration sought to reestablish trade ties with Iraq, it would have to certify that Baghdad “was not using chemical weapons against the Kurds and was not committing genocide.” In effect, the legislation was designed to make it impossible for the White House to ignore the killing in northern Iraq. The bill, which had been passed quickly through the Senate, ran into trouble in the House of Representatives, however. Both the White House and American business interests opposed the legislation, citing inconclusive evidence of genocide and warning against sanctioning Iraq for a crime that, according to one Washington Post op-ed, “may never have taken place.” Over the next weeks, the representatives opposed to the bill chipped away at its restrictions, eventually passing a largely neutered version on September 27. The next month, congressmen separated the genocide act from the tax bill to which it had been attached, and the measure died. The White House’s Realpolitik, coupled with American business interests, had defeated any attempt to sanction Iraq for its actions. Even so, leaders in Washington were quickly losing any illusions they might have had about the Ba’athists.12
The feeling was mutual. Riding high on their recent victory over Iran and the apparent success of the Anfal campaign, Iraqi leaders were in no mood to kowtow to Washington. The U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, noted a surge in “anti-American sentiment” following the Senate’s condemnation of the regime’s attacks on the Kurds. Glaspie warned that the principal tone of Saddam’s public statements was one of “defiance and independence: we are not afraid of the U.S. and we do not need the United States.” Ultimately, she wrote, if Saddam “perceives a choice between correct relations with the USA and public humiliation, he will not hesitate to let the relationship fall completely by the wayside.” The Ba’athists were prone to a “neurotic penchant to suspect ulterior motives,” she added, which fed the regime’s fears that Washington would, sooner or later, tilt back toward Tehran.13
Unbeknownst to officials in Washington, their troubles in the Persian Gulf were just beginning. Though it resolved virtually none of the grievances between Baghdad and Tehran, the Gulf War left two powerful states in the region, each of which commanded massive, battle-hardened armies. Emboldened yet impoverished by the war with Iran, Saddam Hussein would soon turn his attention to his oil-rich Arab neighbors. Meanwhile, leaders in Tehran moved to reclaim the nation’s influence by stationing Revolutionary Guard units around the region, supporting fellow Shia leaders in Syria and Lebanon, and launching a crash program to develop nuclear weapons. In the coming decades, the United States would stage two full-scale invasions of Iraq and become locked in a diplomatic standoff with Iran. In the process, U.S. Central Command (the successor to Carter’s Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force) grew to become the most active military command in the post–Cold War era.
LEAVING AFGHANISTAN
While the Americans worried about their unsavory client in Baghdad, a new leader in the Kremlin (in power since 1985) struggled to find a way out of Afghanistan. At age fifty-four, Mikhail Gorbachev was the youngest man to take leadership of the Soviet Union since Stalin assumed power in the 1920s. The first Soviet leader born after the Bolshevik Revolution, Gorbachev represented a new generation. He was committed to reforming the Soviet political and economic system—not to achieve a revolution but, rather, to renew the vitality of the socialist state. Young and energetic, he breathed fresh air into the stale halls of the Kremlin. “In Gorbachev,” U.S. secretary of state George Shultz noted, “we have an entirely different kind of leader in the Soviet Union than we have experienced before.” As a young man, Gorbachev attended Moscow State University, where he studied law before returning to his hometown of Stavropol, where he quickly advanced up the ranks of the Communist Party. As an ambitious, principled, and hardworking young party member, he caught Leonid Brezhnev’s eye. In 1978, the aging Brezhnev brought Gorbachev to Moscow—the following year, Gorbachev joined the Politburo. There, he watched as first Brezhnev and then his successor, Yuri Andropov, and finally Konstantin Chernenko died in office. Gorbachev represented a departure from the generation of frail, decrepit leaders who had led the Soviet Union since the 1960s. Determined to revitalize the USSR, he launched a series of sweeping domestic reforms (glasnost and perestroika) that encouraged greater openness and transparency and proposed an economic restructuring of the Communist system. In foreign affairs, he sought to improve relations with the United States, scaling back the superpower competition and reducing nuclear arms. He also hoped to remove the Afghan lodestone that the USSR, for nearly six years, had carried around its neck.14
