Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume XII, Afghanistan

56. Editorial Note

In August 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency issued a number of reports assessing Soviet intentions with regard to Afghanistan and the increasingly precarious position of the Afghan Government. While stopping short of predicting with certitude the ultimate collapse of the Taraki-Amin regime and consequent military intervention by the Soviet Union, intelligence reporting noted two fundamental and interrelated trends: the Afghan Government was weakening in the face of the growing rebel insurgency, and in response the USSR was steadily increasing its efforts to equip and train the Afghan military in an attempt to contain and ultimately defeat the insurgency.

In intelligence memorandum SR M 79–10094, August 1, the Asia Branch of the Regional Analysis Division noted that control of Afghanistan was effectively split: “Anti-government forces control most of the countryside, while the Afghan Army controls the cities and main roads.” Further, the division of control was not necessarily static; the Afghan Army, the memorandum reported, was experiencing high rates of casualties and desertions—a manpower problem exacerbated by political purges of field grade officers from the previous year. The Afghan Air Force was suffering “acute shortages of qualified pilots and maintenance technicians.” The memorandum also observed that the presence of the Soviet military in Afghanistan had “more than doubled” since Taraki came to power in 1978. Soviet military advisers numbered between 1,000 and 2,000, and according to a field report by the Chief of Station in Kabul, July 31, the Soviet advisers have “virtually taken command” of the Afghan military units to which they were assigned. Further, the Soviets expanded the military supplies to Afghanistan, including increased shipments of tanks, artillery, and ammunition. (Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, Office of Support Services, Job 81T00031R: Production Case Files, Box 1, Afghanistan’s Military Forces) The Chief of Station report is in the Department of Defense, Afghan War Collection, Box 7, USSR in Afghanistan (July 79)

In an August 2 CIA intelligence memorandum entitled “USSR-Afghanistan: The Case for Soviet Military Intervention,” the Office of Political Analysis (OPA) provided an overview of the factors that could compel the Soviet leadership to send troops into Afghanistan. In light of the trends noted in the August 1 memorandum (above), and the fact that President Taraki and Prime Minister Amin had already appealed to Moscow “for more direct military involvement,” the memorandum asserted “there would be strong arguments for those Soviet leaders inclined to more forceful measures to prevent an anti-Soviet government from coming to power on their southern flank.” The memorandum noted the strategic and psychological ramifications the “loss” of Afghanistan would have for the Soviet Union, especially in light of its recent inability to prevent the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. Additionally, those arguing for intervention might see the political and economic liabilities of such an operation as manageable, given Afghanistan’s close proximity to the Soviet Union and the fact that Afghanistan’s neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, were already anti-Soviet. OPA went on to lay out a number of events that could lead to Soviet intervention. These included: rescue operations of Soviet personnel whose large presence itself already constituted a form of military intervention; tribal violence that embroiled nationality groups on either side of the Soviet-Afghan border; “significant increase in third party assistance” to the rebels from countries such as Pakistan or Iran; and a “serious threat” of rebels overtaking a major urban area such as Kabul. The memorandum concluded with an assessment of the varying degrees of intensity a Soviet intervention could take, ranging from limited operations involving air raids and tank units securing the Soviet-Afghan border, to a “full-fledged intervention” requiring military occupation of strategic areas throughout the country. The latter option, the memorandum asserted, would amount to a “last-ditch Soviet effort” to prevent the fall of the Afghan Government and one that would be complicated by Afghanistan’s rugged terrain and an Islamic population that would mount “intense opposition” to the occupation. (Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Council Files, Job 93T01324R, Box 4, Afghanistan)

In a more detailed look at the position and mobility of Soviet military forces in the event of an impending invasion, [name not declassified] Chief, USSR/EE Branch, noted in intelligence memorandum SR M 79–10100, August 7, that Soviet military advisers currently stationed in Afghanistan could not, in their present formation, “conduct any significant unilateral operations” because they were lightly equipped and spread thin among all components of the Afghan military. Soviet military intervention would require an influx of troops from inside Soviet territory, with the closest units located in the Turkestan Military District, which housed 45,000 troops with an additional 50,000 reserves who could be called up within a week to get the District to wartime strength. Another six divisions were located in the Central Asian Military District but, the memorandum prognosticated, the Soviet leadership would probably be reluctant to redeploy those troops “for fear of weakening their position opposite China.” A faster influx of troops could be accomplished with the Soviet military’s airborne divisions. Airlift of “just one complete airborne division and its support units would, however, severely tax the capacity of the Soviet military transport fleet,” the memorandum noted, and it was unlikely any airlift of troops would be executed without “an eventual linkup of ground forces.” (Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, Office of Support Services, Job 81T00031R: Production Case Files, Box 1, Soviet Military Forces in and Near Afghanistan)

In a memorandum written three days later, August 10, Director of the Strategic Warning Staff Douglas MacEachin provided the National Intelligence Officer for Warning with three courses of action which the Soviets would likely choose regarding Afghanistan:

“a. Continue the present course of providing material support, advisors and technicians, but refrain from committing Soviet combat units (possibly at the same time continuing to seek a political solution).

