Victory Point by Ed Darack Read Free Book Online Page A

a humanitarian and economic crisis by inundating Pakistan with masses of refugees, many of whom arrived maimed by one or more of the millions of land mines the Communists had scattered throughout the Hindu Kush. Newly elected Mikhail Gorbachev, under intense and growing pressure from within as well as from countries throughout the globe, realized that he had no choice but to pull his troops out of Afghanistan. The Soviet Bear had been brought to its knees by the mujahideens’ ‘thousand little cuts.’
    The last of the Soviet troops crossed the Amu Darya River on February 15, 1989. The shock waves of the war that saw over 13,500 Soviet deaths and tens of thousands of wounded would contribute to the downfall of the Communist state a few years later, and with that, the war in Afghanistan landed a far more crushing blow against the USSR than the Vietnam conflict ever could have on the United States.
    In addition to over 40 million land mines—many disguised as toys to attract children—the Communists had left in their wake somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million dead, 1.5 million maimed and injured, 5.5 million refugees chased into Pakistan and Iran, over 2 million internally displaced, arsenic- and mercury-tainted water wells (one of their preferred tactics to render countless villages uninhabitable), and a virtually impotent puppet government now headed by a man named Mohammad Najibullah, who would see the demise of his power and lose his life in just a few years.
    Afghanistan would descend once again into chaos in the years after the Soviet withdrawal, as the seven mujahideen parties and various ethnic groups moved from warring against the Red Kafir to attacking one another, further destroying an already crippled, destitute country. From Pakistan’s standpoint, Afghanistan no longer stood as a base of a foreign threat, and they had their “strategic depth” once again; both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia would continue to provide limited amounts of foreign aid, but not enough to rebuild a nation. The United States, however, pulled its support from the fighters completely, not so much because they had achieved the desired end state of a demoralized Soviet withdrawal, but because U.S. leaders had learned that a disproportionate allotment of American money had been funneled by the ISI to Gulbadin Hekmatyar, whom they regarded as a potentially severe threat to the United States—possibly another Ayatollah Khomeini—should he ever gain national power. Hekmatyar, who spurned the Reagan administration by refusing an invitation to the White House in 1985 to celebrate the mujahideen freedom fighters, openly decried the Americans as infidels—although he was more than happy to accept ISI-routed American funds. The warlord would go on to kill untold scores of civilians in the power struggle that ensued after the Soviet withdrawal, and then continue to vex American interests into the next millennium.
    America seemed to have forgotten about Afghanistan by 1990; the internal conflicts of the country would reduce the crushed state to ashes in just a few years. But out of those ashes would rise yet another threat to the United States, one that would require not secretive international maneuverings, but direct action by American forces.

2
    THE BATTALION
    W hile the Fourth of July stands as the most hallowed date on the historical calendar of the United States, for many Americans the less conspicuous date of 10 November ranks in the same echelon. Some actually consider this autumn day to be the most important of the year, eclipsing birthdays, religious holidays, even wedding anniversaries, as on 10 November 1775, at Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern, Captain Samuel Nicholas, under decree of the Second Continental Congress, established what would arguably become the most venerated, the most feared by America’s enemies yet beloved by its citizenry and allies, the most tireless, brave, and selfless, and the most daring yet professional family of