Ink spots

By Steve Coll

I have a new post over at Think Tank on General McChyrstal’s plan to create and connect a series of "ink spots" in Afghanistan.

I mentioned in the previous post in this series that the Soviet Union’s effort to “Afghan-ize” their misadventure, and to build up Afghan security forces as an exit strategy, succeeded partially for a few years, although it ultimately ended in the collapse of the Afghan Army, just after the Soviet Union itself dissolved, an event that orphaned Kabul materially and politically. Before then, however, the late Soviet and immediate post-Soviet period in Afghanistan — from 1986 until 1992 — did produce an Afghanistan that resembled in some respects what U.S. policy may well create over the next few years, if it is fortunate.

During this period, the Kabul government, run by President Najibullah, a former secret police chief who became a politically adept strongman, controlled an archipelago of Afghan cities. These included Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Khost, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, and a number of smaller provincial capitals, each of which was ringed by layered defenses, with Afghan forces increasingly in the lead. The insurgents they faced — the U.S.-backed Islamist rebels then known as the mujaheddin, some of whom, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Haqqanni clan, are still in the field, now under the Taliban banner and fighting the United States — controlled virtually all of the mountains and countryside. In fortress Kabul, Soviet civilian advisers shuttled among ministries and apartment compounds deep in the center of the ringed defenses, secure from kidnapping. Their client Afghan forces also tried to secure the main roads between the cities, but this proved difficult. At best the uniformed Afghan Army could move down some roads in daylight some of the time without being attacked or ambushed. Even securing roads between exurban airports and city centers proved to be a struggle. The only way government officials could move reliably between their island cities was by air; the mujaheddin began to acquire Stinger anti-aircraft missiles late in 1986, however, so even that method was not foolproof.

We visiting journalists would fly into Kabul in those days from New Delhi, make the rounds of the ministries, and often sit for a few hours with Najibullah, who was desperate to bend international negotiations about Afghanistan’s future toward his own interests. Afterwards, the Kabul government sometimes arranged a hopping air tour, by Antonov or helicopter, to some of the cities it controlled, in order to make the case that the territory under its authority was expanding—a claim the tour itself usually disproved. (I have an unhappy memory of crouching under truck tires to avoid shelling by the mujaheddin during a demonstration tour of supposed government control of the road between Kandahar Airport and Kandahar City — my tax dollars at work, I kept thinking during the barrage.)

Read the rest over at Think Tank.

Steve Coll is the president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at the New Yorker.