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Zbigniew Brzezinski, neocon? Or maybe better, a neo-lib. Was provocation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan worth the cost of the US's current security troubles with Al Qaeda, a vastly expanded Wahhai and Islamist radicalism and militantism across the world?
That was the apparent (pre-9/11) view of Carter-era national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski back in 1998, when he admitted in a widely publicized interview with France's Le Nouvel Observateur that he and CIA director Bill Casey had cooked up the idea of trying to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by providing covert aid via the Pakistani intelligence services to the mujahideen. "What is most important to the history of the world?," Brzezinski reportedly told the paper, in its January 15-21, 1998 issue. "The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
The stir over the revelations in the Brzezinski interview are not new. Pankaj Mishra for one revived discussion of them after September 11 in his fascinating November 15, 2001 article in the New York Review of Books, "The Making of Afghanistan." [Of which a friend of War & Piece recently reminded me].
But it strikes me as particularly relevant in light of the current preoccupation among many of us Perle-watchers who fret endlessly about the excesses, audacity, and wrecklessness of the neocons. In particular, the radical means endorsed by the neocons in their quest to achieve their radical foreign policy vision -- the projection of US military power into the Muslim world as a first step in order to preserve and even expand American predominance in the world, and make the world more in the US's image.
The policy Brzezinski was advocating was perhaps less controversial -- many would still -- even after September 11th -- agree that bolstering the Mujahadeen in the larger struggle to weaken the Soviet Union was valid. But the potential consequences of such a policy were not only underappreciated at the time - but even up to only three years before September 11th, when Brzezinski gave the interview.
Even if one agrees with Brzezinski's 1998 pronouncement - that getting rid of communism was worth stirring up some Muslims, as he crudely put it, it should still give those of us involved with skewering the neocons some pause. Brzezinski's policy clearly utterly and totally failed to anticipate how massive blow back from this policy - in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the massive export of Saudi Wahabism around the globe would combine to become perhaps the largest threat to US national security in the current era.
This recounting of Brzezinski's role from Pankaj Mishra's rivetting November 2001 New York Review of Books article on Afghanistan is worth re-reading:
...3.
By the late Seventies, proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union were already being fought in Angola, Somalia, and Ethiopia. That is why the revelation made three years ago—by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter—that small-scale American aid to the Afghan Islamists based in Pakistan had begun some months before the Soviet army arrived in Afghanistan is not surprising. In July 1979, President Carter signed the first of the directives for the clandestine aid that Brzezinski later said had the effect of drawing the Russians into "the Afghan trap." "We didn't push the Russians to intervene," Brzezinski said, "but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." This secret operation explains his exultant tone in the letter he claims to have sent to President Carter on December 27, 1979, the day the Soviet army entered Afghanistan. "Now," he said, "we can give the USSR its Vietnam War."[5]
Brzezinski's enthusiasm was shared by William Casey, a veteran of the OSS and the director of the CIA under President Reagan. In the mid-1980s, Casey committed CIA funds to the even grander plan of organizing the Muslims of the world into a global jihad against Soviet communism. By the mid-1980s, the CIA office in Islamabad, Pakistan, had become second in size only to the headquarters in Langley, Virginia; and American assistance to the Afghan Islamists, channeled through the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, was running into billions of dollars.[6]
The military dictator of Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq, was more than eager to place his country in the avant- garde of the jihad. Since April 1979, two years after his coup and after he had hanged his former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he had been urgently seeking both money and respectability from the United States. By promoting radical Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan he also hoped to suppress Bhutto's party, the Pakistan People's Party, and the intellectuals, journalists, and human rights activists agitating for the restoration of democracy. Somewhat similar local reasons prompted President Sadat of Egypt to offer cheap arms to the CIA for use in Afghanistan. The most generous support of the jihad among other pro-American governments came from the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, which was concerned about the growing influence of its traditional Shia rival, Iran, since its Islamic revolution.[7]
The Saudis saw the jihad in Afghanistan as a way of exporting Wahabism —an especially austere Saudi version of Sunni Islam, whose founders in the early nineteenth century attacked Mecca and Medina and purged them of the Sufi-style venerations which involved idolatry as well as dancing and music. They matched the American assistance to the Afghan Islamists dollar for dollar. Prince Turki, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency, worked closely with the CIA and the Pakistani ISI, and sent a rich Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden, to organize the thousands of poor Arabs from the Middle East and North Africa who, attracted by promises of food and money, had traveled to Pakistan to enlist in the CIA-backed jihad against communism.[8]
Thus many separate ambitions and strategies powered the Afghan struggle against communism. The diverse agenda of its sponsors and prime agents meant that little attention was paid to organizing the highly fractious Afghans into a cohesive resistance movement that in time could replace the unpopular and discredited Communist government in Kabul—which by Najibullah's own admission had lost control over 80 percent of the Afghan countryside.
