What we did to Afghanistan in the 80s

Dispensing with the notion that the U.S. is a benevolent force in world affairs

I’ve previously argued against interventionist foreign policy. Here, I’ll document, in some detail, the horrific foreign policy towards Afghanistan, in the 80s.

In the summer of 1973, Mohammed Daoud, a nationalist primarily, who was dependent on the Soviet Union, who was also the former Afghan Prime Minister launched a successful coup. Daoud later decided to open up friendly relationships with the U.S.. This lead to backlash and Daod was executed—along with his family—on April 28, 1978.

Taraki took over in 1978, frightening the Carter administration. They feared that he’d revert back to close ties with the soviet Union.

In the summer of 1979, Hafizullah Amin, a longtime ally of Taraki who became Deputy Prime Minister following the April Revolution, received word that Babrak Karmal (Daoud’s early supporter) was leading a Parcham plot to overthrow the Taraki regime. Amin took the opportunity to purge and execute many Parchamists and consolidate his own power.

Taraki was friendly with the soviets, but was significantly unable to put down the insurgency in Afghanistan—thus, the soviets began to look for ways to put down the revolt. In March 1979, Hafizullah Amin became prime minister, though Taraki was still in power. The US ambassador was also killed.

To fight against the Soviet-friendly government, the U.S. backed Mujahadeen rebels, in what was known as operation cyclone. We did this originally through Pakistani proxies. The people we backed included Bin Laden—providing support for the rarely faulty heuristic that all people carrying out horrific atrocities have been backed by the U.S. at some point. As Steve Coll notes "In all, the United States funneled more than $2 billion in guns and money to the mujaheddin during the 1980s, according to U.S. officials. It was the largest covert action program since World War II."

At the end of December 1979, the Soviet Union sent in troops to try to install a socialist government in Afghanistan. The aim of the Soviet Union was to put a friendly government on their border. Babrak Karmal became president on December 27th of 1979, before which Amin was killed. Many scholars have argued that the cause of the Soviet invasion was the U.S. backing rebel forces—called the Mujahideen—though this is disputed. This claim was backed up by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the secretary of state under Carter, who warned Carter that U.S. backing of the Mujahideen would induce a Soviet invasion. U.S. meddling prior to the Soviet invasion has been confirmed by “CIA and State Department documents.” Now, one might think that one would be appalled by admitting to causing a Soviet invasion that may constitute a genocide, but not Brzezinski. As he said, the “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?"

This has lead to terrorism all around the region—the terrorists we trained in Afghanistan did not stay in Afghanistan. Powelson notes

The model for state-sponsored terrorism is the U.S. role in arming, training, and supporting the Mujihadeen "freedom fighters" of Afghanistan in the 1980s. From this guerrilla movement, initially intended to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, arose terrorist groups in nations such as Indonesia, the Philippians, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Chechnya, and the former Yugoslavia. Later, some of the Afghan-trained "freedom fighters" were involved in terrorist acts against the United States, the very government that had given them support in the early days of their organization. The initial bombing of the World Trade Center in 1992, the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the attack on the USS Cole, and the attacks of 11 September all Nave been linked to individuals and groups that at one time were armed and trained by the United States and/or its allies.

U.S. actions to launch operation cyclone ended up resulting in a scaling up of the cold war, causing enormous numbers of deaths—it plausibly killed over a million people. Of course, a million corpses seem to weigh very little on the conscience of U.S. planners, who call an action that caused the vicious slaughter of millions of people an “excellent idea.”

In 1987, Najibullah took over. After the Soviets left, the formerly U.S. backed forces overthrew the government, killed Najibullah, and launched a horrifying and bloody civil war that ripped apart Afghanistan. Human rights watch describes it as a

scene of almost constant armed conflict among hostile Afghan military factions-rival mujahedin forces and defecting army forces who swept into the city after the Soviet-backed government collapsed. During this period, the various factions battled over Kabul and committed countless atrocities against the Afghan civilian population. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed and injured amidst the fighting. Many if not most of these civilian casualties were the result of direct or indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population and other serious violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of war). Militias abducted thousands of civilians during this period; most were never seen again. Much of the city was looted and destroyed. Most of the destruction that scars Kabul even today took place during this period and in the years immediately following-before the Taliban marched on Kabul.

Their thorough report “documents numerous serious human rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that occurred from April 1992-the collapse of the government of President Najibullah.” They note that this horrifying and bloody period ushered in the Taliban

Many if not most Afghans hated the cruelty and viciousness of Taliban rule. But Afghans also remember the period before their rule, when many of Afghanistan's current military and political leadership were in Kabul, serving as factional commanders or officials in the erstwhile government. They remember how the factions looted and fought bloody street battles throughout Kabul, typically with total disregard to their effect on the civilian population. And they also remember the Soviet period, with its terrible crimes.

As Chomsky notes

The U.S., along with Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, Saudi Arabian funding--Israel was involved--assembled a major army, a huge mercenary army, maybe 100,000 or more, and they drew from the most militant sectors they could find, which happened to be radical Islamists--what are called here "Islamic fundamentalists"--from all over, most of them not from Afghanistan. They're called "Afghanis," but like bin Laden, they come from elsewhere.

