The CIA on "Did the CIA create Bin Laden?"
Committed conspiracy addicts will not be disabused of their convictions by Peter's arguments, nor by mine, nor by Steve Coll's.
For the rest of you, however, I would like to share the US Government's quite thoughtful and careful refutation of the charge that "The CIA Created Bin Laden"
The USG's case boils down to this:
* U.S. covert aid went to the Afghans, not to the "Afghan Arabs."
Below is what State and CIA have said on the record about this. As a veteran of the Afghan war era I take their case seriously and I encourage others (conspiracists aside) to consider it carefully.
"The United States did not "create" Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda. The United States supported the Afghans fighting for their country's freedom -- as did other countries, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, Egypt, and the UK -- but the United States did not support the "Afghan Arabs," the Arabs and other Muslims who came to fight in Afghanistan for broader goals. CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen notes that the "Afghan Arabs functioned independently and had their own sources of funding." He notes:
"While the charges that the CIA was responsible for the rise of the Afghan Arabs might make good copy, they don't make good history. The truth is more complicated, tinged with varying shades of gray. The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to favor the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA.
Former CIA official Milt Bearden, who ran the Agency's Afghan operation in the late 1980s, says, "The CIA did not recruit Arabs," as there was no need to do so. There were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight, and the Arabs who did come for jihad were "very disruptive . . . the Afghans thought they were a pain in the ass." Similar sentiments from Afghans who appreciated the money that flowed from the Gulf but did not appreciate the Arabs' holier-than-thou attempts to convert them to their ultra-purist version of Islam. Freelance cameraman Peter Jouvenal recalls: "There was no love lost between the Afghans and the Arabs. One Afghan told me, `Whenever we had a problem with one of them we just shot them. They thought they were kings.'"
... There was simply no point in the CIA and the Afghan Arabs being in contact with each other. ... the Afghan Arabs functioned independently and had their own sources of funding. The CIA did not need the Afghan Arabs, and the Afghan Arabs did not need the CIA. So the notion that the Agency funded and trained the Afghan Arabs is, at best, misleading. The 'let's blame everything bad that happens on the CIA' school of thought vastly overestimates the Agency's powers, both for good and ill." [Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: The Free Press, 2001), pp. 64-66.]
Al Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, confirmed that the "Afghan Arabs" did not receive any U.S. funding during the war in Afghanistan. In the book that was described as his last will, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, which was serialized in December 2001 in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Zawahiri says the Afghan Arabs were funded with money from Arab sources, which amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars:
"While the United States backed Pakistan and the mujahidin factions with money and equipment, the young Arab mujahidin's relationship with the United States was totally different."
"... The financing of the activities of the Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan came from aid sent to Afghanistan by popular organizations. It was substantial aid."
"The Arab mujahidin did not confine themselves to financing their own jihad but also carried Muslim donations to the Afghan mujahidin themselves. Usama Bin Ladin has apprised me of the size of the popular Arab support for the Afghan mujahidin that amounted, according to his sources, to $200 million in the form of military aid alone in 10 years. Imagine how much aid was sent by popular Arab organizations in the non-military fields such as medicine and health, education and vocational training, food, and social assistance ...."
"Through the unofficial popular support, the Arab mujahidin established training centers and centers for the call to the faith. They formed fronts that trained and equipped thousands of Arab mujahidin and provided them with living expenses, housing, travel and organization." (Al-Sharq al-Awsat, December 3, 2001, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), GMP20011202000401)
Abdullah Anas, an Algerian who was one of the foremost Afghan Arab organizers and the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam, has also confirmed that the CIA had no relationship with the Afghan Arabs. Speaking on the French television program Zone Interdit on September 12, 2004, Anas stated:
"If you say there was a relationship in the sense that the CIA used to meet with Arabs, discuss with them, prepare plans with them, and to fight with them -- it never happened."
