BOOKS

Afghanistan and U.S.

A.G. NOORANI

Ghost Wars by Steve Coll; The Penguin Press, 2004; pages 695, $24.95.

THE long sub-title of this tome sums up its contents: "The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001." It is thoroughly researched with over 70 pages of endnotes. When will they revive the footnotes? Else, why not put the references in brackets in the text itself? The bibliography is comprehensive. But to pack a book with trivia is to diminish its worth. Unfortunately, that is the style of American reportage. Bob Woodward imagined that mention of President George W. Bush's grab at mints on others' plates at the table enhanced his credibility and the book's readability.

Steve Coll need not have any such fears. Winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, he has been Managing Editor of The Washington Post since 1998 and covered Afghanistan as its South Asia bureau chief. In May 2002, his report of an interview with President Pervez Musharraf contained the hint that paved the way for a dialogue - and end to infiltration across the Line of Control (LoC) on the understanding that a dialogue would follow. No student of South Asia can ignore this highly informative work.

Ministry of External Affairs (MEA)-watchers would do well to ask what India's Afghan policy has achieved by its assiduous practice of "me-tooism". It was pathetic to hear Atal Bihari Vajpayee complain to the United States of neglect on Afghanistan when he spoke to the Asia Society in New York in 1998. No Afghan government can ignore India. But the urge to outsmart Pakistan by elbowing a way to Kabul has yielded little.

It appears that in 1979, at a delicate stage in Soviet-Afghan relations, "a document from India circulating that autumn noted that when he lived in New York (President Hafizullah) Amin had been affiliated with the Asia Foundation, which had a history of contacts with the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. As the weeks passed, some KGB officers examined the possibility that Amin might be an American plant sent to infiltrate the Afghan Communist Party."

In truth, Amin "had never worked for the CIA". As both U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs and his Deputy J. Bruce Amstutz knew. Now read this: "The Islamabad CIA station ran some Pakistani agents, but it had very few Afghan contacts. Hart (CIA station chief) had scheduled his night-time meeting with Haq (a rebel leader) to coincide with a money drop he had to make to an Indian agent. He carried a small bag with a couple hundred thousand Indian rupees inside." Amstutz became U.S. Consul-General in Mumbai.

The space devoted to trivia might have been used to advantage in exploring some dark covers. Volumes 29 and 30 of the "Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den" (Isnaad Lanaa-e-Jasoosi) published by Iranian students after they had captured the American Embassy in Teheran reveal that Amstutz had rapport with the Soviet and East German embassies and good reason to infer the imminence of the invasion. A timely demarche by the U.S., as in the case of Poland in 1981, would have accomplished more than the covert operation, of frightful consequences, launched thereafter. (During the seizure of the embassy, his personnel, in sheer panic, fed the vital documents to shredders. They little realised that the students had in their veins blood of centuries of carpet weaving. The students admirably pieced together the shredded bits and published a most revealing set of over 50 volumes. Western as well as Indian scholarship has ignored this mine of information.)

Coll is well aware of the Taliban File published by the National Security Archive but does not pause to examine whether diplomacy would have accomplished the result which the U.S. desired - the Taliban's surrender of Osama bin Laden - at less cost (Frontline, January 26).

He records that "all the while neighbouring countries - Pakistan, Iran, India, Saudia Arabia - delivered pallets of guns and moneys to their preferred proxies". Fear and hate, not cold calculation, governed policies. The former Soviet Union feared an American takeover of Afghanistan. The U.S. feared that the Soviet invasion of that country was the first step towards a bid for the Gulf and a march towards Saudi Arabia. Leonid Brezhnev's preposterous proposal, linking Soviet withdrawal to a new regime in the Gulf, confirmed the fears.

Early in 1979, "the CIA's chief analyst for Soviet affairs, Arnold Hoelick, wrote a worried memo to Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA's Director. Hoelick feared that Taraki's communist regime might disintegrate, prompting the Soviets to intervene. A Soviet incursion might lead Pakistan, Iran and perhaps China to augment secret support to the Afghan rebels. General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan might then ask the United States to openly oppose or deter any Soviet military thrust across Pakistan's border. Here was a scenario for the outbreak of World War III, with all of its horrifying potential for nuclear escalation. As to Moscow's attitude towards the floundering Kabul communists, Hoelick concluded that in at least some scenarios `the Soviets may well be prepared to intervene on behalf of the ruling group'. CIA Director Turner sent President Carter and his senior advisers a classified `Alert' memo on December 19, warning that the Soviets had `crossed a significant threshold in their growing military involvement in Afghanistan' and were sending more forces south. Three days later Deputy CIA Director Bobby Inman called Brzezinski and Defence Secretary Harold Brown to report that the CIA had no doubt the Soviet Union intended to undertake a major military invasion of Afghanistan within seventy-two hours." The U.S. responded as if it had been taken by surprise.

