Ghost Wars (19 page)

As Yousaf recalled it, Casey said that there was a large Muslim population across the Amu Darya that could be stirred to action and could “do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union.” The CIA director talked about the propaganda efforts but went further. Casey said, according to Yousaf, “We should take the books and try to raise the local population against them, and you can also think of sending arms and ammunition if possible.” In Yousaf’s recollection, Akhtar voiced agreement about the Koran smuggling efforts but remained silent about the sabotage operations. Robert Gates, Casey’s executive assistant and later CIA director, has confirmed that Afghan rebels “began cross-border operations into the Soviet Union itself” during the spring of 1985. These operations included “raising cain on the Soviet side of the border.” The attacks took place, according to Gates, “with Casey’s encouragement.”
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If Casey spoke the words Yousaf attributed to him, he was almost certainly breaking American law. No one but President Reagan possessed the authority to foment attacks inside the Soviet Union, and only then if the president notified senior members of the congressional intelligence committees. The risks of such operations in the nuclear age were so numerous that they hardly needed listing. Colleagues of Casey’s at the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House later expressed doubt that he had sanctioned cross-border attacks.
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They suggested that Yousaf had probably conflated accurate recollections about Casey’s support for the Koran and propaganda book smuggling with ISI’s independent decision to begin secretly arming Afghan teams to penetrate Soviet Central Asia.

Perhaps. But Gates’s account appears unambiguous, and Yousaf’s recollections are precise. It would hardly have been unusual for Casey to pursue covert action outside the boundaries of presidential authority. ISI was the perfect cutout for operations on Soviet territory, providing the CIA with a layer of deniability. And as Gates reflected later, referring more generally to his sense of mission, Casey had not come to the CIA “with the purpose of making it better, managing it more effectively, reforming it, or improving the quality of intelligence. . . . Bill Casey came to the CIA primarily to wage war against the Soviet Union.”
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In any event, the CIA’s analysts and case officers knew what their Pakistani partners were doing across the Soviet border. Yousaf would pass along requests to the Islamabad station for such equipment as silent outboard motors, which he said he needed for river crossings on the Amu Darya. Piekney, the new station chief, lived in fear that one of these Afghan teams would be captured or killed in Soviet territory and that equipment in their possession would be traced to the CIA, creating an international incident on the scale of the 1960 U-2 shootdown.

Fear of such a public relations catastrophe, or worse, persuaded many analysts at Langley and at the State Department that ISI’s guerrilla attacks on Soviet soil were reckless. Morton Abramowitz, then chief of intelligence at the State Department, saw classified reports about the mujahedin crossing over and urged that ISI be told such assaults were unacceptable. Piekney delivered the message in informal meetings with General Akhtar. The CIA station chief insisted that ISI “not authorize or encourage the Afghans to take the battle into Soviet territory,” as Piekney recalled it. “We all understood, however, that the Afghans would exploit opportunities that arose and do pretty much what they wanted to do,” Piekney remembered. Pakistani intelligence “privately felt it would not be a bad thing” if the Afghan rebels hit targets inside Soviet territory from time to time. “Our only real option was to withhold official U.S. endorsement of that kind of activity and discourage it, which we did.” In any event, the less the CIA knew about the details, the better. Nobody could control armed Afghans determined to cross their northern border anyway, the CIA was prepared to argue if the operations became public.
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The north of Afghanistan lay separated from Pakistan by steep mountain ranges, snow-clogged passes, and large Soviet deployments, and was populated by Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and adherents of Islam’s minority Shia faith. The mujahedin commanders operating along the Soviet border had few connections to ISI’s Pashto-speaking colonels and brigadiers who were handing out the big bags of money and guns in Peshawar. For the Soviets, too, the north of Afghanistan was exceptionally important. The region possessed natural gas resources, vital roads, and ethnic populations whose clans spilled into Soviet republics. As the war went badly, the Soviets considered at times just hunkering down in northern Afghanistan to protect the Soviet Union’s southern rim.

But such a retreat was impractical. By the mid-1980s the Afghan rebels’ most effective military and political leader operated in the northern provinces, right in the Soviet Union’s mountainous backyard. Unlike the mujahedin commanders who would turn up for staged training camp demonstrations, this Afghan leader rarely traveled to Pakistan. He operated almost entirely from his own strategic blueprint. According to CIA reporting, his forces were responsible for some of the first attacks inside the Soviet Union in the spring of 1985. William Piekney wanted to arrange a meeting with him, but it was impossible to manage the logistics. He was too far away to visit.