Even before he took power, Gorbachev understood that the Afghan intervention was draining the USSR’s resources, demoralizing the nation’s citizens, and hurting Moscow’s standing abroad, and—most troubling for him—would hamper his efforts to overhaul the Soviet system. He, along with much of the Politburo, recognized that Moscow was not winning its long war in Afghanistan, a fact that was preventing efforts to implement broader reforms. Still, an abrupt withdrawal was out of the question. Such a move would be tantamount to admitting defeat and would deal a tremendous blow to the Kremlin’s international credibility, throw Gorbachev’s leadership into question, and devastate national morale. Instead, he sought a means of ending the war without accepting defeat. In October 1985, he met with President Karmal and warned the Afghan leader that the revolution was in trouble. Kabul had failed to build wide support among the Afghan people and had implemented its vision of socialist revolution too quickly. If it hoped to survive, Gorbachev told Karmal, the Afghan regime must slow its pace of reforms, seek accommodation with religious authorities, and win over the people. These needs were all the more urgent, he added, because Soviet forces would not remain in Afghanistan indefinitely. Gorbachev said he hoped to pull Soviet troops out of the country the following summer, leaving Afghan forces responsible for security. Upon hearing the news, a distraught Karmal pleaded with Gorbachev to reconsider: “If you leave now, next time you will have to send a million soldiers!”15
Although Gorbachev would not pull troops out the following summer, he was determined to end the war and get rid of Karmal. On November 13, 1986, he vented his frustrations to the Politburo. “We have been fighting in Afghanistan for already six years,” he fumed. “If the approach is not changed, we will continue to fight for another twenty to thirty years.” The military had failed to devise an effective strategy to win the war. “What, are we going to fight endlessly?” he fumed. It was time for decisive action. Gorbachev announced that he hoped to end the war “in the course of one year—at maximum two years.” Moreover, Kabul’s problems traced all the way to the top of the regime. “Karmal is walking like a pretzel,” Gorbachev proclaimed, weaving and stumbling like a drunk man. The Kremlin had lost patience with the Afghan leader and now hoped for a change in leadership. Mohammad Najibullah, the newly elected general secretary of the PDPA, “needs our support,” Gorbachev told his comrades. Najibullah understood Afghanistan’s problems and would work toward “national reconciliation, strengthening the union with the peasantry, and consolidation of political leadership of the party and the country.”16
The following month, Gorbachev told Najibullah that he had decided to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan and end the war. Beginning in January 1987, Soviet forces would cease offensive operations and engage the Mujahideen only in defense of Soviet positions.17 But it would not be easy to end the bloodletting in Afghanistan, Gorbachev told the Politburo in February: “Now we’re in, but how to get out racks one’s brains.” A quick withdrawal would raise doubts among Moscow’s allies in the developing world. “They think this would be a blow to the authority of the Soviet Union in the national liberation movement,” Gorbachev claimed. “And they tell us that imperialism will go on the offensive if you flee from Afghanistan.” At the same time, withdrawal carried domestic political repercussions. “A million of our soldiers have been to Afghanistan,” he explained. “And all in vain, it turns out.” Some way must be found to withdraw Soviet forces while leaving Afghanistan a stable state with a regime that would not be hostile to the Soviet Union.18 But rebel leaders and their international network of supporters had other plans.
