At the same time that Washington is working to involve the Russians in the new war in Afghanistan, an interview with a former top US official has ripped the veil off CIA covert operations in 1979 that helped lure the Soviets into a bloody defeat in the mountainous Muslim state.
The official story Americans are told by the US media and government is that the Soviet Union launched an unprovoked and outrageous attack on Afghanistan in 1979, flooding the impoverished country with troops to prop up a puppet government.
Newscaster Jim Lehrer adopted a theatrical tone in 1983 as he described the events, saying Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet vice president “took over the government with the help of some 80,000 Soviet troops and their weaponry.”
“On a snowy night in January, 1980, an unhappy [President Jimmy Carter] took the first of several futile steps” in response, including cutting grain exports to the Soviets and announcing a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, Lehrer said.
But the US moves paraded by the The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour hardly began to inform Americans of the real state of affairs. Carter, famed for repeatedly telling Americans “I’ll never lie to you,” had earlier authorized covert operations that he had been informed would probably draw the Soviets into a war.
This fact was confirmed by the former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, who stated in his memoirs that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention.
In a recently translated interview with Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brezinski, the former top official revealed that “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 December 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,” Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observateur, in an interview published in French in 1998.
According to Middleast.org, which recently circulated excerpts of the newly translated interview, the conversation with the reporter never made it into the Le Nouvel Observateur edition sent to the US.
And so the war began, with such ferocity that by 1985, MacNeil/Lehrer guest Brzezinski was telling the US public that “Soviet policy in Afghanistan right now is the contemporary case of genocide. It's very brutal.”
On the same episode, Lehrer told viewers: “The Muslim Mujahadeen guerrillas are backed by a reported $250 million in covert US aid and double that from China and Saudi Arabia. Now they have more and better weapons to assault Soviet bases and convoys…A United Nations human rights report estimated more than a half-million Afghan civilians have died in the fighting.”
By that point, an estimated 8-15,000 Russian soldiers had also met their death in the craggy maze of Afghan terrain, prompting outrage at home and effectively draining the Soviet economy. The US had indeed helped achieve a crushing defeat for the Soviets – at a cost, not just in dollars, but in tens of thousands of lives.
With this kind of history to look back on, many Russians have expressed some doubts about the wisdom of President Vladimir Putin’s recent declarations of support for the US war in Afghanistan.
According to a report on Russianobserver.com this week, the consensus in the Russian press is that supporting the US military “operation” against the Taliban regime opens Russia up to a “whole host of risks, with the benefits of cooperation still elusive.”
The Russian armed forces are already openly supplying Afghanistan’s opposition Northern Alliance, according to news agencies, with a view to keeping the militant Taliban preoccupied and unable to link up with rebellious Muslims in other parts of the former Soviet empire.
Analysts fear that by widening such actions, Russia could further provoke its own restive Muslim neighbors, or spur a huge wave of refugees that would destabilize the already shaky former Soviet satellite states along its sensitive southern border.
As the Russians examine what could be the latest US invitation to war, they can at least mull the irony of their former foe’s troubles in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on American landmarks.
“Now we have come to see that the stability of the US dominance was as seeming and transient as the stability of the Soviet stagnation period,” one political scientist wrote in Russianobserver.com this week, adding that the Soviet Union once also appeared “as a very firm and indestructible fortress.”
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
