With the transfer of power in Iraq from U.S. to local forces, whether real or fictive, America’s role in Afghanistan will surely loom large. Indeed President-Elect Barack Obama has promised to escalate the war in Afghanistan, which he sees as the central theater in the war on Middle Eastern terrorism. Given what took place in Afghanistan over nearly the past two decades, the brutal civil war and then rise of the brutal Taliban, one could find reasons to support Obama’s plans without much trouble.
But the reality of Afghanistan and the U.S. role there is far more complex than the traditional media and court intellectuals have made it. The conventional narrative starts in 1979, when the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, and it’s described in cold war terms of Soviet aggression and containment after that. The truth is much more uncomfortable for cold war apologists and the background to American involvement in the crisis and war in Afghanistan is critical to understanding later, and now contemporary, events there. Obama, whom at this point looks a lot like the old boss when it comes to the Middle East, would do well to have some sense of the U.S. past in Afghanistan.
Much of the information below comes from an outstanding article by David Gibbs, “Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan: A Declassified History.” Critical Asian Studies 38:2 (2006), 239-63 ( Gibbs’s Article. ) which used documents collected and declassified by the Cold War International History Project and National Security Archive. (In the interests of disclosure, I read this manuscript for Critical Asian Studies and recommended its publication with enthusiasm).
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In April 1978, a coup led by People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA], a communist group with two factions, led respectively by Hafizullah Amin and Babrak Karmal, supported by the Soviet Union, successfully ousted the regime of Mohammed Daud and took control of Afghanistan. This set into motion a fairly rapid series of events that would lead ultimately to Soviet intervention into Afghanistan in December 1979, U.S. creation and funding of counterrevolutionary groups, “blowback” by those groups that would lead to the establishment of Muslim fighters, or mujahadeen, who would eventually become al Qaeda and Taliban and lead global terror networks, and finally, over la longue duree, 9/11 and the current crises in Iraq and the Middle East. Far from being a small outpost and Cold War rivalry, events in Afghanistan in the 1970 and the American response to them have had staggering consequences.
Prior to the later 1970s, Afghanistan was never of any significance to the U.S., while the USSR, for its part, actually feared that the Americans would try to extend control over Kabul and establish bases on the Soviet border. Indeed, in 1954, CIA Director Allen Dulles even observed that “the Soviets were inclined to look on Afghanistan much as the United States did on Guatemala” . . . and we all know how America’s “look” at Guatemala turned out.
The USSR did establish ties to Afghanistan and became its main military and economic aid provider, but the Afghans, per even CIA analyses, never feared Soviet attempts at control or internal communist movements. Still, the U.S. did try to raise alarms about Soviet influence there, but the warnings seemed pro forma and the Americans never even contemplated competing with the Soviets “on a dollar for dollar basis.”
In 1965, communists in Afghanistan took collective action, forming the PDPA with the Khalq or “masses” faction led by Amin, and the Parcham or “banner” faction led by Karmal. The PDPA was a non-ethnic party, trying to develop a base across ethnic groups, tribes, and regions and made a specific appeal for women with its program of women’s rights. It won more than a few seats in the legislature but was essentially a party of intellectuals and government officers, with little influence among peasants.
Again, the U.S. did not perceive the Afghan Left as a threat with the embassy reporting in 1973 that the PDPA “probably has more nuisance value than anything else . . . Their real threat to the present regime . . . is probably minimal.”
In fact, in that year there was a greater threat to the government, as Prime Minister Mohammed Daud led a coup to oust the Afghan monarchy. Again the Americans were not concerned with any Soviet role there and there was no evidence of Soviet involvement in the Daud coup.
The Daud coup in fact prompted the Americans and the Shah of Iran to make a dedicated effort to bring Afghanistan clearly into their orbit and distance it from the USSR. The U.S., Iran, and Pakistan first fomented anti-Daud protests, principally by extremist Islamist groups, to drive Daud away from the Soviet Union. The Shah then offered Daud major aid packages to, again, drive him away from Moscow. Daud accepted the offer, received more Iranian and American aid, and sent Afghan officers to Cairo and other pro-western countries for training. At home, he repressed the PDPA, putting them on the ropes and causing the Russians to send a message to the Amin and Karmal factions to unite.