Ahmed Shah Massoud seemed to prefer it that way.

6

“Who Is This Massoud?”

AHMED SHAH MASSOUD charged up the face of Ali Abad Mountain on the west side of Kabul, with a ragtag crew of a dozen soldiers in tow. Ali Abad was nothing more than a dusty, rock-strewn hill slouched in the middle of the 6,200-foot-high capital, but occupying its top would give Massoud a commanding position. He could gaze to the south at the pine-tree-laden campus of Kabul University, the country’s premier institution of learning. To the north was Kabul Polytechnic Institute, a reputable science school dominated by the Soviets. To the east sprawled the city’s downtown area. All around stood the jagged snowcapped peaks that walled the city in, cradling Kabul Valley in a cool embrace. Just before Massoud reached the hill’s crest and faced his enemy—a rival faction of similar size—he sent a detachment of loyalists around the opposite side. The enemy never saw them coming. They surrendered immediately, and after briefly savoring his victory, Massoud paraded his captives back down the hill and into a ditch by the side of the road where he kept all of his prisoners of war. Then, with a wave of his hand, he dismissed his soldiers and freed his captives. From across the street his mother was calling him for dinner.

It was 1963, and he was eleven years old. His family had moved to Kabul only recently. Massoud did not consider the city home, but he had quickly mastered the heights of its bluffs and the depths of its ravines. There was no question among his peers as to who would play commander in neighborhood war games.
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His father was a colonel in the army of King Zahir Shah, a position of some prestige but little danger. From the 1930s until the early 1960s the entire span of the elder Massoud’s military career, Afghanistan had remained at peace. Massoud led a transient life during his first decade. He had lived in Helmand in the south, Herat in the west, and then Kabul. But he and his family always considered home the Panjshir Valley town of Massoud’s birth: Jangalak, in the district of Bazarak, several hours’ drive north of the capital.

For seventy miles the Panjshir River cuts a harsh diagonal to the southwest through the Hindu Kush Mountains before spilling onto the Shomali Plains thirty miles above Kabul. On a map it looks like an arrow pointing the way directly toward Afghanistan’s capital from the northeast. On the ground it is a chasm cut between bald, unforgiving cliffs that plunge steeply into the raging current. Only occasionally do the cliffs slope more gently, offering room for houses and crops on either side of the riverbed. There the valley erupts in lush, wavy green fields, and the river sits as placidly as a glacial lake, braided by grassy sandbars.

In front of the Massoud ancestral home in Jangalak, almost exactly halfway up the valley, the water is at its calmest. The Massoud family settled on this site on the western bank of the river around the beginning of the twentieth century. A relatively prosperous family, they initially built a low,mud-brick compound that, like countless other valley homes, appeared to rise organically from the rich brown soil. When Massoud’s father inherited the place, he built an addition on the back that stretched farther up the mountainside. It was there that Massoud’s mother gave birth to Ahmed Shah, her second son, in 1952.

The Panjshir of Massoud’s birth had changed little in centuries. Along the valley’s one true road—a rough, pockmarked dirt track that parallels the river’s course—it was far more common to hear the high-pitched cry of a donkey weighted down by grain sacks than the muted purr of a motor engine. Food came from terraced fields of wheat, apple and almond trees that sprouted along the river banks, or the cattle, goats, and chickens that wandered freely, unable to range far since the valley is only about a mile at its widest.

Few in the Panjshir could read or write, but Massoud’s parents were both exceptions. His father was formally educated. His mother was not, but she came from a family of lawyers who were prominent in Rokheh, the next town over from Jangalak. She taught herself to read and write, and urged her four sons and four daughters to improve themselves similarly. A stern woman who imposed rigid standards, Massoud’s mother wanted her children to be educated, but she also wanted them to excel outside the classroom. Her oldest son, Yahya, once came home with grades putting him near the top of his class, a status the Massoud children often enjoyed. Massoud’s father was thrilled and talked about rewarding his son with a motorbike. “I’m not happy with these things,” his mother complained. She rebuked her husband: “I’ve told you many times: Teach your sons those things they need.” She fired off examples: “Do your children ride horses? Can they use guns? Are they able to be in society and to be with people? These are the characteristics that make a man.” Yahya did not get the motorbike.

