Thirty years ago, before there were cell
and satellite phones, way before WiFi and drones, news about seemingly obscure
wars like Afghanistan came from the plucky reporters who trekked into the heart
of conflict to interview rebel fighters in their lair. British-educated Edward
Girardet was looking for his "own Spanish Civil War or Vietnam to cover" when
he graduated from college, and his reporting from Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor during the
period of the Soviet occupation from 1979-1989 was a stellar example of the unilateral
genre.
He would disappear from view for weeks
on end, hike through contested zones with Russian troops very close by en route
to the Panjshir valley, where he would interview "the Lion" -- guerrilla leader
Ahmed Shah Massoud. To return to his home base in Peshawar he'd search for a Pakistani
border post and turn himself in for illegally crossing the border. After tea
and a friendly chat with the post commander, he'd be sent off on safe
transportation. Girardet's Killing the
Cranes makes gripping reading.
Jonathan Steele of London's Guardian also traveled to Afghanistan
during the nine plus years of conflict, but he arrived by plane from Moscow,
visa in hand, and covered the other side, reporting from the perspective of the
Soviet-installed Afghan government and the Russian officials sent to prop it
up.
The past is prologue in land-locked
Afghanistan as anywhere else, and the challenge for both journalists in writing
memoirs of the 1980s is to make the jihad of that era and the power they were
fighting relevant to the very different contest now under way. This isn't an easy task, for the arduous trek
through the Hindu Kush will provide the brave, lone reporter at best a slice of
events at a certain moment, but it may not have any inherent message for readers
30 years later. It is still tougher for someone who covered the war only from
the Russian side, which would seem like a classic case of looking through the
wrong end of the telescope. Full disclosure: I've known both authors for
decades.
On the surface, there are more than a few
similarities between the two periods: a superpower with enormous resources and
advanced technology is bogged down in an asymmetrical war with indigenous Islamist
insurgents, who survive in large part thanks to backing from neighboring
Pakistan, which has an agenda of its own.
The differences also jump out: Pakistan, nuclear-armed, is now working
both sides of the street -- facilitating the U.S. warfighting, while backing
the Taliban insurgents killing U.S. troops. The added twist is that those
insurgents in the past five years have spawned a Pakistani Taliban that seeks
the overthrow of the Pakistani state.
Girardet's main contention is that by
funneling weapons through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI),
which heavily favored the ruthless commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the CIA set
the stage for the struggle now under way. "Simply put, it was the U.S. backing
of the Islamic extremists in the 1980s that helped produced the current
military quagmire in Afghanistan." Fair
enough. But then he takes it several steps further. "The Hyena," as he calls Gulbuddin,
never won a battle except against his Mujahidin rivals, and also "may have had
dealings with the KGB," which "built him up" through its propaganda. His source
for the latter claim is a 1990 research report by a House Republican committee
on terrorism, co-chaired by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), the champion of the
Mujahidin cause. Girardet says the United States provided Hekmatyar at least
half a billion dollars in military and financial support. While many of Girardet's claims are factually
sound, what's missing is original research, so a reader can judge whether
Rohrabacher's claim is true, partly true or a canard.
The final quarter of the book is a once-over
lightly account of the past 20 years, relying heavily on sourcing from
non-governmental organizations. Girardet himself long ago started up his own NGO
to encourage media coverage of conflicts. But the same initiative which led to
a series of excellent guides for reporters covering Afghanistan also advocated
involving "credible media, like the BBC and VOA more directly as a means of
promoting mediation among the belligerents. This could be through practical
information outreach aimed at making fighters and local populations more aware
of on-the-ground humanitarian needs," he writes, thereby blurring the line between
media and aid organization.
"As with so many foreigners passionately
involved with Afghanistan, it has been hard to see what has become of this
extraordinary country and its people since war first erupted in 1978," he writes,
noting that "many of us have romanticized Afghanistan because of its harsh
beauty and poetic embrace."
In December, 2001, the German government
asked Girardet to take part in the Bonn conference setting up a transitional
government in Afghanistan. He was in a group examining constitutional and legal
aspects, a crossing of lines which no staff journalist could do. Girardet then
switched hats in his book, criticizing his own work: "Much of what finally
emerged from the Bonn accords was a recipe for disaster...equally farcical is the
legal system that eventually emerged," thereby denouncing what seems to be his
own handiwork. It would have been
valuable to know just how that salami was made.
This is not an analytical book; it lacks
source notes; and the case for his conclusion on the last page -- "All I see is
a replay of history" -- is thin. For example, he compares Operation
Moshtarak, the high profile U.S.-led operation in 2010 to remove the Taliban
and the drug trade from a key part of Helmand province, with the Red Army
offensive against Massoud in Panjshir.
"Operation Moshtarak had clear parallels with the Red Army-Afghan
offensive I witnessed twenty-seven years earlier in the spring of 1982 against
the Panjshir. The push, which involved
some twelve thousand Soviet-Afghan troops, was roughly the same size as
Marjah's," he says. In 1982, he recalls, reporters were with the guerrillas,
slept in the villages, drank tea with the locals. Girardet notes with surprise
that the "dispatches from the British and American military fronts of today
often seem to be from a different war, with assessments that have little to do
with Afghanistan."
But he should know that the Taliban
are not Massoud's Panjshiris; their commanders will kidnap a journalist trying
to embed with them, sell him or her to other commanders or hold them for ransom
for a year or more. The aim of Moshtarak was to set up civilian control and
leave, a far cry from the Red Army offensive.