By 1978, Daud had virtually decapitated the PDPA’s leadership and the repression was intense and growing. Daud finally went too far, however, and pro-PDPA officers led the rebellion that ousted and killed him. In April 1978, the PDPA was in power.
The Soviet Union, caught off guard by the quick PDPA success, had to cobble together a response. Soviet advisors in Afghanistan had supported the coup, but Moscow and the KGB were almost certainly unaware of it.
In power, the Amin faction, the more extreme of the two, took control. At first, Amin instituted land reform, eliminated the “bride price” by which young girls were sold into marriage, and established literacy programs for females. PDPA reforms, however, were heavy-handed and alienated the rural population and within months a series of rebellions against the new regime broke out, especially organized and led by Islamist groups-the mujahadeen or “holy warriors.” Exacerbating the PDPA’s problems, it was badly divided with Amin sending Karmal abroad to be ambassador to Prague and expelling him and others from the party. Indeed, the Khalq unleashed a widespread repression against the Parchamites.
By October 1978, the USSR was deeply concerned with Amin’s repressions of these communists so Moscow sent an emissary to try to put a stop to the repressions within the PDPA. The USSR in reality was wary of the entire PDPA, a communist party, but felt obliged to support it against the mujahadeen rebellions.
By early 1979, the PDPA was under serious attack and Amin requested aid from the Moscow, with Premier Alexei Kosygin and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko responsive to the request from Kabul. KGB Chief Yuri Andropov spoke against aiding Kabul, though, finding intervention “entirely inadmissible.” Gromyko then made a complete turn and agreed with Andropov, while the Soviet leadership shared a consensus that there was little to gain in Afghanistan “with its inconsequential weight in international affairs.” Uprisings against the government continued throughout 1979 and Moscow continued to deny armed support to the PDPA, and in fact tried to weaken the Amin faction and support rivals for PDPA leadership.
By September 1979 Amin had unleashed a full repression against those PDPA rivals and seized total control of the party, and by October 1979 Moscow seemed ready to intervene against Amin, the communist leader of the PDPA, a communist party.
The U.S. was of a similar mind, and President Jimmy Carter in fact had authorized aid to the mujahadeen in July 1979, six months prior to the Soviet intervention, to try to oust Amin. Years later, then- National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted that Carter and he authorized CIA involvement in Afghanistan as a way to bait the USSR and “I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” [Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76. Including Brzezinski quotes below].
Ironically, the Soviet Union’s biggest motivation in late 1979 was preventing an alliance between Amin and, remarkably, the United States. A late October report to the Central Committee in Moscow spoke definitively: “It is known in particular that representatives of the USA, on the basis of their contacts with the Afghans are coming to a conclusion about the possibility of a change in the political line of Afghanistan in a direction which is pleasing to Washington.” While there is no real evidence that Washington and Amin were preparing a rapprochement, the Soviet belief in that potential relationship was real, and critical.
In early December, Andropov reported “alarming information” about a possible shift by Amin to the west. “The diplomatic circles in Kabul,” the KGB Chief reported, “are widely talking of Amin’s differences with Moscow and his possible anti-Soviet steps.” Later memoirs by General Alexander Lyakhovsky and Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Kornienko emphasized the Soviet fears of growing U.S. influence in Afghanistan.
That concern over Amin and the Americans coming together served as the prologue to the Soviet decisions of December 1979. Andropov, claiming Amin was an “American agent,” argued for intervention and others, including Gromyko and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev soon agreed. Soviet troops entered Afghanistan around December 24th, ousted and murdered Amin, and then flew Karmal back and put him in power of a unified PDPA with the Parcham faction now holding sway. The intervention, it must be stressed, was conducted by a communist state against another communist state, an extreme one at that [dominated by Khalq], and on behalf of a more moderate communist faction in that state [the Parchamites]. (Markedly similar conditions would exist, and serve as the pretext for U.S. intervention, in Grenada in 1983). It was, despite the dominant cold war narrative that still exists describing it as an act of Soviet aggression, a defensive response to fear of U.S. influence in Afghanistan and disgust over the communist Amin faction’s behavior.
