ashington:
Throughout the 1980s, the Soviet Union threw almost every weapon it had,
short of nuclear bombs, at the Afghan camps attacked by the United States
last week.
During their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan the
Soviets attacked the camps outside the town of Khost with Scud missiles,
500-pound bombs dropped from jets, barrages of artillery, flights of
helicopter gunships and their crack special forces. The toughest Soviet
commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov, personally led the last
assault.
But neither carpet bombing nor commandos drove the Afghan
holy warriors from the mountains. Afghanistan has a long history of
repelling superpowers. Its terrain favours defenders as well as any in the
world whether their opponents, like the Soviets, are trying to defeat them
on the ground or whether, like the United States, they are trying to
disperse, deter and disrupt them. It is uncertain that the United States,
which fired dozens of million-dollar cruise missiles at those same camps
on Thursday, can do better than the Soviets.
The camps, hidden in the steep mountains and mile-deep
valleys of Paktia province, were the place where all seven ranking Afghan
resistance leaders maintained underground headquarters, mountain redoubts
and clandestine weapons stocks during their bitter and ultimately
successful war against Soviet troops from December 1979 to February 1989,
according to American intelligence veterans.
The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence
services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion
worth of weapons. And the territory targeted last week, a set of six
encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has
financed a kind of "terrorist university", in the words of a senior United
States intelligence official, is well known to the CIA.
The CIA’s military and financial support for the Afghan
rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked.
And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the CIA’s help
are now fighting under Mr bin Laden’s banner.
From those same camps the Afghan rebels, known as
mujahideen or holy warriors, kept up a decade-long siege on the
Soviet-supported garrison town of Khost.
Thousands of mujahideen were dug into the mountains around
Khost. Soviet accounts of the siege of Khost during 1988 referred to the
rebel camps as "the last word in NATO engineering techniques". After a
decade of fighting during which each side claimed to have killed thousands
of the enemy, the Afghan rebels poured out of their encampments and took
Khost.
"This was the most fiercely contested piece of real estate
in the 10-year Afghan war," said Milt Bearden, who ran the CIA’s side of
the war from 1986 to 1989.
United States officials said their attack was intended to
deter Mr bin Laden, whom they call the financier and intellectual author
of this month’s bombings of two American embassies in Africa, which killed
263 people, including 12 Americans. They said the damage inflicted on the
Khost camps was moderate to heavy.
But the communications infrastructure used by Mr bin Laden
is based on portable satellite telephones, not a centralised command and
control system that can be destroyed with a missile, intelligence
officials said. The strongest power that binds his loose-knit network of
confederates is his money, which is hidden inside a thus far impenetrable
global maze.
And history does not favour superpowers trying to subdue
men dug into the mountains of Afghanistan.
Mr bin Laden has said he spent the 1980s supporting the
mujahideen from their political base in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the foot
of the Khyber Pass. He was most strongly allied with the most
fundamentalist leaders of the Afghan resistance, particularly Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, the head of the group called the Islamic Party. After the fall
of the Soviet-backed government, Mr Hekmatyar spent most of his brief
tenure as prime minister hurling missiles and mortars at Kabul, trying to
dislodge more moderate rebel leaders from power.
The more militant Afghan rebels, like Mr Hekmatyar,
denounced the United States and backed Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in
1991, as did Mr bin Laden. A year after the Persian Gulf war, posters
throughout eastern Afghanistan displayed heroic if imaginary portraits of
Saddam Hussein and Mr Hekmatyar standing side by side.
No amount of money or moral support could keep the
veterans of the Afghan resistance from killing one another after the fall
of Kabul. The chaos that their infighting created led to the rise of the
Taliban, the militant armed religious party that now controls most of
Afghanistan and harbours Mr bin Laden.
In the nine years since the Soviet withdrawal, Afghan
resistance veterans have hoarded the remaining weapons sent by the CIA and
set up military training centres at resistance camps like the one near
Khost, according to United States officials. In those years thousands of
Islamic outcasts, radicals and visionaries from around the world came to
the borderlands of Afghanistan to learn the lessons of war from the
mujahideen. Mr bin Laden sponsored many of those foreigners.
In a 1994 interview a commander loyal to Mr Hekmatyar,
Noor Amin said that "the whole country is a university for jihad" or holy
war.
"There are many formal training centres," Mr Amin said.
"We have had Egyptians, Sudanese, Arabs and other foreigners trained here
as assassins." United States officials said the former mujahideen camps it
attacked on Thursday were precisely that kind of "university for jihad".
Mr bin Laden, stripped of his Saudi citizenship and
formally stateless, returned to the anarchy of Afghanistan in 1996 from
the Sudan where United States intelligence analysts believe he built at
least three training camps for veterans of the Afghan war.
He said in an interview with CNN last year that one of his
main missions during the war, which he helped finance with millions of
dollars of his own money, was to transport bulldozers, front end loaders
and other heavy equipment to Pakistan to help build tunnels, military
depots and roads inside Afghanistan for the mujahideen.
It is unclear whether Mr bin Laden, who inherited about
$250 million from a fortune his father made building mosques, palaces and
public works for the Saudi royal family, personally helped build the Khost
camps during the war against the Soviets, or has substantially upgraded
them since returning to the mountains of Afghanistan.