Victory Point by Ed Darack Read Free Book Online

What they didn’t bomb, they shot, and what they didn’t shoot, they shelled with artillery, and what they didn’t shell with artillery, they rocketed. And so on and so forth. The Soviets committed the most gruesome and widespread acts of inhumanity since World War II. Genghis Khan would have been proud—and jealous—of the Communists’ modern, efficient weapons.
    Meanwhile, the Afghan Bureau of the ISI inhaled money from the United States throughout the 1980s, acquiring arms, food, and supplies from countries around the globe, and training the mujahideen in camps along the border. Not wanting to tip off the Soviets that outside forces had been aiding the fighters, the ISI didn’t procure fancy, state-of-the-art gear, but run-of-the-mill weaponry: AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, light machine guns, grenades, recoilless rifles, mortars, Chinese 107 mm and 120 mm rockets, and other basic light infantry implements. As well, they kept representatives of the CIA and other American agencies strictly separated from the mujahideen themselves, ostensibly to maintain the illusion that the insurgency was self-supported, but in reality to maintain complete control of which parties received the money and how these funds were used.
    But America wasn’t alone in its desire to repulse the Soviets. The Saudi Arabian government matched the United States in funding during the 1980s; the Brits, too, chipped in, as did Kuwait and some other Arab states. Of course, every nation sought to influence the war for different reasons—Pakistan to maintain “strategic depth,” the United States to beat down the Communist Soviets, and the Saudis in their desire both to free their fellow Muslims from the Communists and to spread their official state religion, that of the Salafi school of Sunni Islam.
    By the mid-1980s, that part of the Hindu Kush to which ⅔ would deploy two decades later became a tempest of clashing external interests. While the Soviets had retreated from most of the area after 1980, having pushed into the Chowkay (out of which the residents quickly and handily blasted them), Saudi Arabians, dressed as local Pashtuns, meandered down the Kunar Valley with suitcases stuffed with tens of thousands of dollars—money to be handed out to help build mosques and madrassas that would teach their brand of Islam. Other Arabs, unaffiliated with the Saudi government, showed up, too. Based out of Peshawar, these “Afghan Arabs” represented the most radical of all the Islamists in the world, even more so than the followers of Hekmatyar. Their beliefs were guided by the teachings of the “Muslim Brotherhood,” an organization founded in Cairo, Egypt, in the 1920s, and based on the teachings of the Salafiyya movement, and some in the jihad movement saw them as arrogant, hateful—even toxic. The Afghan Arabs had come not so much to help free the Afghan people or to stand with them in Muslim solidarity on the front lines, but out of a burning hatred of the European Infidel, and included among their ranks the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman the world would come to know all too well: Osama bin Laden.
    Fueled by money from the United States and Saudi Arabia, and armed with high-resolution and time-relevant satellite imagery and other intelligence from the CIA—as well as, later in the war, the much-hyped Stinger missile, which leveled psychological “what if” blows to Soviet pilots more than actual aircraft downings—the mujahideen froze the Soviet’s war effort into a virtual stalemate. True, the Soviets had control of the cities and major highways, but they rarely dared emerge from behind their encampments’ perimeters or step from their armored vehicles. The Soviets, having surmised that the ISI was responsible for training and equipping the mujahideen, struck back at Pakistan, not with bombs or rockets, but with Afghans themselves—chased out through the intentional attacks on civilian targets for the sole purpose of causing