For American hawks, the Soviet invasion was a the culmination of many a cold war fantasy. U.S. officials, many prompted by the Committee on the Present Danger [CPD], a private-public group committed to escalating military spending and extending American power [a forerunner to the Project for the New American Century in many ways] saw this is an aggressive move by Russia to use Afghanistan as a jumping off point to get access to Persian Gulf oil.
Jimmy Carter, not yet the humanitarian home builder and Nobel Peace Prize winner we know today, and already beset by the Iranian hostage crisis and increasingly moving to the right, especially on foreign policy issues, used the Soviet invasion to ratchet up the cold war and essentially buy into the CPD’s agenda. He created the “Carter Doctrine” in 1980, in which the president threatened war if the Soviet took aggressive action in the Gulf. “The threat of the Soviet invasion to the rest of the region was very clear-and had grim consequences. A successful takeover of Afghanistan would give the Soviets a deep penetration between Iran and Pakistan and pose a threat to the rich oil fields of the Persian Gulf area and to the crucial waterways through which so much of the world’s energy supplies had to pass, ” Carter later wrote.
Exploiting the Soviet intervention, Carter decided to boycott the 1980 Olympics, scheduled for Moscow, but more importantly ramped up aid to the mujahadeen who immediately shifted their fight against the late Daud to a counterattack against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Within a decade, the Americans, first Carter and even more his successor Ronald Reagan, gave over $2 billion in aid and weapons to the Afghan resistance, which consisted of Islamic fundamentalists based in Pakistan and on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Brzezinski, in fact, traveled to the region to give a pep talk to the Mujahadeen [there are rumors that he met Osama bin Laden at the time, but that appears unlikely], telling them “Your cause is right and God is on your side.” ( Win One for the Zbigster ).
Not surprisingly, most of the recipients of this aid went on to become al Qaeda or Taliban in the ensuing years and we know the consequences of that.
Given the political atmosphere at the time-the Iranian Revolution had just taken place and the Soviet intervention added to the sense of crisis in the Middle East, Carter’s hard line had few critics.
There was a notable exception, the individual who knew more about Soviet history and politics than probably anyone else, George Frost Kennan. Writing in the New York Times in February 1980 he took issue with the American response, finding the Soviet intervention defensive in nature and no threat to western security. Afghanistan was a “border country of the Soviet Union and a natural security issue for the Russians” and their intervention reflected “defensive rather than offensive impulses.”
Even Kennan could not break through, however, and Carter’s initial course of action only ballooned over the following years, giving way to Reagan’s “evil empire,” rhetoric, massive increases in military spending [again per the CPD's program to rebuild the military-industrial complex in the aftermath of Vietnam], the funding of proxy groups which, under the rhetoric of democracy and freedom, were terrorist in nature, whether in Afghanistan, El Salvador, or Nicaragua, and, most critically, “blowback” by the very Islamist groups the U.S. helped create in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Still, Brzezinski had no regrets over the U.S. role in helping provoke a crisis in Afghanistan or funding groups which would later attack U.S. interests. “Regret what?,” he later said, “that secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.” Perhaps Brzezinski was trying to inflate his own reputation with post-hoc self-serving rationales, but his analysis does have some real validity.
Even when confronted with the “blowback” by Islamic groups, Brzezinski was unrepentant- “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
While no one would diminish the historical importance of the demise of the eastern bloc in the 1989-1991 period, the events of 9/11/01 and thereafter certainly do make Brzezinski’s claims seem tenuous.
More importantly, as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and others confront Afghanistan in 2009, the would do well to be aware of the history that Gibbs has written about. They ignore it, indeed they ignore the role of the U.S. in the Middle East, at their own peril.
Tags: Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter, Mujahadeen, Soviet Intervention, Zbigniew Brzezinski
Bob Buzzanco
Professor, Department of History, University of Houston; Ph.D. from The Ohio State University; Author and editor of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy; recipient of Bernath Book Prize [1996] and Bernath Lecture Prize [1999]. buzz@uh.edu; http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/buzzanco.htm