The Afghan/Soviet War started with Carter ("House of Bush, House of Saud")

Not trying to start a flamewar or anything, just pointing out something interesting -- I'm about 100 pages into Craig Unger's book.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's "hawkish" National Security Advisor, proposed the covert funding of the Afghans, and Carter signed off on it. The Afghan Arabs cared less about American policy -- they saw it as a jihad against the Soviet occupying power.

Unger adds that once the Reagan Administration learned of the policy, they liked it very much and pursued it with vigor (obviously).

1998 interview with Brzezinski on the subject: http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

:(

5 year projections totals for Defense that was released in Aug 1980.

Tax cuts for the rich and Star Wars and Treason in Iran Contra and we name buildings for him.

The 1979 CIA report said that the USSR was falling off the economic clift and would end in 10 years, so we needed to keep the defense budget pressure on them. Indeed part of the report suggested that they were already over the edge and we could begin to cut back on defense spending.

This was published at the time but has since been under wraps - as are all things that do not show the GOP as "great".

They started funding the Mujahadeen well before the Soviets 'invaded' Afghanistan (which the Soviets did at the behest of the communist government in Afghanistan).

When Reagan got in, they changed the strategic goal. Brzezinski/Carter wanted to 'bleed' the Soviets -- Reagan wanted the Mujahadeen to win. They boosted the funding from about $3 million a year to $500 million a year, and pressured Pakistan to supply the Mujahadeen with more advanced weapons, such as Stingers.

Pakistan's government at the time didn't want to do this, since they feared they'd lose control over the Mujahadeen if they got too powerful. They ended up bowing to pressure from the Reagan administration, and did it anyway.

Looks like they were right...

the Soviets set up...

I put the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets at the 'request' of the Afghan government right next to the invasion of Vietnam by the US at the 'request' of the South Vietnamese government. Both actions were wrong -- and neither was worse than the other.

However I do believe that it was in the interest of the United States and the free world to contain and ultimately roll back communism...

If you were to set up a Soviet-style communist government (there are three kinds--Soviet-style, Chinese-style and North Korean-style) you had to act in accordance with the wishes of the Soviets.

In 1978, Afghani president Mohammed Daoud Khan died, apparently of natural causes. This guy apparently thought he was going to live forever so he set up no succession plan--meaning that when he died, there was a power vacuum in Kabul. This is how communist governments start (either a power vacuum opens on its own, or the communists create one by shooting the old leadership) so naturally Afghanistan went communist.

Noor Mohammed Taraki became dictator with Hafizullah Amin and Babrak Karmal as deputy prime ministers. He instituted a Marxist-Leninist government and pissed off most of the populace in the process. In September 1979, a fight between Taraki's supporters and Amin's supporters ended up with Taraki shot dead and Amin in charge. Babrak Karmal had proven himself to be a Soviet supporter par excellence and was banished to Europe.

Amin then shot all of the people in the government who hated him, told the Soviets to go screw themselves, and started setting up a kinder, gentler communist Afghanistan. By December 26, 1979, the Soviets decided they had had enough of Amin's shit, found Babrak Karmal, and put three divisions of Spetsnaz troops and Babrak Karmal on airplanes headed to Kabul.

On December 27, 1979, the Spetsnaz had taken the presidential palace and killed everyone in there, then installed Babrak Karmal as president.

One thing led to another...and now we've got Osama bin Laden to deal with. Thanks, Ron. You're such a dear.

Until the Stinger missles were delivered, the Soviets had pushed the Mujahadeen back into Pakistan and were really only dealing with minor uprisings. The occupation was not costing them very much in terms of troops or money (at least in Soviet terms). It's not clear that anyone in the Reagan White House really thought the Mujadeen could "win" even with the funding. Of course, no one knew in 1984 that the entire Warsaw Pact had only five years left.

In retrospect, we would have been better off to do nothing, let the Soviets have Afghanistan, kill all the radicals, and then see what happened when the Soviet Union imploded. But hind-sight is 20/20.

While the White House in 1984 acted and appeared to believe that the Soviet Union was gaining in power, that was primarily because they'd signed onto the theories of the controversial 'Team B' at the Pentagon, populated by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, ironically.

Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets were gaining in power, and were destined to win the arms race. Most of the rest of the Military Intelligence complex disagreed at the time, stating that the Soviets were clearly on their last legs.

When Reagan got into power, he found Team B's neocon siren song to be to his liking, and brought them into the White House. Team B went from being a backroom laughingstock at the Pentagon to the forefront of our Foreign Policy apparatus almost overnight.

So it's definitely NOT true that 'nobody knew the Warsaw Pact was on it's last legs'. Most everyone who was supposed to know that sort of thing, KNEW they were on their last legs. Everyone but the Wiz Kids on Team B, that is. Way too many parallels to how we got tangled up in Iraq, actually. A lot of the same D.C. players, too.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

They couldn't anticipate that members of the Mujahadeen would turn against the Americans and Saudis after they forced the Soviets to leave...

Pakistan's government warned that the increase in funding and advanced weaponry to the Mujahadeen under Reagan would turn against us. IIRC, the phrase they used was 'creating a Frankenstein'.

So Pakistan anticipated it. That the Reagan administration either ignored the warnings or dismissed them speaks to their own incompetence -- not that they "couldn't" have anticipated it.

Foreign policy is hard to navigate...


We also supported both Iran and Iraq in their war at different times in the hope that the war would bleed both countries dry...


To me formulating foreign policy is a balancing act between advancing the national interest and having a healthy respect for the rights of other nations....

With so many extremists from different countries.

I've read that the Wahabbis(sp) having money/resources and more education looked down on the mostly poor and uneducated rural afghanis (as well as their brand of Islam) and treated them accordingly. I was under the impression that that's why the Northern alliance stayed "purer" and had less to do with the extremists that filterd in. Probably resented their madrassa's as much as they resented the Soviets secularism.