Girardet also acknowledges that
enterprising Afghans are now starting up businesses, cross-border trade is
vibrant, newfound wealth has enabled local people to send their children to
schools, and education is one of the country's "most dramatic success stories."
Steele's "Ghosts" is a packhorse of a
different color, recounting his trips into Kabul in 1981, 1986, 1988 and 1989,
but without any reflection or second thoughts. His sources are largely from the Soviet-backed
People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), with no voice from the
guerrilla side except for the much despised Hekmatyar, with whom he had some fascinating
exchanges. Even though Steele has returned to the country several times since
9/11, he apparently did not use the opportunity to flesh out his facts.
This is an unabashedly revisionist
history of Afghanistan in the modern era.
Steele says a lot of Afghans still admire Najibullah, the
Soviet-backed leader who served as president from 1986 to 1992 after heading
the KHAD secret police at a time it reputedly arrested, tortured and killed
large numbers of Afghans.
"In today's Afghanistan, many
Afghans in their late thirties or older look back on the Najibullah period with
nostalgia, and his picture is occasionally seen on windshields or bumper-stickers
in Kabul. People remember it as a time
of genuine national sovereignty in which a secular and apparently uncorrupt
regime was in charge."
"Some older Afghans even hark back
favorably to the Soviet period, when millions of rubles of aid flowed into the
country and did not disappear into ministers' or other corrupt pockets in the
way it has done more recently under the US occupation." No source given, so
just take it on faith.
Ghosts
is
built around a device that will madden any serious student of Afghanistan: a
set of myths supposedly held by the western media and governments.
"One reason why the United States has
repeated so many Soviet mistakes is that much of the West's conventional wisdom
on Afghanistan rests on myths," Steele writes. "Policymakers and the media
peddle an inaccurate view of Afghanistan's history. In this book, I hope to set
the record straight."
Chief among these
"inaccuracies" is that the defeat the Soviet Union suffered in Afghanistan was
a military defeat during nine plus years of guerrilla war. According to Steele
it stemmed directly from the failure of the Soviet project to modernize the
country. The defeat "was political, not
military," he writes. "Moscow's attempt to safeguard the PDPA program of
radical reform in one of the world's poorest and most conservative countries had
run into the sand." But this was a historic defeat for the Red Army too, for
the collapse of political support for its venture in Afghanistan led to the
collapse of the Soviet dominance in Communist East Europe.
Steele makes no secret that he opposed the
U.S. intervention after 9/11, putting him in a minority at the left-of-center Guardian.
He recounts the debate: "The war's opponents (myself included) argued that
attacking Afghanistan would provoke anger in many parts of the Muslim world and
increase the terrorist risk. The ‘war'
against terrorism was not a job for troops or missiles. It should not really be
a war at all. Dealing with terrorists had to be a combination of politics and
police."
He says he also argued to his colleagues
that Osama bin Laden, unlike Japan during World War II, was not interested in
territory, for "his was a war of ideas."
A revisionist perspective sometimes
leads to fresh insights and a valuable critique. But in this case, no example jumps out that
is worth citing. What does jump out is that the author, in failing to shoot
down the very myths he posits, gives currency to the Soviet myths used to
justify the invasion.
Take "myth" number three: "The Soviet
invasion led to a civil war and Western aid for the Afghan resistance. " To
counter this, he quotes a Russian diplomat "who preferred not to be named" 30
years later after the event. "Soviet
officials...believed that holding Kabul, the other main cities and the roads
connecting them was enough to keep the Mujahedin at bay and prevent Afghanistan
from going over to the Western side."
Another variant is "myth" two: "The
Soviet invasion was an unprovoked attack, designed to capture new territory."
In actual fact, Steele reports, "the invasion's primary aim was to protect the Soviet Union's southern
border and save a revolutionary government that was meeting armed resistance."
The inconsistencies largely discredit
the thesis. Was it the threat of Afghanistan going "Western" that led to the
invasion, armed resistance against a friendly government, or a Soviet desire to
"modernize" Afghanistan?
His debunking is sometimes simplistic.
Take the "myth" that the CIA's supply of Stinger missiles forced the Soviets
out of Afghanistan. That, according to Steele, is "a right-wing propaganda attempt
to manipulate history."
In the more recent era, his "myths" defy
the facts. He calls it a "myth" that the Taliban "are uniquely harsh oppressors
of women," and then there is myth 13: "Banning girls from school is a Taliban
trademark." He even calls it a "myth" that the West abandoned Afghanistan after
the Red Army departed.
The lack of rigorous analysis, far from
undergirding, instead raises questions about his major point, which is to plead
for Washington to negotiate a "power-sharing" arrangement with the Taliban,
though he doesn't define what that would be. He doesn't help his case by saying
there's "one enormously important difference" between the record of President
Obama with Soviet Party Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, he says, seriously
sought a negotiated exit while the U.S. sought to extend the civil war.
"The lesson for today is clear," Steele
says. "This time there must be negotiations.
For the Obama administration to put its weight behind a serious effort
to end the Afghan civil war would atone, in part, for the U.S. policy of sustaining
and enlarging it in the 1990s."
If you accept Steele's reading of
history, this may well follow. Anyone
who doesn't will have to look for a better set of arguments.
Roy Gutman
is McClatchy Newspapers' bureau chief for Turkey and the Gulf, based in
Istanbul.
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