AFGHANISTAN: CAUGHT IN THE STRUGGLE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301500002-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 14, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: November 13, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO N REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM Afghanistan: STAnON WHMM-TV
Caught in the Struggle
DATE November 13, 1984 9:00 P.M. ciTY Washington, D.C.
ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE: When there is war, children
suffer. This child is one of hundreds of Afghan children maimed
by booby-trapped mines the Soviets have scattered by the thou-
sands in the fields of Afghanistan. This child, like most Afghan
wounded, endures the indescribable pain without tears.
Refugee camps, the fallout of any armed conflict, and a
common sight in the global community since World War II. Almost
four million Afghan women, old people and children, the largest
refugee population in the world, wait, wait for food and medi-
cine, wait for shelter, wait for firewood, wait for their men to
return from the fighting, wait for the country to be free so they
can go home.
The Afghans need not suffer this way, and for the
children of Afghanistan there would be an alternative. If the
resistance ceased and they accepted communist control, they would
have the privilege of being on the safe side of Russian airpower.
Here is Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, Iran, Pakistan,
and India. Afghanistan is mostly mountains, the Western
Himalayas. 'These mountains are the only barrier between Central
Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian
Gulf. A few key passes -- the legendary Khyber Pass is one of
them -- are the only way to get from here to here. And this
desert is an open highway to Iran and the Persian Gulf.
I'm Arnaud de Borchgrave. For the last 35 years I have
worked as a foreign correspondent, reporting from over 90
countries. For 4000 years, from prehistoric times down to the
last century, no would-be conqueror who held the mountains of
Afghanistan and wanted to move south has been stopped on the
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plains of Pakistan and India, as flat as Kansas. Alexander the
Great, Genghis Khan, the Mogul emperors, they all came through
the ,Afghan mountain range.
Now the Soviets are in Afghanistan. Why? Moscow says
that the Soviet Army was invited in to help a country that was
being attacked by American, Chinese, and other agents of imperia-
lism. Few outside the Soviet Bloc accept that explanation.
Some analysts say that Soviet motives are defensive,
that Moscow is afraid of instability and trouble on its southern
borders. Other analysts believe that Soviet moves are part of an
overall strategy to gain control of the Persian Gulf and the
Indian Ocean,, threaten the oil fields and the oil routes, the
lifeline of Western Europe and Japan.
If this theory is correct, then control of the Afghan
mountains is important to more than the Afghan people. Only one
thing is stopping the Soviets from controlling those mountains,
the Afghan resistance, the Afghan Mujahadeen.
December 27th, 1979. The Soviet Army invaded Afghani-
stan. For almost two years before the invasion, the Afghans
resisted the Soviet-assisted communist regime of Hafizullah Amin.
When the Afghan resistance came close to overthrowing Amin, the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan, killing Amin and announcing Babrak
Karmal as the new president.
Even with an invasion force of
85,000,
the Soviets still
met
fierce resistance, often from
Afghans
armed only with
homemade weapons.
. In a broadcast taped and transmitted
from the Soviet
Union, Babrak Karmal welcomed the limited military contingent of
the friendly Soviet Union. Within 48 hours, Karmal, an Afghan
who had been Amin's chief rival, was flown to Afghanistan by the
Russians and installed in the presidential palace under Russian
guard.
MAN: When we came back to school, the major change that
came, the principal was communist principal and he was protected
by the two Russian soldiers. And another change was that they
dropped the subject which was the translating of Koran and other
subject about political science, which they just teach communism.
WOMAN: They didn't want us to demonstrate and they shot
some of the girls that were in the girls school, and they shot on
us and there was some girls was killed. And we finally broke the
gate and we run out the gate. And there was some tanks of
Russians and soldiers. And we continued our demonstration, and
they arrested us.
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DE BORCHGRAVE: As the fighting intensified, the
population began to move. They walked to Iran and south to
Pakistan, refugees.
MAN: The exodus of Afghans from Afghanistan is unparal-
leled in contemporary history. Close to four million Afghans
have sought exile in bordering countries, mainly in Pakistan, 25
percent of Afghanistan's population. One must realize how
terrible conditions must be in Afghanistan, how much it takes to
move that many people into something which is, in a loose way,
hopeless.
