The Post After The Last One

(Part deux in a series. There will be no part three. Stop the applause.)

There were a number of factors leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Many people believe the Red Knight was dying before its ill-fated decision to fulfill its own version of manifest destiny by taking control of its neighbors, in this case Afghanistan. Even by Charlie Wilson’s own calculation, the CIA-led Mujahideen victory over the Soviets hastened its collapse by 5-10 years. By his reckoning, the accelerated fall freeing 100 million people of Eastern Europe and millions of persecuted religious and social subgroups was worth the billions of dollars and political capitol spent.

But what was the full cost of the victory? If one can’t learn the lessons of history, then apply this rule of physics: every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. All of us are feeling that reaction in our everyday lives.

Following the victory over the Soviets in 1988, the Muj didn’t have a victory parade down the main streets of Kabul. Instead the country descended into chaos while old sectarian scores were settled among warring tribes. No longer were they fighting with old British Enfield rifles captures during the British attempt to tame the tameless. Now the factions had the best weapons the CIA could send them and the result was the destruction of nearly all the country’s infrastructure, the killing of hundreds of thousands and eventually the rise of a theocratic leadership known as the Taliban.

The presumption at the CIA was once it cut off funding to the Mujahideen, the jihad would burn itself out. If the Afghani people decided to kill each other rather than rebuild a broken nation, that was a shame but not our problem. That policy may have worked if all we left behind were weapons. Instead we left them with the spirit of the Jihad and the belief that they had won a miracle victory over the Soviets through the power of prayer and not the CIA’s 10-year assistance that turned primitive tribesmen into techno-holy warriors

Just as today in Iraq, Afghanistan of the 1980s became a draw for Jihadists from all over the Middle East. The CIA suggested as many as 30,000 foreign fighters had entered Afghanistan to chase the Soviets back across the border. As the Mujahideen and foreign holy warriors came to see it, the victory over the Soviets had little to do with the billions in cash and weapons from the CIA and Saudi Arabia, but divine intervention from Allah.

It was this invincible feeling that led the Afghani freedom fighters to turn their aim on the U.S. The coupling of Muj and the West was something of a dysfunctional arranged marriage as it was, but there were a few events that put the U.S. in the Muslim crosshairs. In 1993, the world came to know the poorest kept strategic secret of the decade: Pakistan had a nuclear weapon. Pakistan had long sought a nuke to counterbalance the weapons pointed at them by India. In fact it was India’s cozy relationship with the Soviets that prompted the Pakistanis to play middleman to the CIA and be the supply route for weapons, money and supplies for the Muj. But after the secret was out in the open, the Clinton administration cut off all foreign aid and sought sanctions. The rebuff was seen as a betrayal by the freedom fighters and more evidence to them that they were only pawns in a larger battle for control of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves. This thought was further pounded home when the U.S. decided to leave a large military contingent, including women, in Saudi Arabia following the 1991 Gulf War.

The leaders of the Afghanistan resistance to the Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqani and Ahmad Massoud, were happy to take weapons from the CIA but they really didn’t like the U.S. government or the American people. Following the 9/11 attacks, Haqani – a man once described by Charlie Wilson as “goodness personified” – would emerge as the number three target of American forces in Afghanistan and Hekmatyar became a high-ranking leader of the Taliban. The mystic of both men was raised in their eyes and the eyes of the Jihad when they survived several missile attacks as Osama bin Laden later did. Massoud didn’t have much use for the Taliban and continued to fight them from the north. For this, he was seen by rivals as a tool of America and was killed when two men posing as cameramen had more bomb than film in their cameras. The assassination took place on September 10, 2001.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam don’t fit as nicely into a neat little package as the two posts imply. However, it does paint a different picture than most people have of the factors involved in each world-altering event. It makes sense that the key architects of the Afghan battle would like to keep the details from coming to light. For Wilson and his fellow democrats, it demonstrates a 10-year history of a hypocritical foreign policy of acting like doves but sanctioning mass killings like hawks. The Islamic Jihadists would prefer to be viewed as holy warriors protected by Allah and the specter of Mohamed rather than opportunists who took our weapons, training and money and turned it all against us.

From where we stand, it’s difficult to know if we would have been better off dealing with the Soviets and the enemy we knew rather than the ghosts we are dealing with now. Future historians will tell the full story, but for now it appears that our country decided to sleep with the lions and we therefore shouldn’t be surprised that it was a dangerous and regrettable act.