The Road to Afghanistan - George Washington University

The taxi driver sensed that his passengers didn’t feel like engaging in small talk. Heturned the radio on. A tragic accident in the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk was reported on thenews program. Two airplanes had collided. There were many casualties, includingmembers of the football team Pakhtakor. Starostin thought the news of the tragic accidentwas a bad omen—there was a long day and several flights ahead of them.Valery recalled the words of a colleague who was a Center handler with the KGBKabul Residency. At a picnic for Starostin and his family during their vacation, the colleaguesaid: “I am not surprised anymore when trains are two, sometimes three, hours late. I amnot surprised when airplanes crash. I am surprised that the train system functions at all. Iam surprised that airplanes take off before crashing. The country is a mess. Nobody caresabout people. Everything is done to submit reports to the higher ups. The reports tell onestory. Real life has nothing to do with the reports. You, Valery, tried to provide yoursuperiors with an objective analysis about the situation in Afghanistan. Do you know whatthe response of General Polonnik, the head of our Near East Division, was to your analysis?Once you left his office, he said to me: “Why is he such a pessimist? At his age? He ischallenging the official line of party advisers directed at the expansion of the social base ofthe PDPA…He must consider himself to be smarter than everybody else.”It was true that Starostin’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan was grim. Hemade a case to the department head that the Khalq regime was not functional and that theSoviet party advisers’ strategy to expand Khalq by granting membership to more workersand peasants was a mistake. Most of those newly recruited party members were illiterateor poorly educated at best, and they were not familiar with either history or PDPAdocuments. Starostin was trying to make an argument that such “growth of party ranks”464