DE BORCHGRAVE: The resistance, although fragmented, has
had tactical successes against the Soviets. In May of 1982, the
freedom fighters won a major victory against the Soviets in the
Panshir Valley, an area that has eluded Soviet control since the
invasion. Some analysts call it the first major defeat of the
Soviets on the battlefield since World War II.
The Russian dead are almost always removed by the
Soviets when they withdraw. The dead of the Afghan Army,
fighting with the Soviets, are often left behind. But the price
of resisting the Soviets is high. In an effort to crush the
resistance, the Soviets have zeroed in on food. Crops and
irrigation systems have been destroyed. Hunger varies from one
place to another, depending on how much a village is suspected of
supporting the Mujahadeen, the resistance fighters.
MAN: The Soviets were forced, have now been forced to
do much of the fighting themselves. They do this not by occupy-
ing territory, but rather by adopting a strategy of preventing
the Afghan guerrillas from using an area to fight the Soviets.
They do this by making sure there are no people in this area to
support the guerrillas and no food to feed them. So they have
massive attacks on the Afghan people and their agriculture.
DE BORCHGRAVE: Pilots, during air attacks near Kanda-
har, seem to fire indiscriminately at villages. The Mujahadeen
sit nearby. They don't fire for fear of giving their position
away.
A family of 12 lived in this house. They were all
killed. Seventeen people died in this air raid.
MAN: In the summer of 1982, when I was in the Logar (?)
province, south of Kabul, gunship helicopters bombed villages
every day in the province. The worst off were the children. They
were so nervous and frightened. A couple of times they thought I
was a Russian trying to kill them with my camera, and ran away
crying.
On the 3rd of December, 1982, the Russian forces from
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Bardak (?) attacked the village. People and innocent children
were dragged out of their homes and murdered. All together, ten
children.
In this area, there were no doctors. And many times
farmers came running with their sick children and found out, to
their desperation, that I was only a journalist.
DE BORCHGRAVE: The price paid by the refugees has
escalated, too. Little protection from extreme temperatures,
summer heat of over 120 degrees and subfreezing winter tempera-
tures; shortages of food, water and medical care, and problems
with hygiene and sewage, a part of everyday life.
As severe as the conditions have become on the refugees,
life inside Afghanistan has become a tightrope walk between the
resistance and the secret police. Afghans suspected of spying
for the Russians are tried by the freedom fighters. Even young
children are questioned.
These 12-year-old boys are suspected spies. The fear in
their faces tells of their plight if they cannot prove their
innocence. But they had been confused with two other boys and
were released.
This man also was arrested by the freedom fighters as a
suspected spy for'the Russians. Substantial evidence proved his
guilt and he was shot as a traitor a few minutes after this film
was taken.
During a raid, the freedom fighters captured files about
Afghans who had been outstanding students under their Russian
masters. They are targets for later punishment.
The Russian presence pits Afghan against Afghan. The
balancing act is complex. There is also a tremendous price to
pay when one decides to oppose the Russians. Helping the
resistance brings arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution.
An estimated 25,000 executions, much of the educated leadership,
and thousands imprisoned.
In spite of that price, more half of the Afghan Army has
deserted. Many have joined the resistance. Young boys and older
men are now subject to forced induction to fill the dwindling
ranks of the Afghan Army. Russian troops are forced to pick up
the slack.
How much longer will the Afghans be able to resist the
Soviets? Some say the Soviet gamble is that the resistance,
though militarily more effective, will eventually be cut off from
support and supplies, and forgotten, and Soviet strategic goals
realized..
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MAN: Out of seven Soviet divisions now in Afghanistan,
only one is involved in fighting the Afghan resistance. The
other six, based in almost uninhabited southwestern desert, are
being trained for a rapid dash to the Persian Gulf or any part of
Iran. In addition to Afghanistan, the Soviets have overt
military installation in Iraq, Syria, South Yemen, Ethiopia,
Libya, a covert infrastructure in Iran, Chad, southern Sudan,
North Yemen.