Both Pakistan and India profited by Afghanistan's misfortune. It helped Zia-ul-Haq come out of his isolation and secure arms from the U.S. and India acquire Soviet arms and diplomatic support to a greater degree. A fuller study of India's Afghan policy, which notes Indira Gandhi's private fears, the able Foreign Secretary Ram Sathe's mission to Pakistan in 1980 and the rest - awaits its author. It must record the dressing down which Prime Minister Charan Singh gave the Soviet Ambassador on December 26, 1979, when he called to inform the Prime Minister of the Soviet move. The Ambassador beat as hasty a retreat as he could with some dignity. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) became more powerful, the KGB more active. "KGB-backed agents killed hundreds of civilians in terrorist bombings inside Afghanistan."

In March 1985 President Ronald Reagan signed a directive - NSDD 16, entitled "Expanded U.S. aid to Afghan guerrillas", with a 16-page annex laying down tasks for the CIA. On November 13, 1986, President Mikhail Gorbachev decided at a polit bureau meeting, to withdraw Soviet troops.

The war exacted a heavy toll in lives - and values. The CIA used journalists as informers. The U.S. and Pakistan put most of their eggs in the basket of the most ruthless and extremist of the Afghan leaders Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. "Poorly understood and lightly challenged the Afghanistan-spanned Islamist cells began to spread." Few in the U.S. Embassy dissented. One of them, Ed McWilliams. Another, who came later on the scene, was Peter Tomsen, who had served in the U.S. Consulate in Mumbai and the Embassy in Delhi in the 1970s. Dissent was ignored when it could not be smothered. It is an instructive episode. The U.S. imagined that the Najibullah regime would collapse once Soviet troops withdrew. The dissenters' questions were not answered. "However deprived and battered they were, Afghan civilians in Kabul enjoyed certain privileges they did not wish to surrender. There were ample if unproductive government jobs. Tens of thousands of women worked in offices, arriving each day in rough-cut East European-style skirts and high heels. What would their lives be like under the Islamists? The Afghan people hated Najibullah, but they feared Hekmatyar. What if Najibullah began to negotiate cease-fires with ambitious rebel commanders - perhaps even [Ahmed Shah] Massoud? If he preached Afghan nationalism, might he not be able to hang on? What if the Soviets poured billions of dollars of economic aid into Kabul even after their troops evacuated, providing Najibullah with a way to buy off warlords from the mujahedin's ranks?"

Coll misses a significant event preceding the Taliban movement. Najibullah quit power on April 18, 1992. President Burhanuddin Rabbani, mentor to the legendary Massoud, a man of high quality, reneged on his promise to hand over power on June 28, 1994, as an accord he had signed required. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's Foreign Minister, the ridiculous Assaf Ali Khan, impetuously declared: "Anything that happens in Afghanistan will have no legitimacy." Was it a mere coincidence that the Taliban began moving into Afghanistan only a few months later in 1994? Two years later they captured Kabul and proceeded to teach Pakistan the lesson, which clients have taught patrons since the dawn of time - ingratitude is the surest proof of independence. "The Taliban travelled in shiny new Toyota double-cab pickup trucks. They carried fresh weapons and ample ammunition. Mysteriously, they repaired and flew former Soviet fighter aircraft, despite only rudimentary military experience among their leaders."

IN Washington a spokesperson for the State Department, Glyn Davies, announced the official American reaction: "We hope this presents an opportunity for a process of national reconciliation to begin."

The Taliban was created by the ISI, with full backing from Benazir Bhutto. Coll had a lengthy interview with her in Dubai on May 5, 2002. He repeatedly records her lies yet accepts her disingenuous excuses. "Bhutto said that in the months that followed this first meeting between ISI and the Taliban, the requests from Pakistani intelligence for covert aid to their new clients grew gradually. `I became slowly, slowly sucked into it,' Bhutto remembered. `It started out with a little fuel, then it became machinery' and spare parts for the Taliban's captured airplanes and tanks. Next ISI made requests for trade concessions that would enrich both the Taliban and the outside businessmen who supplied them. `Then it became money direct from the Pakistani treasury,' Bhutto recalled. Benazir Bhutto, who was secretly authorising the Taliban's covert aid, did not let the Americans know. She visited Washington in the spring of 1995, met with President Clinton, and promoted the Taliban as a pro-Pakistan force that could help stabilise Afghanistan."