Zbig didn't get to stick around very long after it started though, but he definitely wants his share of the "We Won the Cold War" legacy.


I think his funding was strictly limited to funding the Afghani rebels though. The recruiting, training and use of arab extremists came later.


I have always read that it was Casey, in '86, that pushed the Saudis and others to step up their funding as well as a supply of bodies for a "big push", because things had stalemated.


Here's a link to a piece by a former CIA that was in Pakistan from '86 to '89 that has a fair amount of info, though he claims the CIA never had anything to do with the recruitment of arab extremists (of course).

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Afghanistan Graveyard of Empires
Milton Bearden
THE GREAT GAME

MICHNI POINT, Pakistan's last outpost at the western end of the barren, winding Khyber Pass, stands sentinel over Torkham Gate, the deceptively orderly border crossing into Afghanistan. Frontier Scouts in gray shalwar kameezes (traditional tunics and loose pants) and black berets patrol the lonely station commanded by a major of the legendary Khyber Rifles, the militia force that has been guarding the border with Afghanistan since the nineteenth century, first for British India and then for Pakistan. This spot, perhaps more than any other, has witnessed the traverse of the world's great armies on campaigns of conquest to and from South and Central Asia. All eventually ran into trouble in their encounters with the unruly Afghan tribals.

Alexander the Great sent his supply trains through the Khyber, then skirted northward with his army to the Konar Valley on his campaign in 327 BC. There he ran into fierce resistance and, struck by an Afghan archer's arrow, barely made it to the Indus River with his life. Genghis Khan and the great Mughal emperors began passing through the Khyber a millennium later and ultimately established the greatest of empires-but only after reaching painful accommodations with the Afghans. From Michni Point, a trained eye can still see the ruins of the Mughal signal towers used to relay complex torch-light messages 1,500 miles from Calcutta to Bukhara in less than an hour.

In the nineteenth century the Khyber became the fulcrum of the Great Game, the contest between the United Kingdom and Russia for control of Central Asia and India. The first Afghan War (1839-42) began when British commanders sent a huge army of British and Indian troops into Afghanistan to secure it against Russian incursions, replacing the ruling emir with a British protégé. Facing Afghan opposition, by January 1842 the British were forced to withdraw from Kabul with a column of 16,500 soldiers and civilians, heading east to the garrison at Jalalabad, 110 miles away. Only a single survivor of that group ever made it to Jalalabad safely, though the British forces did recover some prisoners many months later.

According to the late Louis Dupree, the premier historian of Afghanistan, four factors contributed to the British disaster: the occupation of Afghan territory by foreign troops, the placing of an unpopular emir on the throne, the harsh acts of the British -supported Afghans against their local enemies, and the reduction of the subsidies paid to the tribal chiefs by British political agents. The British would repeat these mistakes in the second Afghan War (1878-81), as would the Soviets a century later; the United States would be wise to consider them today.



http://www.khyber.org/publications/afghangraveyard.shtml

Was "showing' Mujahadeen fighters to use Stinger Missiles...

I haven't read his book, but I didn't think they got stingers until the mid 80's

He's pointing it up in the air as a bunch of men in Afghan garb look skyward...

Some site had the download, but I doubt I could find it now.

And they were delivered to camps in Pakistan. Those missles were really the turning point, because the Soviets began to lose helicopters like crazy, which not only drove up the casualty rate but drove up the expense of the war.

that broke the camel's back. They caused a paradigm shift.


Being that they were used anyway, it's too bad that they hadn't been used earlier, as it would have been a damn sight better alternative than the hoards of arab extremists that flowed in.

For the US, the Afghans, and the entire ME.

Musn't upset the Holy Knights of St. Ron with facts.

I'm not being a smart-ass but what is the average age on this website?

The Soviet Invasion was seen as yet another example of the US's lost credibility in the world (along with the Iran Hostage Crisis) under Carter. It led to the Summer Olympic boycott.

I think he was posting about our early involvement there.

Zbig's '98 interview suddenly became "news" in Oct '01, when some (or at least a few) people suddenly became interested in our previous history in Afghnistan.

But the poster seemed surprise that Carter was in office when all this started. Like I said, we didn't go to the 80 Summer Games because of it.

based on the fact that they deliberately lured the soviets into the "afghan trap"

then, they displayed the self-righteous, we're "shocked, shocked i tell you" response.

The "Nixon Doctrine" was now replaced by the "Carter Doctrine," which placed emphasis on the need to use direct military force if U.S. interests were threatened in the region. Accordingly, President Jimmy Carter promoted the idea of a U.S. "rapid deployment force" that could intervene quickly in the region. Such a strategy required the U.S. to line up local regimes to allow U.S. military bases on their territory. Saudi Arabia became the lynchpin of this strategy. Unable to openly declare support for the U.S. and Israel for fear of alienating their own populations, Gulf rulers were forced to act discreetly, allowing U.S. air and naval forces limited use of military facilities in the region. This forced the U.S. to depend heavily on more remote bases in Kenya and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as on deployment of aircraft carriers.


http://www.isreview.org/issues/15/blood_for_oil.shtml


Carter Doctrine (1980): in an attempt to protect Middle-East oil interests, Carter announces that the U.S. would intervene unilaterally in any Middle-East country . . .


http://userpages.umbc.edu/~cgehrm1/pres_site/presidents/jc.html

geez, think this guy might just be worthy of a nobel peace prize, hopefully someone will nominate him.

I can't think of one myself. They've all been imperialist -- I'd say that imperialism has been the normal state of US foreign policy since Monroe.

Bush, though, is worse. He's an INCOMPETENT imperialist.