“b. Commit a limited number of Soviet combat forces, sufficient to insure at least the security of Kabul and its immediate area, and perhaps a few other key centers.

“c. Commit large combat forces for the purpose of inflicting major military defeats on the insurgent forces and recapturing much of the territory now in rebel hands.”

Speaking on behalf of “most other community analysts,” MacEachin asserted that the third option was the least desirable for the Soviets, given the military and political challenges it would create. Instead, MacEachin predicted with “strong likelihood” that the Soviets would undertake option b, “and probably in the near future.” Without a limited intervention, MacEachin reasoned, the “USSR faces the likelihood of being forced to evacuate its mission from Afghanistan,” a development the Soviets would view as worse than any costs associated with limited military intervention. MacEachin saw the beginnings of a trap: “once having undertaken the increase in their military ante, however, the Soviets are likely to find themselves being drawn into the larger operation despite whatever resolve they might have to avoid it.” Although MacEachin specified that the intelligence community had no “concrete evidence” that the Soviets had already decided on even a limited intervention, the evidence was, in his view, sufficiently strong to issue an alert memorandum, a vehicle by which the intelligence community intended to warn policymakers in advance of an intervention, rather than a report on a fait accompli. MacEachin based his argument on the fact that the Soviet military posture in Afghanistan “already has gone about as far as it can short of direct action by Soviet combat units,” and that the Soviets viewed some form of intervention, without which the Taraki regime would fall, as the “least bad” option. (Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Council Files, Job 93T01324R, Box 4, Afghanistan) For the alert memorandum, see Document 62.

A more historically focused memorandum, drafted August 10 by H.C. Cochran of the CIA’s Strategic Warning Staff, examined the choices the Soviet Union faced in light of Soviet policy toward Afghanistan since tsarist times. Russia’s longstanding interest in exerting control in Afghanistan, coupled with its proximity to Soviet territory, and the socialist revolution in April 1978, made Afghanistan a “special case” in the minds of Soviet leaders, who ranked its priority well above the importance they attached to supporting “liberation movements” elsewhere in the Third World. Together, these factors “would seem to rule out the theoretical option of Soviet withdrawal and cutting of losses,” particularly because the Soviet leadership believed that a successor government to the Taraki regime would inevitably be composed of Muslim “counterrevolutionaries,” allied with Iran and Pakistan and hostile to the Soviet Union. Cochran argued that from Moscow’s vantage point, the situation was both high stakes and lacked any satisfactory low-risk options, presenting “Moscow with one of the most difficult foreign policy decisions since the Cuban missile crisis.” Further, the memorandum observed, the hesitancy the Soviet Union displayed in its Afghan policy over the past several months represented a “delayed recognition that the USSR had seriously miscalculated the strength of the forces opposed to the Taraki regime.” Cochran concluded by noting that the Soviets might still continue to consider all options, but the impending collapse of the Taraki regime—which Cochran calculated would come by the month’s end—would effectively preclude any non-military options the Soviets would consider, no matter the diplomatic and economic consequences. (Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Council Files, Job 93T01324R, Box 4, Afghanistan)

The Office of Political Analysis and the Soviet Branch of the Regional Analysis Division each produced memoranda on Soviet options in Afghanistan dated August 17. The OPA memorandum, PA M 79–10378C, noted that despite significant successes mounted thus far by insurgent groups, their capacity to challenge the Afghan Government remained limited: rebels had “been unable to take and hold any major town;” they had no means of procuring arms beyond “gun dealers” in Pakistan and whatever they could capture from the Afghan Army; and rebel groups were driven more by provincial desires to rid their territory of government influence than a unifying, countrywide effort to topple the Kabul regime. Still, the memorandum noted, these limitations did not mean the Afghan Government would be able to survive the insurgency, and in recent months Soviet political efforts to moderate antipathy toward the Taraki-Amin government had largely failed: Taraki and Amin still refused to broaden their political base; leading members of the Parchamist faction were under arrest; and the regime remained unremittingly hostile toward Pakistan despite the Soviet Union’s attempts to mitigate tensions between the two countries. Further, the memorandum noted, while the Soviets “should have sufficient assets to pull off a coup,” it remained unclear to them what kind of successor government would be preferable to their interests, and therefore “they probably see no alternative at present to trying to tough it out with Taraki and Amin, even though this option will almost certainly require still deeper Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan.” (Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, Office of Support Services, Job 82T00267R: Production Case Files, Box 1, the Situation in Afghanistan and Soviet Options)

