THE ROOTS OF TODAY’S NEW WAR
By Jack A. Smith
The terror attacks in New York City and Washington last month, and now the war President Bush initiated Oct. 7, are in large measure a consequence of U.S. intervention in the 1979-92 Afghan civil war. Here, briefly, is how the second Afghan war is connected to the first.
Land-locked, rugged, Texas-sized and strategically located where the Middle-East and Central Asia overlap, Afghanistan gained independence from colonial Great Britain in 1919. A monarchy was established in this dirt-poor country until overthrown by a military coup in 1973. Another coup took place in April 1978, this time principally led by left forces, including progressive military officers, determined to enact major social and political reforms to “bring Afghanistan into the 20th century.”
The resulting ruling group, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set about to introduce reforms and to establish close relations with the neighboring Soviet Union. Alarm bells immediately sounded in Washington, which had been engaging in a cold war to degrade the socialist USSR since the end of World War 2. Plans were discussed within the administration of President Jimmy Carter about how the U.S. might intervene to support opponents of the new leftist regime within Afghanistan--mostly by aiding right-wing and fundamentalist religious groups opposed to the reforms and the Kabul government’s friendship with Moscow. In July 1979, the Carter administration secretly began to send money and equipment to opposition groupings to support a war against the government.
Meanwhile, the two leading factions within the PDPA government differed over the extent of the reforms and how swiftly they should be implemented. Both sides agreed on enacting progressive programs to elevate the status of working people generally and the oppressed women of Afghanistan in particular. But one side feared the other was pushing the new regime to introduce reforms too fast, thus engendering a stronger opposition. As an early consequence of factional fighting, Deputy Prime Minister Babrak Karmal was removed from government office and posted as ambassador in Eastern Europe. In September, there was a major confrontation between the factions. Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin deposed Nur Mohammad Taraki, the general secretary of the PDPA and president of the Revolutionary Council. Karmal was then removed from his diplomatic post and remained in exile in Prague.
By the fall of 1979 the Amin government began receiving Soviet military aid to bolster the Afghan army in its fight against the U.S.-backed opposition, which by then was advancing toward Kabul. The Soviet Union began sending troops into Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979, to prevent the progressive government from falling. At the time the USSR declared it was acting in response to a request from Prime Minister Amin and because the United States was secretly supporting the opposition forces to overthrow the government. The U.S. denied aiding the anti-government armies, but the evidence of its involvement was irrefutable.
On Dec. 27, Amin and some of his associates were slain and most leading members of his government were ousted. Amin was immediately replaced by Karmal, who then put members of his faction in the vacant top posts. One strong school of thought suggests that Moscow was closer to Karmal the entire time and was in fact implicated in the events leading to the transfer of power.
With Soviet troops now defending the Kabul government, the U.S. vastly increased its clandestine economic and military commitment to the reactionary opponents of reform. Simultaneously, the Carter administration launched the Carter Doctrine, a program re-energizing the cold war internationally (including an announcement that the U.S. and its allies would boycott the upcoming Moscow Olympics) and ushering in an austerity program domestically. This is precisely what right-wing and neo-conservative elements had been demanding for years. It is clear in retrospect--and as President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, finally acknowledged in 1998--that the U.S. virtually induced the USSR to send troops into Afghanistan in order to justify a more aggressive international stance after the defeat in Vietnam. In his interview in the French periodical Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski could not resist engaging in revelatory braggadocio when asked about Washington’s intervention. He replied:
“According to the official version of history,” Brzezinski commented, “CIA aid to the Mujahedin [the collective name of the Muslim fighters] began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan....But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 [nearly six months before the Soviet intervention], that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. On that very day, 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....We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”
Asked if he had any regrets about denying Moscow’s assertion that it had intervened to save the Kabul government against a U.S.-sponsored war, the former national security adviser responded: “Regret what? 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: Now we have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”
For the next several years following the arrival of Soviet troops, the White House--now occupied by the Reagan administration--virtually created the rebel Mujahedin armies--composed of warlords and soldiers from rightist ethnic factions within Afghanistan who historically were fighting each other. They were eventually joined by up to 40,000 recruits from over 40 countries in the Muslim world in a project aided by the CIA, which spent at least $8 billion to finance this first Afghan war. Washington supplied these forces with cash, training camps, intelligence information, U.S. military “advisers” and sophisticated weaponry such as Stinger anti-aircraft missiles for use against government and Soviet troops. Osama bin Laden, scion of a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, was among those attracted to the anti-government fight by the CIA. At the time, the U.S. was indifferent to the extreme fundamentalist religious impulses that were spreading throughout the Mujahedin. Throughout this first Afghan war, until the progressive government was defeated, Washington and the corporate media cynically referred to the Mujahedin as “freedom fighters.”
The USSR totally withdrew its troops in 1989, after a decade of war that drained Moscow’s treasury and morale. The civil war lasted until what was left of the progressive government fled Kabul in 1992. The various U.S.-supported factions then fought each other until the Taliban, and its 20,000-strong militia of “freedom fighters,” took power. Most of the Taliban’s recruits were trained in fundamentalist religious schools set up during the war mainly in Pakistan with support from the United States government. Several losing factions regrouped to become the Northern Alliance, the coalition Washington initially selected to replace the Taliban. According to a statement from Human Rights Watch Oct. 6, the alliance shares many of the Taliban’s shortcomings, especially in crimes against the civilian population. The next day, the New York Times reported that “The last time the alliance's leaders tried to run Afghanistan [in 1992], Kabul dissolved into factional civil war. More than 25,000 people died in the fighting, which reduced a third of the city to rubble and carved the country into fiefdoms essentially run by warlords.”