Milt Bearden served as the CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, where he was in charge of running the covert action program for Afghanistan. In his memoirs titled "The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB," Bearden says the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, Egypt, and the UK were "major players" in the effort to aid the Afghans. Bearden writes:
"[President Jimmy] Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had in 1980 secured an agreement from the Saudi king to match American contributions to the Afghan effort dollar for dollar, and [Reagan administration CIA director] Bill Casey kept that agreement going over the years." (The Main Enemy, p. 219)
From 1983 to 1987, Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf was in charge of the Afghan Bureau of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which ran Pakistan's covert program to aid the Afghan mujahidin. In his book The Bear Trap: Afghanistan's Untold Story, Brigadier Yousaf confirms the matching U.S.-Saudi arrangement, stating:
"For every dollar supplied by the US, another was added by the Saudi Arabian government. The combined funds, running into several hundred million dollars a year, were transferred by the CIA to special accounts in Pakistan under the control of the ISI." (The Bear Trap, p. 81)
Bearden makes it clear that the CIA covert action program did not fund any Arabs or other Muslims to come to the jihad:
"Contrary to what people have come to imagine, the CIA never recruited, trained, or otherwise used Arab volunteers. The Afghans were more than happy to do their own fighting -- we saw no reason not to satisfy them on this point." (The Main Enemy, p. 243)
Marc Sageman worked closely with the Afghan mujahideen as one of Milt Bearden's case officers, from 1987 to 1989. In his book, Understanding Terror Networks, he writes:
"No U.S. official ever came in contact with the foreign volunteers. They simply traveled in different circles and never crossed U.S. radar screens. They had their own sources of money and their own contacts with the Pakistanis, official Saudis, and other Muslim supporters, and they made their own deals with the various Afghan resistance leaders. Their presence in Afghanistan was very small and they did not participate in any significant fighting." (Understanding Terror Networks, pp. 57-58.)
The Central Intelligence Agency has issued a statement categorically denying that it ever had any relationship with Osama bin Laden. It stated, in response to the hypothetical question "Has the CIA ever provided funding, training, or other support to Usama Bin Laden?":
"No. Numerous comments in the media recently have reiterated a widely circulated but incorrect notion that the CIA once had a relationship with Usama Bin Laden. For the record, you should know that the CIA never employed, paid, or maintained any relationship whatsoever with Bin Laden (emphasis in original)."
While I don't think the question is at all interesting, I must say quoting the CIA (thy name is disinformation) or al-Zawahiri (do business with the great Sa-TAN? My goodness, never) or Abdullah Azzam's son-in-law (who did assassinate Azzam, anyway?) hardly proves much of anything.
January 21, 2006 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: No, Numerous comments in the media recently have reiterated a widely circulated but incorrect notion that the CIA once had a relationship with Usama Bin Laden. For the record, you should know that the CIA never employed, paid or maintained any relationship whatsoever with Bin Laden (emphasis in original).---------------
Well I haven't been exposed to all the theories, some of which are characterized as conspiracies.
Which denotation/connotation of the term 'conspiracy' you mean to emphasize here?
I wonder whether we can really define and use the term 'conspiracy' accurately or appropriately to characterize constructions of events, given the breadth/depth of our current understanding of the cognitive/visual/categorization processes used to arrive to perceptions and to construct concepts/facts/images/actions.
More broadly, if we resort to allegations based on incomplete information (about an individuals/groups, institutions, or events) then I don't see how any one of us can escape the characterization, in some degree. And I think many people are unlikely to voice their real opinions or knowledge.
Basically I am not as interested in an answer to this question as I am in methods used to arrive at information and analyse these events and individuals.
January 21, 2006 10:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Are you suggesting that, absent US covert action in Afghanistan, Bin Laden and the international jihad movement that he symbolizes would have emerged anyway?
From everything that I have read in Coll's and other histories of the CIA war in Afghanistan, the CIA was careful to do everything through intermediaries, avoiding direct contact with militants as much as possible. Would this argument be an example of the plausable deniability that such a "hands off" approach was designed to create?
The US's intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s subjected the country to a brutal war that killed over a million people, created one of the largest displaced populations in the world, turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear program, led to the AQ Kahn nuclear black market that supplied Iran, Lybia and god knows who else with nuclear technology, and led to 9/11. If I were involved with it I would be heavily in denial as well.
January 21, 2006 11:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why is the CIA a more trustworthy branch of the government than the Presidency?
January 21, 2006 11:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear program-----------It is the only country that has been held to task because the explanation toward proliferation mechanisms has been so politicized and may disregard the role of a broader culture of technology sharing among scientists-one that brought together scientists from all over the world to collaborate on scientific projects I base this hypthosis on a RAND monograph about the years between 1950-1965 or so: I can't recall the author or name, at this moment.
Now 9-11 raises a whole host of separate questions, the complexity of which is daunting. I don't think we should be so ready to resort to fallacies of the complex question so easily.