The second memorandum, SR M 79–10109J, built on Douglas MacEachin’s proposition that, for all intents and purposes, Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan was already underway. According to intelligence reporting, the memorandum noted, Soviet advisers had: accompanied Afghan patrols on the Pakistan border; operated tanks in fighting against rebels in the eastern provinces; coordinated defense plans of major Afghan cities; and might be flying helicopters in anti-insurgent operations. The various options before the Soviets to intensify its military presence in Afghanistan ranged from incremental increases of Soviet advisers to large-scale deployment of ground and airborne forces. The memorandum concluded with the assertion that the Soviet leaders “almost certainly do not believe” that anything short of the “most massive intervention options” would ensure that the Afghan Government was not overtaken by rebel forces. (Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Council Files, Job 93T01324R, Box 4, Afghanistan)

On August 20, the Office of Political Analysis issued memorandum PA M 79–1038C, which raised many of the same points stated in previous memoranda, but argued that a full-scale military operation was not yet a foregone conclusion, contrary to Cochran’s analysis. It noted the possibility that increasingly intensive direct military operations could provoke widespread defections from the Afghan Army to rebel forces, which in turn would require a full-scale military intervention. While “there is no question that the Soviets could install a regime of their choosing with a massive military intervention,” the memorandum argued, a gutted Afghan Army would require an “open-ended” commitment of regular ground force divisions. Thus, “we see few signs that the Soviets are so wedded to leftist rule in Afghanistan that they will undertake an operation of this magnitude. Their unwillingness to label this regime Communist when its leaders clearly view themselves as such, and their willingness to talk to non-Communist figures from old regimes about participation in a new government suggests they have long been mindful of the possibility that the leftist experiment in Afghanistan will fail.” (National Security Council, Carter Administration Intelligence Files, Box I–047, Afghanistan: 15 Feb 1979–22 Aug 1979)

In a memorandum to Arnold L. Horelick, NIO for USSR–EE, the NIO for Conventional Forces added a military dimension to assumed Soviet considerations that might point away from a full-scale military intervention in Afghanistan: such an operation would “appear to require undertakings, quite unlike the massive armor-heavy thrusts against clearly-defined objectives which have heretofore been the Soviet forte. Seizure of Kabul offers no finality, like that of Berlin, Budapest, or Prague. The Soviet advisors with the Afghan Army have been at it long enough to have reported the frustrations and costs of trying to winkle the will-o’-the-wisp insurgents out of the hills, and to have assessed for Moscow the ephemeral fighting qualities of their Afghan allies.” Even in the event of an “anti-Soviet regime seizing power” in Afghanistan, which might compel such an intervention, it would be unlikely that Soviet planners “would contemplate a swift (large-scale) strike like those into Hungary and Czechoslovakia—nothing much to strike against; no assurance that, having struck, any decisive political or military change in the internal security situation would eventuate; and no threat of external counter-intervention to forestall.” Instead, the memorandum argued, the Soviets would employ “recourse to classic counter-guerilla strategy, tache d’huile—seizure of Kabul plus other centers which would constitute a minimal Soviet-controlled Afghan polity, creation of a ‘legitimate’ Afghan regime, and retrenchment of the Afghan Army.” (Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Council Files, Job 81B00080R, Box 11, NI IIM 79–100225, [cable number not declassified] 28 Sept 79, Soviet Options in Afghanistan)

The CIA ended its August reporting on an equivocal note. Intelligence information cable [cable number not declassified], August 27, noted the challenges facing both the Afghan Government and the insurgency. For the former, the only positive development was a “non-event” in that “the government had not lost control of any major urban area during the month.” Still, the cable reported, the insurgents’ tactics had grown more sophisticated, and government forces struggled to control major urban areas and the transportation routes connecting them. Meanwhile, the insurgents confronted the same problem that had plagued their campaigns since 1978: while the government enjoyed loyalty from only about 20 percent of the population, the insurgents could claim even less; and politically, rebel leaders had not unified their forces—a fact, the cable observed, that was “part of the reason this regime survives.” With the coming winter, the cable concluded, the advantage might shift to the Afghan Government, which would take advantage of the inevitable slowdown in insurgent activity to shore up its support among the Afghan people, of whom more “may come to realize that even an odious government is better than none.” (Department of Defense, Afghan War Collection, Box 7, USSR in Afghanistan (August 79))