The Soviets have four major goals in this area: warm-
water ports and naval bases, the oilfields, Israel's military
infrastructure, and the Suez Canal.
In Afghanistan, the Russians have already built six
permanent air bases for the year around, all their operations.
From there they can provide fire bomber air cover all across Iran
into Persian Gulf.
Afghanistan is also serving them as a testing ground for
new aircraft and prototypes of various new weapons systems and
military concepts. Soviet reports of training exercise held near
Farah in September 1981 boasted that in less than two weeks the
Farah base forces entering part of Iran drove more than 800 miles
across the eastern desert. The Strait of Hormuz is little more
than half that distance, less than 500 miles from that division's
permanent base.
As long as the Soviets retain access to the military
infrastructure they have created in Afghanistan and can control
it, their offers to withdraw the Soviet Army will be strategicaly
meaningless, merely cosmetic gestures for international consump-
tion.
DE BORCHGRAVE: The Afghan Communists call themselves
the PDP, the People's Democratic Party. But they were not
elected. The PDP Communist Party, fashioned after the Soviet
Communist Party, had fewer than 5000 members out of a population
of 16 million at the time of the Russian invasion. Through a
bloody coup, they took power in 1978 with the backing of Afghan
Air Force personnel trained by the Russians.
MAN: In 1964 I was a medical officer who got sent to
Russia for advanced training. Personally, I saw how they
approached a few officers and select for secret indoctrination.
Among those was officers that did the coup of 1978.
NARRATOR: The Afghan regime is totally dependent on
Soviet military backing to keep them in power.. The Russians
control the Afghan Army and civil administration. The Russians
also run the schools and Afghan ministries.
Afghanistan was the first independent neutral country
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invaded by the Soviets since World War II. But with the passage
of time, the story of the Russians in Afghanistan faded from
media reports, partl.y because reporters are barred, unlike the
freedom they enjoyed to report in Vietnam, or more recently in El
Salvador and Lebanon, except for the view invited by the regime.
Reporting in Afghanistan can be hazardous.
MAN: The worst fear, I think, is the helicopters. When
you see an MI-24 coming in at you, it's a terrifying experience.
One day I was in a vilage in Pateer (?) province. We
were waiting, and four Soviet MI-24s, so-called flying tanks,
came into the valley on what are presumed to have been a recon-
naissance mission. The helicopters were circling the valley,
coming closer and closer to us each time. I was filming them
throughout. I had no expectation of the helicopters attacking
the village. When they did, I was taken totally by surprise.
As it was, eight helicopters took part in the attack and
rocketed the village for 20 minutes. Throughout the attack,
there were some Mujahadeen outside returning fire with their
small weapons.
After the Soviets withdrew, after that 2.0 minutes of
rocketing, we went outside. The villagers were evacuating the
village, trying to get out in case the gunships returned. There
was incredible destruction. All the villagers' livestock was
tied up outside and was either dead or dying. We found out that
one woman and her child had been killed during the attack. And
in the attack that had occurred down the road, I saw four men
being carted away, dead.
DE BORCHGRAVE: By 1980, chemical warfare reports were
coming from Afghanistan on an increasingly frequent basis.
MAN: In June 1980, I was with a group of Mujahadeen
near the village of Tarba (?). In the morning we were woke up by
helicopters. They were flying around, and this was in the
seventh day of constant helicopter attacks around the villages.
We ran out of the village when the helicopters came. We had to
leave one man behind. He was wounded and we couldn't carry him
out.
The Falquin (?) helicopters dropped a couple of what we
thought at the moment were bombs. The only thing we saw was a
kind of an explosion and a yellow cloud. Then the second wave of
helicopters came in and bombed the village with rockets. Most of
them were high-explosive and burning material. So everything in
the village was bombed.
Then the Afghans told me that the first wave was a gas
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attack. Well, at that moment I didn't believe it because it was
rather unbelievable that they were doing it. And a lot of
Afghans were claiming it before, and I never saw any evidence of
it.
We came in the village a couple of hours later and we
found the man we left behind dead. His face was swollen. They
took him out and brought him to another place. I saw the man
back the next morning, and then the face was completely swollen,
disintegrated, like if he had been dead for three or four weeks.
