Early Histories III: Afghanistan

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.7.07]

1979: April — Zbigniew Brzezinski instructs the CIA to develop a comprehensive plan for a secret war in Afghanistan backed by the US. July – Carter signs document authorizing US to arm the mujahideen. December – USSR invades Afghanistan. “It [the US arming of the rebels] had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap” – Z. Brzezinski

1979 — 88: US pours $3 billion into Afghanistan (matched by $3 bil from Saudi-Arabia); Green Berets are sent in to teach the rebels how to use the high-tech weapons the US is supplying.

Saudi intelligence, with US approval, uses the young engineer, Osama bin Laden, to funnel millions of dollars to rebel forces. Starting in ’87, CIA begins issuing visas to Middle East applicants to come to the US for training in terrorism for the war in collaboration with bin Laden (this continues into the 90s).

1988 — 89: Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan; the USSR begins to unravel.

1992: With half their population affected (1 million dead, 3 million wounded, 5 million refugees), Afghan society is destroyed. Having no further use for the country, the US walks away. The Taliban rises from the ruins.

A “fixation with combating the Soviet threat,” writes historian Douglas Little, “had led a generation of US policymakers to neglect the appeal of revolutionary nationalism and radical Islam among the people of the Muslim world” – an appeal that our actions served to deepen.

“That the Pakistani and US intelligence services helped stroke the fires of radical Islam among bin Laden and the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s is one of the cruelest ironies of the Cold War,” says Little; both bin Laden and the Taliban, he points out, “were to some degree Frankenstein’s monsters created by US and Pakistani political experiments that were too clever by half.”

While it is true that a good part of the resistance to the Soviets was indigenous, the fact is that we instigated an anti-Communist “proxy” war that resulted in worldwide terrorist blowback. If, concludes Little, we had had some sympathy for revolutionary nationalism in the 1950s, for figures such as Mossadegh [see my Early Histories I] and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser – whose aspirations were hardly those of a clash of civilizations – we might have avoided Khomeini and bin Laden.

– Morris Berman, Dark Ages America (This was the main source for the Early Histories Series)