Bin Laden joined very quickly. He was involved in the funding networks, which probably are the ones which still exist. They were trained, armed, organized by the CIA, Pakistan, Egypt, and others to fight a holy war against the Russians. And they did. They fought a holy war against the Russians. They carried terror into Russian territory. They may have delayed the Russian withdrawal, a number of analysts believe, but they did win the war and the Russian invaders withdrew.

The war was not their only activity. In 1981, groups based in that same network assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who had been instrumental in setting it up. In 1983, one suicide bomber, maybe with connections to the same networks, essentially drove the U.S. military out of Lebanon. And it continued.

By 1989, they had succeeded in their holy war in Afghanistan. As soon as the U.S. established a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia [in 1990], bin Laden and the rest announced that from their point of view, that was comparable to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and they turned their guns on the Americans, as had already happened in 1983 when the U.S. had military forces in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is a major enemy of the bin Laden network, just as Egypt is. That's what they want to overthrow, what they call the un-Islamic governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other states of the Middle East and North Africa. And it continued.

In 1997, they murdered roughly 60 tourists in Egypt and destroyed the Egyptian tourist industry. And they've been carrying out activities all over the region, North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, for years. That's one group. And that is an outgrowth of the U.S. wars of the 1980s and, if you can believe Brzezinski, even before, when they set the Afghan trap. There's a lot more to say about them, but that's one part.

The U.S. funded horrifying people in Afghanistan who totally ruined the country, allowing really vicious warlords to take over. This is a long pattern of cold war actions, we’re totally willing to ruin entire countries of unpeople just to get at the Soviet Union. Just to give you a sense of what Afghanistan was like, here’s an earlier report

When we asked 4,151 respondents as part of the survey whether they had been personally affected by violations during the conflict, 69 percent identified themselves or their immediate families as direct victims of a serious human rights violation during the 23-year period. Out of over 2,000 focus group participants, over 500 referred to killings among their relatives. Almost 400 had experienced torture or detention either themselves or in their immediate family.

We backed savage fighters who ruined Afghanistan, enabling the Taliban to take over, being more popular than the warring hellishness that existed previously. Davies notes the really horrifying effects of this.

Afghanistan now ranks 175th out of 177countries in the world for corruption, 175th out of 186 in human development, and since 2004, it has produced an unprecedented 5,300 tons of opium per year.  President Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was well known as a CIA-backed drug lord.

We did much of this ostensibly because of the domino theory. We thought that if one country became sympathetic to the Soviets, so too would the world. Of course, when the U.S. conducts a savage war against a country, that makes them more likely to go into Soviet hands, but nevermind that inconvenient fact—as long as we had an excuse for turning a country to shit, we decided to take it.

But the Domino theory is false. In an important piece of scholarship, Slater provides decisive evidence against the domino theory. We can actually test it by looking at whether, when one state became communist, others fell.

The communist victory in South Vietnam in 1975 has provided an historical test of the validity of the domino theory. It was not the first such test. If the domino theory realistically portrayed the dynamics of international politics, then surely the 1949 communist victory in China - the largest domino of all - should have led to victorious communist revolutions elsewhere in Asia. However, no new regional revolutions broke out in the years following the "fall" of China and the already-existing revolutions in Burma, the Philippines, Malaya, and Indonesia were all defeated - the Vietminh revolution in Vietnam was the only one that eventually succeeded." Similar tests of the domino theory had occurred elsewhere. In 1959 Cuba "fell," but despite Castro's efforts to export revolution, there was no subsequent spread of communism in Latin America. To be sure, in both Asia following the fall of the Chinese domino and in Latin America following the fall of the Cuban domino the subsequent failure of other dominoes to fall had something to do with u.s. actions and policies. In the 1950s the United States provided economic and military assistance to the Philippines and Indonesia (and Britain did the same in Malaya), and in the 1960s there were extensive American efforts, including covert and para-military interventions, designed to ensure that Castroism would not spread in Latin America. The key point, however, is that the very success of those actions, combined with indigenous anticommunist efforts in countries threatened by revolution, constitutes a decisive refutation ofthe domino theory. Evidently the fall of dominoes is not inevitable, for there are a range of policy options open to the United States and other countries, even after the first domino has fallen

An empirical investigation of whether Democratic dominoes fall—that is, whether when countries turn Democratic their neighbors follow—concluded “even if foreign military intervention aimed at promoting democracy in undemocratic countries succeeds in democratizing these nations, intervention is likely to have only a small effect on democracy in their broader regions.” Girling, in a concise statement of why the domino theory is wrong, asks “If the domino theory is corect, why did the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948 not result in the collapse of Western Europe? And why was Castro's revolution in Cuba not followed by a wave of successful revolts throughout Latin America?”

So we totally ruined Afghanistan—as well as lots of other countries—based on a totally false theory. As seems to be relatively typical of U.S. meddling. We turned Afghanistan into a horrible place to live, which enabled the Taliban to take over. Then, we invaded. This is the story of Afghanistan, like so many other countries: a country turned into a living hell by horrific U.S. meddling.