world with disastrous results. “Vietnam was the attempt to apply the containment principles of Europe to Asia,” Kissinger continued, “But, in Europe, containment was applied to societies that had existed for hundreds of years and whose internal structure was relatively stable except for the impact of the war.” Vietnam had proved to be another matter entirely. Likewise, in Afghanistan, the question after 9/11 was, “Can we turn Afghanistan into a democratic government which no longer supports such efforts?” as Kissinger put it. “That was the wrong question.”
That day at the State Department, Richard Holbrooke was quick to point out that Afghanistan was not Vietnam. The inciting event—an attack on American soil—made the strategic calculus different. “But structurally there are obvious similarities,” he said. “And leafing through these books here, they leap out at you. Many of the programs that are being followed, many of the basic doctrines are the same ones that we were trying to apply in Vietnam.”
SHORTLY AFTER RICHARD HOLBROOKE left behind the wreckage of Vietnam and resigned from the Nixon administration, Robin Raphel departed Cambridge and returned to Iran, taking a job teaching history at Damavand College for women. Before the fall of the shah, Tehran was cosmopolitan and welcoming. Raphel danced and acted in US-backed theater productions, including one of Anything Goes. She fell in love with a handsome, funny Foreign Service officer, Arnold Raphel; “Arnie,” to friends. In 1972, they married on the grounds of the American embassy in an interfaith ceremony bringing together his Judaism, her Christianity, and a lot of 1970s velvet.
When he was posted to Pakistan in 1975, Raphel went with him. Pakistan didn’t faze her any more than Iran had. Islamabad was a sleepy town, lush and green, with a third of its current population. “It was great,” Raphel recalled, lighting up at the memory. “It was up and coming.” She joined the Foreign Service and took a job at USAID. The young American couple cut a glamorous profile, throwing cocktail parties and hosting screenings of American movies. She slipped effortlessly into Pakistani high society, developing a network of connections that would serve—and haunt—her in years to come. For Raphel, like generations of Foreign Service officers before her, advancing American influence was about friendship and conversation. “You need to be engaged and figure out what makes people tick and what motivates them,” she said. “To me that’s blindingly obvious.” She reflected on this for a moment. “But sometimes we forget. And in this post-9/11, more urgent and demanding time, we fell into finger-wagging demanding.”
Just a few years after Raphel’s first, golden days in Islamabad, a transformation swept the region. When the secular, American-backed shah of Iran fell to an Islamist revolution in 1979, it cemented America’s reliance on Pakistan as a military and intelligence partner. The United States had lost important listening stations in Iran used to monitor the Soviets. The CIA approached Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency—the ISI—which agreed to build Pakistani facilities to fill the void.
THE CALL OF ISLAMIC REVOLUTION also sounded from Iran to neighboring Afghanistan, where a Soviet-backed Marxist regime had seized control a year earlier. Under the guidance of the KGB, the Marxists had instituted secular reforms, including mandatory girls’ education. On propaganda posters, women with red babushkas and red lips held open books under Cyrillic screaming: “IF YOU DON’T READ BOOKS, YOU’LL FORGET THE LETTERS.” For conservative Afghans, it was too much. The Afghan army erupted against the communists.
Initially, the Soviets hesitated as the revolt spread. But in Moscow, diplomacy had been sidelined and the KGB’s influence had swelled. KGB chief Yuri Andropov neatly bypassed Soviet diplomats voicing caution. On Christmas Eve, transport planes loaded with Soviet troops landed at Kabul airport. The Carter administration saw the invasion as a chance to embarrass Moscow. Carter green-lit a covert war orchestrated through the United States’ military alliance with Pakistan. “It is essential that Afghanistan’s resistance continues,” National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote. “This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels … To make this possible, we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.”
Pakistan had not been a paragon of virtue in the late 1970s. Its military dictator, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, hanged the civilian leader he had forced out of office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and canceled elections. Pakistan was aggressively pursuing the atom bomb, resisting American calls to stand down. In the name of war with the Soviets, as was the case in the later war on terror, all those concerns were secondary.
Over the course of Reagan’s first term, Congress’s approved funding for the covert war swelled from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Zia insisted that guns purchased with those funds be dispersed entirely on Pakistan’s terms. A Top Secret Presidential Finding at the outset of the war called for the CIA to defer to Pakistan. One Islamabad station chief remembered his orders this way: “Take care of the Pakistanis, and make them do whatever you need them to do.” When Zia visited Reagan, Secretary of State Shultz wrote a memo advising that, “We must remember, without Zia’s support, the Afghan resistance, key to making the Soviets pay a heavy price for their Afghan adventure, is effectively dead.” (When I asked Shultz about his advocacy for the Pakistani regime, he was unapologetic. “Zia and President Reagan, they had a relationship. The whole idea was helping the mujahedeen get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan,” he said, using the Arabic word for Muslim fighters engaged in jihad, like those fighting the Soviets. “And we succeeded.”) And so, as Zia insisted, weapons would be given to Pakistan’s ISI, which would hand-select the mujahedeen who received the spoils. The United States, still stinging from the complexities of managing a proxy war in Vietnam, was happy to leave the details to Pakistan.
AMID THE URGENCY of battle with the Soviets, the partnership’s less pleasant realities were easy to overlook. Pakistani officers sold their CIA-supplied weapons on the black market—once, they even sold them back to the CIA. Pakistan continued to brazenly flaunt its nuclear development. In 1985, the Senate passed the so-called Pressler Amendment, requiring the president to certify, on an annual basis, that Pakistan didn’t possess nukes. The rule was strict: no certification, no assistance. Zia lied to President Reagan about the Pakistani nuclear program. “There is no question that we had an intelligence basis for not certifying from 1987 on,” said one veteran CIA official. But Reagan continued to certify that Pakistan was nonnuclear anyway. Ohio senator John Glenn argued that nuclear proliferation was “a far greater danger to the world than being afraid to cut off the flow of aid to Afghanistan … It’s the short-term versus the long-term.” But he was a rare voice of dissent.
The covert war also required