While the Kremlin labored to draw down Soviet deployments in Afghanistan, the CIA and ISI continued pouring money and weapons into Afghanistan. By late 1986, they had recruited a new set of allies. From the beginning, elements in the Arab world had supported the Afghan struggle against the Soviet occupation. By the latter stages of the conflict, this support had grown into a transnational pipeline of volunteers from places such as Egypt, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia. The first Arab volunteers had arrived in Afghanistan escorting aid packages sent from wealthy oil states. By the second half of the decade, young Arab men were making the journey to participate in what they saw as a jihad against the Soviet occupation. Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian professor and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, is credited with inspiring a flood of Arab volunteers to join the battle in Afghanistan. His booklet, Defending the Land of the Muslims Is Each Man’s Most Important Duty, called upon Muslims everywhere to join the jihad. Somewhere between eight thousand and twenty-five thousand men answered. Although they contributed little to the armed strength of the Afghan Mujahideen, their experience of waging a jihad in Afghanistan was pivotal in establishing global networks of Islamic fighters that rose to prominence in the following decade.19
Foremost among these was the son of a Saudi billionaire, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden had met Azzam while studying at King Abdulaziz University, in Jeddah, in the late 1970s. After leaving the university, he joined Azzam in Pakistan, where he helped facilitate the transfer of aid from the Arab world to the Mujahideen. Like many of the so-called Afghan Arabs, bin Laden worked with the Haqqani group in the mountains of Paktia. He found himself at the center of an emerging, global jihadist movement: CIA, Saudi, and ISI supply chains; zealous Islamic ideologies; and fearsome guerrilla fighters all met in the Haqqani camps along the Pakistani border. In late March 1986, Soviet commanders launched an attack on the Zhawar base, a Haqqani stronghold and critical stopping point for supplies moving across the border that the Mujahideen and the ISI were determined to defend. The Battle of Zhawar was the first major engagement in which large units of Arab fighters participated. Mujahideen fighters supported by Pakistani agents waged a desperate defense against Afghan and Soviet forces. The attackers managed to take the base for five hours on April 19 before being pushed back. Soviet engineers laid explosive charges that inflicted significant damage to the facilities, but they were unable to completely destroy the complex. Fearing a counterattack, government troops withdrew, and the Mujahideen were able to reclaim what was left of the camp. Both sides suffered significant casualties, but Kabul claimed victory in the engagement. In the wake of the battle, bin Laden threw his resources into rebuilding the base. In return for his efforts, the Haqqanis gave the young Saudi three caves along the edge of the camp, which bin Laden transformed into a comparatively luxurious multiroom accommodation. Following his reconstruction efforts at Zhawar, he established a training camp for Arab fighters at Jaji, north of Khost. While largely unknown to the outside world, the young Saudi was becoming an important figure along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier.20
While bin Laden’s star was rising, Kabul’s leader was about to fall. For some time, officials in the Kremlin had been losing patience with Babrak Karmal. The Afghan leader, they believed, had centralized power in his own hands and exacerbated the rifts inside the PDPA. Soviet leaders instead favored Najibullah, whom they had been grooming as Karmal’s replacement. In March 1986, Gorbachev summoned Karmal to Moscow, where the Soviets encouraged him to abdicate. The Afghan leader remained stubborn, however, wrangling a return trip to Kabul, where he tried to block Najibullah’s efforts to consolidate control over the Politburo and the Defense Council. Soviet leaders allowed him to remain as chairman of the Revolutionary Council until November, when he was finally pushed aside. For better or worse, Najibullah was now at the helm in Kabul, and Gorbachev was looking to get out of Afghanistan.21
While the Kremlin searched for an exit, officials in the Reagan administration worked to escalate the bloodshed. Milt Bearden arrived at the CIA station in Islamabad in August 1986. The forty-six-year-old CIA veteran was a large man with a broad nose and a charismatic swagger. He had become a close friend of William Casey’s earlier in the decade, while stationed in Khartoum, and was the Director of Central Intelligence’s choice to take over the Agency’s operations in Afghanistan. “I want you to go out there and win,” Casey had told Bearden. And there was little question about what victory would entail. “All of you guys out there, you try to recruit Soviets,” Bearden boasted to other CIA station chiefs. “Me, I just kill them.” Bearden combed the globe for pack mules he could use to send supplies across the border into Afghanistan, bringing in animals from as far away as China, Texas, and Djibouti. He also oversaw the deployment of the first Stinger missiles to Afghan rebels in September 1986. Bearden would coordinate the final escalation of the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan, oversee the end of the Soviet occupation, and witness the aftermath.22 But the Soviets had no intention of going quietly.