To earn American sympathy she later claimed that her dismissal as Prime Minister was secured by the ISI, which sought bin Laden's money to bribe MPs' vote on a no-confidence motion. This is palpably false. The ISI was never short of funds and Benazir Bhutto was never ousted by a vote. President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed her on August 6, 1990, without any vote in the National Assembly. On November 5, 1986, President Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari also sacked her without any vote in the House. He told Roedad Khan he had tried to make her mend her ways. But failed. He cited "Benazir's corruption, maladministration, abdication of authority in favour of her spouse" (Pakistan - A Dream Gone Sour by Roedad Khan; Oxford University Press; page 213). Benazir Bhutto lied to Coll as she did and still does to everyone. "Around December 1989, Pakistani intelligence reached out to bin Laden for money to bribe legislators to throw Benazir Bhutto out of office, according to reports that later reached Bhutto. According to Bhutto, ISI officers telephoned bin Laden in Saudi Arabia and asked him to fly to Pakistan to help organise a no-confidence vote in Parliament against Bhutto's government, the first step in a Pakistan Army plan to remove her forcibly from office." Coll apparently accepts this claim.

His view that "Bhutto had decided that it was more important to appease the Pakistani Army and intelligence services than to level with her American friends" is wrong. She supported this policy ardently. Two oil companies - the American Unocal and the Argentinian Bridas - competed for a contract to lay down a pipeline through Afghanistan to Central Asia. Benazir Bhutto plumped for Bridas, among others, the U.S. Ambassador Tom Simons also received indications that "someone in Bhutto's government had been paid off on the Argentinian pipeline contract". The suspect was her husband Asif Zardari.

Unocal's representative Marty Miller adopted a Muslim name and approached the Taliban leaders. They refused. "It was a tawdry season in American diplomacy. After years of withdrawal and disengagement American policy had been captured by the language of corporate deal-making. In the absence of alternatives the State Department had taken up Unocal's agenda as its own. Whatever the merits of the project, the sheer prominence it received by 1996 distorted the message and meaning of American power. American tolerance of the Taliban was publicly and inextricably linked to the financial goals of an oil corporation."

TWO years later the U.S. discarded the weapon of diplomacy and took up the weapon of brute force. Before and after the firing of Cruise missiles into Afghanistan in 1988 the Taliban were prepared to talk on bin Laden while the CIA busied itself in infantile plans for his capture with its "tribal leaders' leaders". By 2000 there were still a few analysts at the State Department's Intelligence Bureau who argued for patient engagement with the Taliban. But most of Clinton's Cabinet believed that Al Qaeda had hijacked Mullah Omar.

In June 1998, shortly before the Cruise missile attacks, Mullah Omar (the Taliban chief) had assured the Saudis that they would throw bin Laden out through a Saudi-Taliban commission to bring him to trial. The ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmed was told by Omar in 2000 that he "wanted to get rid of Osama but did not know how". The U.S. brusquely rejected the idea of an Islamic court. All peaceful avenues were barred. The book ends with Massoud's tragic assassination by Al Qaeda.

It reveals much about events in Pakistan. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was privy to the Kargil venture. He had much in common with Benazir Bhutto. "He was presumed to be raking millions from Pakistan's treasury for his family's benefit." The 9/11 attacks gave Bush and his National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice an opportunity which they grabbed - to attack Iraq and impose a New Order on West Asia. Steve Coll recalls for the benefit of the reader the intellectual equipment which they brought to the task. It bears quotation in extenso because it helps explain why and how they have behaved in these and a half years since he became President:

"Bush's intellect and qualifications had become campaign issues. He had travelled abroad very little and had no direct experience in international affairs. He could not spontaneously identify General Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan's leader. His lapses prompted a writer from Glamour magazine to list a series of names and ask Bush what came to mind: Christine Todd Whitman, Madonna, Sex and the City, the Taliban. Whitman was a `good friend'. On the television show, Bush explained that he did not get cable. About the Taliban, he shook his head in silence. The writer provided a hint: `Because of the repression of women - in Afghanistan'. Bush lit up. `Oh, I thought you said some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan: Absolutely. Repressive.'

"Bush relied heavily on Condoleezza Rice, his chief foreign policy adviser during his campaign. Rice was a self-described `Europeanist'. She had written books on the communist-era Czechoslovak army and on the reunification of Germany. She had run the Soviet Affairs directorate of the National Security Council under Bush's father. `I like to be around her,' Bush explained, because `she's fun to be with. I like light-hearted people, not people who take themselves so seriously that they are hard to be around.' Rice was a self-confident administrator with well-developed views about post-Cold War Europe. But she had to cram during the campaign about areas of the world she knew less well. At one point she described Iran as `the state hub for technology and money and lots of other goodies to radical fundamentalist groups, some will say as far-reaching as the Taliban'. But Iran's Shiite regime and the Taliban's radical Sunni mullahs were blood enemies, and Iran actually sent arms and money to Ahmed Shah Massoud, to aid his war against the Taliban. Challenged by a reporter, Rice insisted that the Iranians were `sending stuff to the region that fell into the hands of bad players in Afghanistan and Pakistan'. She did not explain what players. Asked about her statement once again, she said that, of course, she was aware of the enmity between Iran and the Taliban."

The last word belongs to Talleyrand: "Nations would have been horrified if they know what petty people rule them."

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