The Road to Afghanistan - George Washington University

keep hostages in captivity. In other words, it’s good when the situation is more or less clear.Then one can foresee the evolution of the situation with a sufficient degree of certainty.One can undertake certain steps directed at forestalling the terrorists’ actions. It is goodwhen experienced operatives, who know each other well, work together while trying tosave hostages, when they report to a single central command, and when externalconditions are favorable to the team.In the case of Adolph Dubs, everything was bad. Soon both Bakhturin andKliushnikov understood that the terrorists felt as if they were the hostages of the situation,even more so than the captured ambassador. They felt themselves to be prisoners of anunmanageable affair that they should never have started. It seemed that here, in Room 117of Hotel Kabul, the terrorists were not making their own decisions, but were directed bysomebody’s evil will. While they seemed quite calm and collected during the capture of theambassador, now something had shattered that calm, and something unforeseen wasgradually becoming more and more obvious to them. One could feel that they werebecoming increasingly agitated, inevitably approaching the state of nervous breakdownthat could be provoked by the most innocuous trigger. If such a breakdown were to occur,they—spirited by nature—would not seek a logical way out. On the contrary, they wouldact irrationally, and possibly, like desperate predators, would attack those who wouldarrive to free the ambassador.On the other hand, the Americans were also acting very strangely. They behaved asif they knew more than what the Soviet officers had been told. It seemed as if they werewaiting for some kind of evolution of events known only to them. They acted as if they hadno doubt that the situation’s conclusion would occur exactly as expected. It appeared as if302