The Kremlin believed that the key to accomplishing the withdrawal from Afghanistan lay in a campaign for national reconciliation. Gorbachev held a long discussion with Najibullah in July 1987 on the program’s goals and current status. Both men agreed that a purely military solution to Afghanistan’s problems was unlikely. National reconciliation aimed to expand the regime’s base of support by bringing enough disaffected elements in the country back into the fold. Najibullah explained that some ten thousand reconciliation commissions were working with local communities and groups throughout the country. Kabul was making special efforts to broker deals with Mujahideen commanders, Najibullah noted, going so far as to recognize “a certain autonomy and independence of mid-level rebel chieftains on the territory which they control” in return for their recognition of the regime in Kabul. Likewise, the government was working to reintegrate refugees who had returned from Pakistan and Iran. Despite some initial success, the regime still faced daunting challenges. Critics of the national reconciliation campaign within the PDPA threatened to inflame the cleavages that had plagued the party since the 1970s. The regime also faced the task of bridging divides between Afghanistan’s various ethnic communities and moving away from a government structure that privileged certain groups over others. All these efforts took place against the backdrop of a bloody and well-funded insurgency raging in the hinterlands. “Our country has become one of the main links of a policy of state terrorism being pursued by the US,” Najibullah complained to Gorbachev.23
On November 19, 1987, Soviet commanders launched one of their largest offensives of the war, Operation Magistral, which was designed to blast open the road leading into Khost and relieve the besieged city. In an overwhelming display of force, ten thousand Soviet troops supported by another eight thousand Afghans were sent in to clear the rebels from the area. While armored vehicles pushed down the road, Soviet paratroopers dropped in along the surrounding heights to force the Mujahideen away from firing positions. In one of the war’s most storied engagements, the company that had staged the 1979 assault on the Tajbeg Palace fought a ferocious battle with Mujahideen in defense of Hill 3234, along the road to Gardez. The Soviet company suffered heavy casualties (twenty-eight out of thirty-nine men) and nearly ran out of ammunition but managed to hold off the attack. Operation Magistral, like most other large operations during the war, ended in a Soviet victory followed by a withdrawal. In short order, rebel fighters moved back into the area where they were once again able to block the road to Khost. Magistral and the battle for Hill 3234 would come to symbolize both the heroism of many Soviet soldiers and the ultimate futility of the war itself.24
The Kremlin was indeed preparing to make good on its promise of pulling Soviet forces out of the country. During the Washington Summit in December, Gorbachev told Reagan that he hoped to withdraw all Soviet troops from Afghanistan within the next twelve months, if not sooner. But he noted that the “process should be tied to national reconciliation and the creation of a coalition government.” He explained that the Kremlin wanted only to see a stable, neutral Afghanistan, and he assured Reagan that Moscow had no designs on bases in Afghan territory. In order to aid the withdrawal, he asked Reagan to cut off U.S. aid to the Mujahideen. Reagan deflected the request. The following day, Gorbachev pleaded with Vice President George Bush to suspend aid to the rebels. “If we were to begin to withdraw troops while American aid continued,” he warned, “then this would lead to a bloody war in the country.” The Soviets and Americans had common interests in Afghanistan—namely, seeing that the country did not fall into chaos after the Soviet withdrawal, and blocking the rise of a potentially dangerous Islamist regime. But Operation Cyclone, the CIA’s covert aid program to the Mujahideen, was too successful for the Reagan administration simply to abandon it while Soviet boots remained in Afghanistan. Reagan’s determination to use Afghanistan as a weapon against Moscow led Washington to drive a hard bargain and effectively rebuke Gorbachev’s attempts at accommodation. Neither the prospect of hastening the Soviet withdrawal nor the threat of a coming anarchy in Afghanistan would move the White House.25
Soviet forces launched their last major combat offensive of the war on January 23, 1989. Operation Typhoon was a parting gift to Najibullah, who had requested that the Soviets make one last effort to crush Massoud’s forces in the Panjshir Valley. Though many Soviet officers warned against the operation, which they saw as futile and needlessly destructive, the Kremlin acquiesced. After calling on the civilian population to evacuate, the Russians used their artillery and aircraft to pound the valley, smashing buildings and devastating roadside villages. Massoud and most of his fighters survived while Soviet soldiers were left to wonder at the ultimate purpose of the operation and the larger war. “Almost ten years of the war were reflected, as if in a mirror, in three days and three nights,” one Soviet general later wrote; “political cynicism and military cruelty, the absolute defenselessness of some, and the pathological need to kill and destroy on the part of others. Ten years of bloodletting were absorbed into three awful days.”26
Three weeks later, the last Soviet armored vehicle rolled across the Amu Darya Bridge, marking the end to the Soviet-Afghan War. Soviet officials reported nearly 15,000 of their troops killed during the nine-year conflict, with more than 50,000 wounded. Some reports claimed that casualties were even higher. Rough estimates of Mujahideen deaths started at 75,000 killed, with at least as many wounded. Estimates of total casualties ranged from 600,000 to 1.5 million killed and another 3 million wounded. Approximately 5 million Afghans had fled the country, and another 2 million were internally displaced.27
Although the war had ended for the USSR, Afghanistan’s ordeal was only beginning. In a report written the previous spring, the CIA predicted that Najibullah’s regime would not long survive the Soviet departure: “[W]e believe [the new regime] initially will be an unstable coalition of traditionalist and fundamentalist groups whose writ will not extend far beyond Kabul and the leaders’ home areas.” These new leaders of Afghanistan, the Agency warned, “will be Islamic—possibly strongly fundamentalist, but not as extreme as Iran. . . . We cannot be confident of the new government’s orientation toward the West; at best it will be ambivalent, and at worst it may be actively hostile, especially toward the United States.” There was also a possibility, analysts warned, “that no stable central government will develop in Kabul.” Should this happen, they predicted, “Afghanistan could evolve into a Lebanon-like polity in which there is no effective central government and regional warlords battle each other and compete for hegemony in the capital.”28 As the spring thaw melted the snowy mountain passes and rival Mujahideen factions prepared for a new season of fighting, not just with Kabul but also with one another, it appeared that the CIA’s dire predictions would come true. But with the Soviet departure, most of the outside world’s attention had turned away from Afghanistan.
