Bagram Ghosts

By Roger Morris

“I heard a loud boom,” Vice
President Dick Cheney remembered of the suicide bomb at Bagram air base outside
Kabul where he
stopped over this week. Said to be aimed
at Cheney himself, the attack left him untouched while killing twenty-one
Afghan workers and two Americans—still more casualties in Afghanistan’s thirty-year,
million-and-a-half-dead civil war.

In
that setting, one hopes Cheney heard symbolically more than a “boom.” Bagram thunders with relevant ghosts, many of
them American.

In the fourth century
B.C. it was a fort in one of the first of so many ill-fated attempts to subdue
the Afghans. Even Alexander’s campaign-hardened
Macedonians were shocked when the local insurgents left battlefield dead to
devouring wild dogs. For ancient Afghans
it was religious practice, but for invaders a telling mark of a people capable
at once of tender poetry and chivalrous hospitality along with the most
ferocious, indomitable resistance to conquest.

Bagram
was a mocking ruin as Britain
came and went in the nineteenth century to parry imperial Russia in the Great Game. The English killed, tortured, bribed, and subverted
the Afghans, and in the end, like Alexander’s legions, left their bones to
bleach at Gandamak and on the stony plain of Maiwand west of Kandahar.
They left, too, the Durand Line dividing Afghanistan from the subcontinent. Cut for colonial convenience through the
heart of Pashtun tribal lands, the fateful boundary with its separatist
ambitions and fears still makes Pakistan the furtive nemesis of Afghan
stability, and the inconsolable frontier now a sanctuary for the resurgent
Taliban.

Cold War brought
Bagram back to life in the mid-1950s as an air base of the old Afghan royal
regime. Having begged in vain for U.S. help—Washington
at the time thought the Hindu Kush of no strategic value and preferred as
clients the crisp military dictators in Pakistan—the
Afghans turned to Russia
to modernize their antique armed forces.

As Bagram hummed
with Soviet advisors and MIGs, America
took up the competition, albeit on the cheap.
Over a quarter century U.S.
aid to Afghanistan would be
only a fraction of Moscow’s. All the while, the Great Game continued. Whatever the visible policy, the CIA
relentlessly used Afghanistan
to spy on Soviet Central Asia, feeding perennial Russian fears and the
inevitable counter intrigues.

Intent on each
other, both superpower rivals dispensed their foreign aid wares—and a corrupt Kabul oligarchy took them—heedless
of the impact. As aid spawned an educated class without jobs,
as the army grew better armed but no better paid, as grinding poverty only
worsened, the turmoil built that would plunge Afghanistan into unimaginable
disaster, and haunt the world into the next century.

Bagram was always
emblematic. The neutrality of its officers
allowed strongman Mohammad Daoud to overthrow the venal monarchy of King Zahir
in 1973. It was from Bagram five years
later that a leftist commander launched his jet fighters with withering effect
on Daoud’s presidential palace in the 1978 communist coup neither Russia nor the
U.S. expected—and Moscow soon regretted more than Washington.

Into Bagram then
poured Soviet advisors and materiel in the Kremlin’s vain attempt to shore up a
weak, divided communist rule in Kabul
that remained typically Afghan, and thus fiercely independent of its patrons. The regime’s reforms were now crudely
anti-religious and culturally insensitive, now laudably democratic in land
reform and the education of women. Change
in any case ignited a reactionary Islamic revolt which the U.S., Pakistan,
China,
and briefly the tottering Shah of Iran quickly moved to foment with covert arms
and training.

Results were
horrific. When a CIA- and
Iranian-instigated Islamic uprising in Herat massacred hundreds of Russian aid
workers and their families in March 1979—the bloodiest episode in the history
of foreign aid—sorties from Bagram indiscriminately bombed monuments, homes and
schools of the ancient capital even after rebels had left, killing as many as
20,000.

In the face of a deliberate
U.S. policy to provoke an invasion of
Afghanistan—“giving to the USSR its Vietnam War,” as National Security Advisor
Zbigniev Brzezinski told President Jimmy Carter—we know from the post-Soviet release
of Politburo minutes the Kremlin warily resisted what some knew would be a
disaster.

When that trap was
sprung by self-deception and fear on all sides, it was Bagram that saw the
elite KGB unit who killed Afghan President Hafizullah Amin in a December 1979
coup to replace his regime with a more agreeable puppet. It was Bagram’s runways that took wave after
wave of Soviet invasion forces whose masters expected a victorious,
low-casualty show of force lasting only months.
It was Bagram that saw the last Russian troops more than nine years
later after some of the most savage warfare in history and twice as many casualties
as the Kremlin admitted.

Over a decade of
carnage the base was a center of war and portent. Trained by the Americans and Pakistanis with
the latest explosive devices and eventually Stinger missiles, the Mujahideen,
as the Islamic radicals were known, constantly stalked Bagram. Tuesday’s attack was in a tradition begun by U.S.-directed
car-bombing squads sent to terrorize not only Soviet or Afghan military, but
also civilians, including Kabul’s
intelligentsia and university professors at sites like movie theaters and
cultural events.

After the fall of
the USSR and the Kabul communist regime,
the base was a shifting prize between Mujahideen factions abandoned to the
chaos of further civil war and then the bloody Pakistani-sponsored rise of the
Taliban. With the U.S. occupation in
2002, Bagram was expanded as never before as a hub of the NATO war, including conversion
of one of its cavernous hangers into most notorious prison in Afghanistan,
eclipsing even the infamous Pul-i-Charki outside Kabul where the Mujahideen,
and the communists, Daoud regime and monarchy before them, jailed and tortured
thousands.

Did Cheney hear
any of it? In the 1970s as Afghanistan
slid to calamity, he was a rising young aide to Don Rumsfeld in the Nixon and
Ford Administrations. In 1978 as the communists
seized power and the U.S.
began its covert intervention, he was maneuvering for a Wyoming congressional seat. In 1979 as Washington
provoked and Moscow
invaded, he was finishing his first year in the House, positioning for the
leadership he gained a decade later. In
the 1980s as the Mujahideen attacked Bagram, he ardently supported the Reagan
Administration’s covert wars in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Iran, though
he took no interest in places or issues—like his colleagues, looking the other
way amid questions about the drug trade, atrocities, terrorism..

It was all there
at Bagram—the consummate folly of corrupt clients, the false valor of
historical ignorance, and the presumption once again to conquer the
unconquerable in what the Greeks called the “land of the bones.” A “loud boom” indeed.