It was really strange. And everybody who was in the village, had
been into it, was having blisters on his hands and his face. The
faces were swollen.
MAN: It seems that a wide variety of agents are being
used, from the old classic, if you will, nerve agents to a number
of agents that we don't fully understand as yet. Mycotoxins,
which have bee found in Southeast Asia, apparently are also being
used in Afghanistan. That's a new kind of agent, rather hideous,
and extremely lethal. Riot-control agents are apparently also
being used. And there are some agents that have been reported
and which have symptoms that are not fully understood, which
cause sudden onset of death without any prior symptoms.
DE BORCHGRAVE: Plastic mines camouflaged to look like
stones or leaves. Soviet helicopters scatter them by the
thousands in the fields and on mountain paths. They're designed
to maim, not kill. And these tiny booby traps have been respons-
ible for maiming hundreds of men, women and children.
The use of camouflaged mines in civilian areas was
outlawed by an international convention signed by the Soviet
Union in April 1981. At the time of the signing, Russian
helicopters were dropping the mines. They are still dropping
them.
For those that oppose the Soviets, there is little
medical care. The International Red Cross is not allowed to work
in Afghanistan. Since the invasion, a handful of French doctors
make secret trips into Afghanistan and provide medical care to
the people.
This hospital was marked with a cross, but the Soviets
still strafed it.
It is estimated that half a million Afghan civilians
have died, and no one knows how many have been wounded. But
still the Afghans resist.
MAN: We're trying to move through the city at the
moment as quietly as possible. The game is to reach the customs
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house undetected and bring considerable firepower to bear on it,
in the hope that people inside will surrender quickly. Everybody
is keeping as quiet as possible as we go through those areas of
the city that contain places like the jail and the police
station.
They've taken [unintelligible] to try and hit the
customs house with a recoilless rifle. We've just heard a
loudspeaker announcing what sounded like an Afghan Army unit.
And quite a fierce fire fight at the moment preventing us from
moving off this route.
We've just been told that some of the Mujahadeen of the
Nationalist Army Front have succeeded in getting inside the
customs house. They called on the army to surrender. But when
they went to take control, one of their commanders was killed by
an army grenade. A stream of fire hit the building and set it
ablaze.
The body of the rebel commander was carried away.
Twenty Afghan soldiers were killed, but no weapons or ammunition
were taken. Yet the guerrillas had proved a point. A column of
flame signaled their defiance in the center of Russian-held
territory.
DE BORCHGRAVE: I was one of the American correspondents
expelled from Afghanistan three weeks after the invasion. And as
I went to get my exit visa at the Interior Ministry, the man
sitting behind the desk noticed in my U.S. passport I had been
born in Belgium. And lowering his voice, he asked me in French
whether I spoke French. And when I told him I did, he pointed at
some Russian advisers at the end of the room and said, "They have
not read their history books. Not one of them will leave this
country alive."
Conflicts like Afghanistan are always described in terms
of the superpowers, as if the United States and the Soviet Union
were the same. It's called the mirror-image syndrome. But they
are not the same. The values and objectives of the Soviet
leaders are not compatible with personal or national freedom.
Lenin said that the communists have a right and a duty to extend
the communist system to all countries of the world. He also said
that the purpose of terror is to terrorize. In the communist
system, the individual is of no importance and has no rights
other than to serve the state.
The principles of Lenin are not obsolete. And since
World War II, scenes like this, of Soviet troops in Prague, have
been common. In East Berlin in 1953, Hungary '56, Czechoslovakia
'68, and in Afghanistan in 1979. There have been these repeated
examples of the Soviet military enforcing the new communist
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imperialism, now known as the Brezhnev Doctrine.
Yet the Soviets escape the full fury of worldwide
condemnation. The issue is not Afghanistan. The issue is not
Middle Eastern oil. The issue is freedom.
At the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick
said that Afghanistan can only be conquered by destroying the
Afghan people. The world must not allow this to happen, she
added. Because if Afghanistan is conquered, no independent
nation will be safe.
Is she right or is she mistaken? Perhaps it it some-
thing we ought to start thinking about.
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