ARMS SMUGGLERS, PIRATES, WARLORDS, AND GUNMEN
There remained one last round of fighting before the Middle Eastern conflicts of the late Cold War finally came to an end.
After nearly fourteen years of war, the combatants in Lebanon had approached the point of exhaustion. Sectarian resentments continued to fester, however. In September 1988, outgoing president Amine Gemayel dismissed the serving prime minister, Selim Hoss, and appointed Gen. Michel Aoun to the office of prime minister—rather than passing to Hoss, a Sunni—so that Lebanon’s head of state would remain a Maronite Christian. Aoun formed a military cabinet and announced the creation of his new government. Hoss rejected his dismissal and insisted that he remained the legitimate prime minister of Lebanon. After nearly fifteen years of civil war, Lebanon had two rival governments.29 Aoun was determined to reunite Lebanon under his rule and push the Syrian forces out of the country. To do this, he declared a “war of liberation” against foreign forces inside Lebanon on March 14, 1989. Syrian units responded with a blockade against Aoun’s territory and a ferocious artillery attack that destroyed 80 percent of Aoun’s petroleum reserves. Aoun fired back with his army’s guns, many of which had been acquired from the United States and Israel, and managed to inflict substantial damage against Syrian bases in the Beqaa Valley. As Syrian shells rained down on West Beirut, a flood of refugees abandoned the district, moving back toward South Lebanon, from whence many had come. Those that remained sheltered below ground as everyday life ground to a halt.30
In October, the surviving fifty-eight members of Lebanon’s National Assembly—parliamentary elections had not been held since the beginning of the civil war in 1975—met in Taif, Saudi Arabia, with the support of Riyadh, Washington, and the Arab League. Their task was to revise the National Pact, which had formed the basis for sectarian power relations in Lebanon since 1943. The resulting Taif Agreement restructured political power to reflect the growth of the Muslim population and announced Lebanon as a state firmly rooted in the Arab world. However, in an acknowledgment of Maronites, the agreement stressed that Lebanon would remain the “final homeland for all its citizens.” The document also called for the eventual abolition of the confessional system, but it did not establish a time line for doing so. The accords implicitly accepted Syrian influence in Lebanon, granting Damascus an official role in assisting Lebanese forces to establish the new government’s authority and acknowledging the “special relationship” between the two nations. Finally, the Taif Agreement called for the disbanding and disarming of all sectarian militias, concentrating military power in the hands of the state. Although it signed on to the agreements, Hezbollah maintained its forces in South Lebanon, an act that it justified as necessary to continue its armed resistance against Israel’s occupation.31
At the end of 1989, only one major force remained in opposition to the Taif Agreement: Michel Aoun. Many in the Christian population cheered as the general rejected Taif as a violation of Lebanese sovereignty and as a “repair to a rotten regime.” International forces were coalescing against the general, however. In August 1990, Iraqi forces launched an invasion of Kuwait that sparked an immediate outcry around the world. As the United States built an international coalition to attack Iraq, Aoun lost one of his last remaining foreign supporters. Washington and Damascus found common ground in their opposition to the regime in Baghdad, and Assad found himself with a freer hand to deal with Lebanon. It would be the Syrians who finally crushed the general. On October 13, 1990, Syrian ground units moved en masse to attack Aoun’s force as Syrian warplanes struck the presidential palace at Baabda. As the Syrians massacred the Lebanese defenders—the bodies of seventy-three soldiers who had been executed with a bullet in the skull were sent to one hospital—Aoun realized that his time had run out. The general ordered his troops to surrender and then fled Baabda to seek refuge in the French embassy, as Assad’s forces seized the presidential palace. After a decade and a half, the civil war had come to an end.32
