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The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan

According to this 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA's intervention in Afghanistan preceded the 1979 Soviet invasion. This decision of the Carter Administration in 1979 to intervene and destabilise Afghanistan is the root cause of Afghanistan's destruction as a nation.

Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And 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.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: 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. 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.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: 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?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Translated from the French by Bill Blum

Copyright, Le Nouvel Observateur and Bill Blum. For fair use only.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
also at e.g.:
http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html
http://www.marxists.org/history/afghanistan/archive/brzezinski/1998/interview.htm
and included in, see also:
http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm


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from http://www.counterpunch.org/petras07082004.html :

Afghanistan: Carter Finances the Invasion of Islamic Terrorists

In the late 1970's Afghanistan was ruled by a nationalist secular regime allied with the Soviet Union. The regime promoted gender equality, free universal education for women and men, agrarian reform including the redistribution of feudal estates to poor peasants, the separation of religion and the state and adopted an independent foreign policy with a Soviet tilt. Beginning at least as early as 1979, the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia orchestrated a massive international recruiting campaign of Islamic fundamentalist to engage in a "Jihad" against the "atheistic communist regime." Tens of thousands were recruited, armed by the US, financed by Saudis Arabia and trained by the CIA and Pakistani Intelligence. Pakistan opened its frontiers to the flood of armed invaders. Internally the displaced Mullahs, horrified by the equality and education of women, not to speak of the expropriation of their huge land holdings, joined the Jihad en masse.

The Carter Presidency (and not Reagan) was responsible for the organization, financing, training of the Islamic uprising and the terror campaign which followed. Zbig Brzesinski later wrote of the US--Afghanistan campaign as one of the high points in US Cold War diplomacy--it provoked Soviet intervention on behalf of the secular Afghan ally. Even when confronted with the consequences of the total devastation of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and Al Queda and 9/11, Carter's former National Security Adviser, Brzesinski replied that these were marginal costs in comparison with a war which successfully hastened the fall of the Soviet Union. President Carter's intervention in Afghanistan initiated the Second Cold War, which was pursued with even greater intensity by Reagan. Carter backed a series of surrogate wars in Angola, Mozambique, Central American, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Carter was clearly an advocate and practitioner of the worst kind of imperial intervention and a master of public relations: he was an early practitioner of "Humanitarian Imperialism"--humane in rhetoric and brutally imperialist in practice.


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from http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/19/interviews/carter/ -- Jimmy Carter, in 1997, 'On the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan':

I had no forewarning in Christmas week of 1979 that the Soviets were going to invade Afghanistan. ... And I could see that the Soviet movement into Afghanistan was not an end in itself. The intelligence that I had from various sources, including within the Soviet Union, was that the Soviets' long-term goal was to penetrate into access to warm-water oceans from Afghanistan, either through Iran or through Pakistan. I saw this as a direct threat to global stability and to the security of my own nation. I had several alternatives, one of which was military action, which I thought was out of the question half way around the world, with the powerful Soviet military adjacent to Afghanistan. So I exhausted almost all the other means that I had to put restraints on the Soviet Union. One of them was to issue a public statement that if the Soviets did invade either Pakistan or Iran out of Afghanistan, that I would consider this a personal threat to the security of the United States of America, and I would take whatever action I desired or considered appropriate to respond -- and I let it be known that this would not exclude a nuclear reaction. This was a very serious and sobering statement that I made, and I relayed this in more private terms to Brezhnev, and encouraged him to restrain the Soviet forces and urged him to withdraw them from Afghanistan. ...

I sent Brezhnev an inquiry. At first: "What are your intentions in invading Afghanistan? When will you withdraw?" That was my first question. He sent me word back that he had been invited into Afghanistan, to maintain stability there, by Afghan leaders. The fact is that as his forces went into Afghanistan, he carried in a puppet leader that he implanted in Kabul to administer the government that was to be controlled by the Soviet Union. I knew that his response was not honest. Then they continued to pour in airplane after airplane loaded with troops, and then to cross the border on land as well. This took several days. That's when I decided to issue my statement, that I've already described, that I considered any further advance by the Soviet Union beyond Afghanistan to be a direct threat to my country. ...

This was a major setback, and obviously the Soviets had not tried to extend their hegemony beyond their borders since they had gone into Hungary and Czechoslovakia a generation earlier, so it was quite a change in their basic policy. ... We had been making good progress, I think, in alleviating the tension of the Cold War. I had explained my reasons for normalizing relations with China; we had concluded a very productive negotiation in Vienna for the SALT II treaty; we were having a very good response from the Soviet Union in permitting Jews to emigrate from their country because of our human rights policy; and I really felt that we were on the track to an alleviation of tension. And then Brezhnev made what I considered to be a very serious mistake.