Journalist Robert Fisk, reflecting on the Northern Alliance predilection for killing civilians, speculated Oct. 6 in Britain’s The Independent newspaper, that “at some point--always supposing we've installed a puppet government to our liking in Kabul--the alliance will fall apart and turn against its ethnic enemies or, if we should still be around, against us. Because the alliance knows that we're not giving them money and guns because we love Afghanistan, or because we want to bring peace to the land, or because we are particularly interested in establishing democracy in southwest Asia. The West is demonstrating its largesse because it wants to destroy America's enemies....And, dare I ask, how many bin Ladens are serving now among our new and willing [Northern Alliance] foot-soldiers?”
Whether the U.S. will continue to promote the Northern Alliance as the main successor to the Taliban is now in question. The Bush administration’s enthusiasm has waned as it has become aware that the rivalry-riven alliance has little influence in large sectors of Afghanistan, is thoroughly distrusted by Washington’s coalition partner Pakistan, and has been getting bad press now that its past actions have come under scrutiny.
Upon taking power, the Taliban immediately overturned most of the progressive legislation remaining from the earlier government and imposed a rigid, reactionary religious state upon the 26 million Afghani people, over 5 million of whom are starving at this moment. The ousted government’s laws affording women numerous freedoms for the first time were overturned by the most oppressive anti-woman regime in the world, much--it must be noted--to Washington’s official indifference, until now. (The U.S. actually has a history of supporting extreme fundamentalist states, such as absolutist Saudi Arabian regime kwith its attachment to the Wahhabi religious movement, or the fundamentalism of Pakistan’s military government.) The Taliban also gave hospitality to bin Laden, an important wartime ally and close friend of the CIA, permitting him to train more fundamentalist soldiers in some of the U.S.-built camps. Washington was likewise indifferent to the Taliban-bin Laden relationship until the latter metamorphosed into the “Evil One,” as President Bush now describes him.
According to an article Sept. 27 in the large-circulation Indian daily newspaper The Hindu, Osama bin Laden “was deputed [assigned] by the CIA to Afghanistan to finance and oversee the resistance to the Soviets. He was groomed as a theocratic-terrorist by the U.S.” The newspaper suggested that “modern Jehadi [holy war] Islam is a byproduct of intrigues by the West to keep the Islamic world under its suzerainty.” Writing in “Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,” journalist-author Ahmed Rashid said the training camps “became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism.” In the words of William Blum in his book, “Rogue State--A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” “The war had been a rallying point for Muslim zealots from throughout the world.... Thousands of veterans of the war...dispersed to many lands to...inflame and train a new generation of...terrorists ready to drink the cup of martyrdom.”
Washington not only encouraged and trained those former pawns in the cold war who have now become the enemy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attack. Inadvertently the U.S. provided them with a multitude of reasons for ventilating anger against their former wartime benefactors. Many working people throughout the Middle East, of all degrees of religious persuasion, view the U.S. government’s economic, military, political and cultural hegemony in the world, especially in relation to Islamic countries, as a danger to their societies, culture and religion. Washington’s half-century of one-sided support for Israel against the oppressed Palestinians is viewed as a torment for Arab and Muslim people. The U.S. government-initiated sanctions against Iraq, responsible for the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqi civilians, is regarded as a holocaust. Washington’s obvious manipulation of client regimes in the Middle East is considered a humiliation. And for the orthodox, the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the host of Mecca, and in other forward bases in the region, are interpreted as insults to Islam.
Those fundamentalist veterans from the Afghanistan and Pakistan training camps are relatively few in number and essentially powerless compared to the Pentagon’s world-spanning projection of military might. Only an infinitesimal proportion are misguided enough to engage in acts of terror or suicide attacks to express their frustration. Their terrorist deed Sept. 11 was a grotesque crime against innocent civilians, of course, but hardly a declaration of war by Afghanistan or any other country. Yet, it has propelled the Bush administration into launching another Afghan war and possibly additional wars against so-called “Rogue States” over the next several years, not to mention the inevitable harm that will be done to civil liberties in the United States in the name of fighting terrorism, or the militarist, anti-environmental, and pro-business legislation that will be pushed through a limp Congress. President Bush and his conservative allies are clearly taking advantage of this brief political window of opportunity to advance right-wing ideology and programs.
Had Washington not adopted imperial policies toward the Middle East since the end of World War 2 in order to dominate its oil resources, and had it refrained from interfering in the Afghanistan cauldron in 1979 to undermine its Soviet rival, much of what the people of the United States are experiencing today--and perhaps worse yet to come tomorrow--could have been entirely avoided.
The Bush administration now disingenuously characterizes the second Afghan war as an effort to dislodge its former Taliban “freedom fighters” in order to “liberate” Afghanistan from their control. We made ‘em, as it were, and now we’ll break ‘em. If any brutal right-wing regime deserved to be overthrown by its own people, the Taliban is a perfect example. But for the world’s only superpower to undertake the job with its planes, missiles, self-interest and hypocrisy, bodes ill for the long-suffering Afghan masses and the region in general. Indeed, this insertion of U.S. military power deeper into strategically important Central Asia brings Washington closer to its goal of hegemony over the neighboring Islamic former Soviet republics, now discovered to be awash in oil reserves. (end)