For fifteen years, Lebanon had appeared as a sort of Hobbesian nightmare, a war of all against all gripping the small country. As one historian noted, much of the most vicious fighting took place between rival militias within the same sect: Gemayel’s Phalangists slaughtered Chamoun’s Tigers; the PLO battled Saiqa; Amal and Hezbollah waged a brutal war against each other.33 During this time, Lebanon’s central government ceased to perform many of its basic functions. As the nation fractured into warring ethnic cantons, rival economic units emerged. Coupled with the rise of warlords and militia rule, illicit economies proliferated throughout Lebanon. By the early 1980s, Lebanon had become a leader in the global drug trade. Up to 40 percent of the cultivated land in the fertile Beqaa Valley was devoted to narcotics cultivation—mainly hashish and opium. Some estimates placed the market value on Lebanese-produced narcotics at $150 billion. Ports along the Mediterranean coast became havens for arms smugglers, drug traffickers, and pirates. The Lebanese black market flowed with everything from tax-free cigarettes to heroin, AK-47s to contraband livestock. This lawless atmosphere extended well into the major cities, where drivers were expected to pay “tolls” at rival militia checkpoints on major thoroughfares. The Lebanon of the 1980s became a potent example of the dangers of state marginalization—a land ruled by smugglers, pirates, warlords, and gunmen.34
WITH THE CONCLUSION OF THE WARS IN LEBANON, AFGHANISTAN, and Iran-Iraq, the Cold War era’s final stage of mass violence came to an end even as the Soviet Union itself teetered on the brink of collapse. The Middle Eastern wars of the 1980s ushered in a new type of conflict, one in which sectarianism replaced secular liberation as the primary vehicle of revolutionary politics in the developing world. Communal violence in Lebanon, the shock of the 1979 revolution in Iran, and the growing strength of the Afghan Mujahideen showcased the degree to which resurgent ethno-religious ideologies had eclipsed the Cold War politics of East versus West. The Middle Eastern conflicts of the late Cold War tilted the regional balance of power decisively in favor of the United States. From the late 1980s on, Washington stood unchallenged as the most influential outside power in the Middle East. But the price of this victory remained unclear. Over the course of the 1980s, U.S. leaders had mobilized the forces of militant Islam in their Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. As U.S. officials understood, these groups were hardly friendly to American interests, and there was no reason to believe that they would hesitate to turn their fury against Washington after the Soviet departure. Even as the Soviet war in Afghanistan was coming to an end in 1989, Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto cautioned George H. W. Bush about the dangers of Washington’s support for militant Islam. “You are creating a Frankenstein,” she warned.35 Just how dangerous these forces would become would not be made apparent until the beginning of the next century.
“WE’RE GOING TO PUT THEIR HEADS ON STICKS”
On September 13, 2001, two days after Al-Qaeda militants crashed commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Cofer Black sat down for a meeting with President George W. Bush in the White House Situation Room. The fifty-one-year-old head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had spent the last two years preparing for war against the radical Islamic group Al-Qaeda. Black outlined a plan to launch a relentless assault against Al-Qaeda operatives around the world, with the goal of killing as many militants as possible. “When we’re through with them,” he told the president, “they’ll have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black’s gruesome words struck a chord with the president’s national security advisors, many of whom had come of age during the Cold War, an era when sober diplomacy eclipsed violent military clashes. The United States was now embarking on a different type of war than the one that most remembered against the Soviet Union. It would be a conflict centered on special operations forces and targeted killings rather than issues such as nuclear diplomacy and economic rivalry. “We’re going to kill them,” Black explained later. “We’re going to put their heads on sticks.”36
To many of the architects of the so-called global war on terror, the fighting to come must have seemed very familiar. While men such as Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spent the first decades of their careers preparing for a confrontation with the Soviet Union, the front lines of this new struggle against Al-Qaeda and similar groups were often manned by veterans of the Cold War’s killing fields—sites of savage conflicts fought by mercenaries, guerrillas, and hard-faced soldiers, conflicts that killed hundreds of thousands in the far-flung corners of the world.