One of the few things that united the five million Afghans in Pakistan and Iran and millions more in Afghanistan itself was their resentment of the Afghan Communists and their Russian backers. Seven Afghan resistance "parties" came forward to receive the millions of dollars' worth of arms and humanitarian aid that started flowing into Pakistan in the early 1980s. The parties represented the ethnic, linguistic, and tribal divisions within the Afghans; but many of their members had little or no connection with the Mujahideen commanders and soldiers in Afghanistan who were fighting a sporadically intense guerrilla war against the Soviets.
The CIA avoided direct contact with the Afghans in order to maintain the fiction of American noninvolvement; it used Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) for the important logistical tasks: the distribution of aid, the military coordination between Mujahideen outfits. But the officers of the ISI had their own favorites; they wanted to promote the pro-Pakistan men within Afghanistan's majority ethnic community, the Pashtuns. As a result, one of the most effective fighters who was neither led by the CIA nor coordinated by the ISI, the brilliant Tajik Mujahideen commander in northern Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Masoud, received hardly any assistance. Masoud fought the Taliban for six years, until he was assassinated last month, two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, by two suicide bombers posing as Arab journalists, who were in all likelihood sent by Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The largest beneficiary of foreign aid was the Pashtun Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who amassed a huge ar-senal in southern Afghanistan and most of the time avoided the battlefield.
Then there were the obvious instances of corruption produced by a prolonged war effort, bankrolled covertly with unaudited money, and controlled through several intermediaries: the proof of unrestrained plunder is all there in the mansions of ISI officers and Afghan resistance leaders you see in Pakistan. A large number of sophisticated weapons ended up in an arms bazaar near Peshawar or traveled elsewhere in Pakistan, stoking the various ethnic and sectarian conflicts that ravaged the country in the late 1980s and 1990s. Mujahideen leaders like Hekmatyar, indulged by the ISI, branched off into opium cultivation—for years a small-scale business in Afghanistan— and smuggling, and began a turf war against other Afghans.[9]
5. All quotes are from an interview Brzezinski gave to Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15–21, 1998, p. 76. When asked in the same interview if he regretted "having supported Islamic fundamentalism [intégrisme]" and given "arms and advice to future terrorists," Brzezinski said: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" That some stirred-up Muslims were a minor price to pay for the collapse of the Soviet empire cannot but seem now an especially cynical and wrongheaded bit of Realpolitik.
[6] Casey's and the CIA's dabblings in Afghanistan have been described in Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–87 (Simon and Schuster, 1987). Lawrence of Arabia met James Bond in many of the fantasies that bloomed in this expensive but relatively underreported battle of the cold war. Casey wanted the ISI to involve the Muslims of the Soviet Union in the jihad; and he wasn't satisfied with the ISI-arranged smuggling of thousands of Korans into what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, or with the distribution of heroin among Soviet troops. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, a senior officer of the ISI, got Afghan Mujahideen to mine and bomb military installations a few kilometers deep inside Soviet territory; but plans for more such attacks were hastily dropped after the Soviet Union threatened to invade Pakistan. The story is told by Yousaf and Major Mark Adkin in The Bear Trap (London: Leo Cooper, 1992).
[7] Zia did make himself unassailable through his partnership with the CIA. Many of his political opponents stayed in prison, and while promising elections and democratic rule all the time, he remained the dictator of Pakistan until his death in a plane crash in 1988. The present military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, was offered a similar partnership by the US government, which expects Pakistan to be a "front-line state" again, this time in a war against terrorism. But Zia's encouragement of the jihad in Afghanistan produced hundreds of thousands of radical Islamists who make Pakistan an unstable country; and Musharraf, who seems to realize well that cooperation with the US could endanger rather than consolidate his hold on power, has responded cautiously so far, agreeing to cooperate in intelligence and other ways, but resisting the presence of US troops there. Unlike Musharraf, the Communist-era despots of the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan ruthlessly persecute their relatively few radical Islamists, and have been quick to ally themselves with the United States.
[8] These and other details about Osama bin Laden are to be found in Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University Press/Nota Bene, 2000).
[9] In fact, Hekmatyar, who inaugurated his career as a radical Islamist by assassinating a left-wing student at Kabul University in the late 1960s, is held responsible for the murder of many rival Mujahideen as well as some of the liberal-minded Afghan intellectuals who had fled Kabul for Pakistan after the Communist coup in 1978. Hekmatyar's rocket attacks on Kabul during the civil war in 1994 killed more civilians in the capital city than had died in ten years of anti-Communist jihad.
--Pankaj Mishra, "The Making of Afghanistan," New York Review of Books, Vol. 48, Number 18, November 15, 2001.
Update: Weird -- seems for a variety of reasons several people have the US policy vis a vis Soviet-era Afghanistan on the mind. This afternoon, a few hours after posting this Mishra article, I was browsing the blogs and was directed by Josh Marshall's site to Calpundit's review of Charlie Wilson's War. The book is about the covert US effort to arm and train the mujahadin in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets. Calpundit shares some utterly gruesome anecdotes from the book that reveal how truly deluded Richard Perle -- and Ollie North -- were. The holding onto their delusions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is what is so consistent about Perle and his circle. Check it out here. Must read.