Ahmed Shah Massoud’s mother meted out family discipline, and because he was a child who seemed naturally inclined to mischief, his reprimands came often. She never struck her children physically, her sons recalled, but she could wither them with verbal lashings. Years later Massoud confided to siblings that perhaps the only person he had ever feared was his mother.

By the time Massoud reached high school in the late 1960s, his father had retired from the military and the family had settled in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Kabul. They lived in a seven-bedroom stone and concrete house with panoramic views. It was the finest building on the block. Massoud attended the Lycée Istiqlal, an elite, French-sponsored high school. There he earned good grades, acquired French, and won a scholarship to attend college in France. The scholarship was his ticket out of Kabul’s dusty, premodern alleys, but Massoud turned it down, to his family’s surprise. He announced that he wanted to go to military school instead and to follow in his father’s footsteps as an Afghan army officer. His father tried to use connections to get him into the country’s premier military school, but failed. Massoud settled for Kabul Polytechnic Institute, the Soviet-sponsored school just down the hill from the family home.

In his first year of college, Massoud discovered he was a math whiz. He set up a tutoring service for classmates and talked hopefully about becoming an engineer or an architect. As it happened, he was destined to knock down many more buildings than he would ever build.

The Cold War had slipped into Afghanistan like a virus. By the late 1960s all of Kabul’s universities were in the grip of fevered politics. Secret Marxist book clubs conspired against secret Islamist societies in damp concrete faculties and residences. The atmosphere was urgent: The country’s weak, centuries-old monarchy was on its way out. Afghanistan was lurching toward a new politics. Would it be Marxist or Islamic, secular or religious, modern or traditional—or some blend of these? Every university professor seemed to have an opinion.

Massoud’s parents had raised him as a devout Muslim and imbued in him an antipathy for communism. When he came home after his first year at the institute, he told his family about a mysterious new group he had joined called the Muslim Youth Organization. Ahmed Wali, his youngest full brother, noticed that Massoud was confidently explaining to not just family but shopkeepers and nearly anyone else who would listen that his group was going to wage war against the Marxists who were increasingly prominent on the capital’s campuses, in government ministries, and in the army. Massoud’s swagger was unmistakable: “He was giving that sort of impression, that tomorrow, he and four or five others are going to defeat the whole thing.”
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THE ISLAMIC FAITH that Massoud acquired at Kabul Polytechnic Institute was not the faith of his father. It was a militant faith—conspiratorial and potentially violent. Its texts had arrived in Kabul in the satchels of Islamic law professors returning to their teaching posts in the Afghan capital after obtaining advanced degrees abroad, particularly from Islam’s most prestigious citadel of learning, Al-Azhar University in Cairo. There a handful of Afghan doctoral candidates—including Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani—came under the influence of radical Egyptian Islamists exploring new forms of Islamic politics. Back in Kabul the Afghan junior professors began during the mid-1960s to teach Egyptian creeds in their classrooms, pressing radical ideas on bright, restless young Afghan students such as Massoud.
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For centuries religious faith in Afghanistan had reflected the country’s political geography: It was diverse, decentralized, and rooted in local personalities. The territory that became Afghanistan had been crossed and occupied by ancient Buddhists, ancient Greeks (led by Alexander the Great), mystics, saints, Sikhs, and Islamic warriors, many of whom left monuments and decorated graves. Afghanistan’s forbidding mountain ranges and isolated valleys ensured that no single dogmatic creed, spiritual or political, could take hold of all its people. As conquerors riding east from Persia and south from Central Asia’s steppes gradually established Islam as the dominant faith, and as they returned from stints of occupation in Hindu India, they brought with them eclectic strains of mysticism and saint worship that blended comfortably with Afghan tribalism and clan politics. The emphasis was on loyalty to the local Big Man. The Sufi strain of Islam became prominent in Afghanistan. Sufism taught personal contact with the divine through mystical devotions. Its leaders established orders of the initiated and were worshiped as saints and chieftains. Their elaborately decorated shrines dotted the country and spoke to a celebratory, personalized, ecstatic strain in traditional Afghan Islam.