Greg Vogel (code-named “Spider”) helped coordinate the CIA’s war against Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan during the 2002 Operation Anaconda. A former marine who had served with CIA paramilitary groups in Central America, Vogel had also worked to train Afghan Mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War.37 Another member of the CIA’s paramilitary unit, Michael Vickers, stepped into key positions in the Pentagon to help design Washington’s global war on terror. A veteran of the Grenada invasion, Vickers served as the “principal strategist” for the CIA’s covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. During the Cold War, Vickers trained as a Green Beret to “parachute into enemy territory with a small nuclear weapon strapped to his leg,” the Washington Post reported, “and then position it to halt the Red Army.”38 Far from a break from the earlier era of the superpower struggle, this new war was rooted firmly within it.
But Vogel and Vickers were not the only warriors who had come of age fighting on these distant battlegrounds. In the spring of 1989, a young street tough from Zarqa, Jordan, made his way to Afghanistan. Encouraged by his mother to join the jihad against the Soviets, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi arrived too late to do any fighting against the now-departed Soviet forces. Instead, he became a writer for a jihadist magazine. Ashamed of the tattoos acquired in his youth, he wore long sleeves among his fellow fighters. Zarqawi fought alongside Mujahideen groups in Paktia and Khost before returning to Jordan sometime in the early 1990s. Like other Arab veterans of the Afghan war, Zarqawi tried to bring the jihad home. Jordanian authorities caught wind of his activities, however, and imprisoned him throughout most of the 1990s. After the regime declared a general amnesty in 1999, Zarqawi mounted a failed attempt to bomb the Amman Radisson Hotel. He then fled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he connected with another jihadist who had come of age fighting Soviets in the mountains of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden.39 The Saudi militant had been busy in the years since the end of the war, establishing himself as one of the most prominent Islamic revolutionaries in the world. During the 1990s, he used his financial resources to build his organization, Al-Qaeda, into a major player in the world of militant Islam. He had also come to see the United States, the most important outside power in the Middle East and a key backer of regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel, as the principal obstacle to a broader Islamic revolution in the region. In an effort to drive U.S. influence out of the region, Al-Qaeda launched a series of attacks over the decade, including the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, off the coast of Aden. Bin Laden and his comrades moved from Afghanistan, to Saudi Arabia, and to Sudan before returning to Afghanistan in 1996.
To date, no researcher has produced documentation of direct links between Washington and bin Laden or, for that matter, Zarqawi. The weight of evidence suggests that the CIA and the future leaders of Al-Qaeda and ISIS were not in communication with one another during the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. U.S. officials tended to leave direct contacts with the Mujahideen to their counterparts in the Pakistani ISI, and neither bin Laden nor Zarqawi would have been important enough then to command significant attention from Washington. Nevertheless, U.S. and Soviet operations in Afghanistan laid the groundwork for the rise of a global jihadist movement in the waning years of the Cold War. Likewise, the U.S. invasions of Iraq, spearheaded by the Reagan-era successor to Carter’s Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, Central Command, created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
THE COLD WAR TURNED AFGHANISTAN, AND ULTIMATELY the wider Middle East, into the epicenter of a growing global jihadist movement. The chaos that had engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet departure helped to transform Afghanistan into an ideal breeding ground for Islamic revolutionary fighters. Al-Qaeda’s leadership, ideology, and infrastructure had risen from the ashes of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Zarqawi would build upon his background in Afghanistan to form a jihadist group inside American-occupied Iraq that, in time, would evolve into ISIS. With the ascension of Al-Qaeda’s worldwide Islamic insurgency and America’s war on terror after the September 11 attacks, figures such as bin Laden, Zarqawi, Vickers, and Vogel took commanding positions in a new global conflict. The shadow warriors of the superpower struggle now stepped into the light. Having sown the wind on the battlefields of the Cold War, the United States would now reap the whirlwind.