January 21, 2006 11:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Alabasterjones writes: "The US's intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s subjected the country to a brutal war that killed over a million people, created one of the largest displaced populations in the world..."
Let me remind Mr Alabasterjones of the facts that define the historical context.
On the 27th of December, 1979 a battalion of Soviet troops, including 54 KGB spetznaz special operations troops dressed in Afghan uniforms occupied major governmental, military and media buildings in Kabul, including their primary target, the Presidential Palace, where they deposed President Amin. Simultaneously, the Soviet spetznaz blew up Kabul's communications hub, paralyzing the Afghanistan military command.
A few hours later the Soviet Army began crossing the border into Afghanistan in force with two full divisions. The Soviet invasion, which sparked a national Afghan resistance, initially involved an estimated 30,000 Russian troops, a force that ultimately grew to 100,000.
The Soviet-managed coup was fully complete by the following morning. On the 28th of December the Soviet military command in Afghanistan announced over radio Kabul that Afghanistan had been "liberated".
The Afghan war of resistance to the Russians lasted almost a decade until, in February of 1988, Soviet President Gorbachev announced the beginning of the withdrawal of his defeated Russian Army..... a process of gradual retreat which was completed one year later.
More than 1 million Afghans died in the war against the Soviet occupiers and 5 million became refugees in neighboring countries.
The Afghan resistance fighters, however, made the Russians pay a serious price for their invasion, killing 15,000 Soviet soldiers and wounding another 37,000.
Only a fool or a knave, Mr. Alabaster Jones, could write that "The US's intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s subjected the country to a brutal war that killed over a million people". Which are you?
John Stuart Blackton
January 21, 2006 11:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you. You beat me to it!
January 21, 2006 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
That the CIA never funded the Arab fighters directly is of little consequence for quite plainly Osama Bin Laden and the burgeooning jihad movement had its origins in the Afghan conflict, grew as a result of it, and afterwards came to be nutured and to thrive in that environment.
Why didn't you cite Michael Shuerer?
An audit of CIA/US funds proves next to nothing. Bin Laden was an unintended consequence of CIA/US policy. The Afghan jihad factory - your tax dollars at work.
January 21, 2006 12:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
The question is phrased so broadly that I suspect it appeals only to the extremes on both sides of the political divide in the first place. The history of CIA relations with Bin Laden aside, did the CIA create Bin Laden? Only if we deny human beings any degree of self determination outside of American geopolitical machinations.
Surely there are more productive questions to be asked. For example: in hindsight, are there any lessons we should take from the history of our interactions with Bin Laden?January 21, 2006 12:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
JMACSF asked "Why didn't you cite Michael Shuerer?" (actually his name is "Scheuer")
Mike was a young recruit in the DO learning tradecraft at the Farm when the action was hot and heavy in Afghanistan.
He worked the Bin Laden account very actively in the post 9/11 era, but Mike has absolutely no first-hand knowledge of the active phase of the Afghan War.
I was posted in Afghanistan in the 70's, worked the cross-border program from the Pakistan side thereafter, and currently regularly go to Afghanistan on consulting assignments in the post-2001 phase.
I have a reasonable grasp (solid, but not encyclopedic) of what happened and what did not happen in the theater.
Peter has worked the region for years. So has Steve Coll. Unlike me, they have no partisan axe that they might be grinding.
One can always find someone who takes a contrarian perspective on any issue.
Steve and Peter could surely sell more books if they could make a tight, documented case that the CIA actually did create Bin Laden.
Both are true to their craft, however, and after years of research both have concluded that there is not a shred of evidence that the CIA and OBL worked together in any witting way.
OBL was a devout Muslim and radical Islamist who wouldn't have wanted to hang out with us, and the CIA wasn't looking to work with guys of his sort.
It is quite true that both the CIA and OBL gained some real advantage from the activites of the other, but mutual benefit is scarcely the same thing as witting collaboration.
John Stuart Blackton
January 21, 2006 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
nascardaughter asks "are there any lessons we should take from the history of our interactions with Bin Laden?"
We really haven't had any "interactions" at the one-to-one level.
If you consider 9/11 to be an
"interaction" with Bin Laden, then, yes, indeed, there are certainly lessons to be learned.
Quite a few people are working on those lessons - both inside of government and outside of government.
I rather imagine that the process will continue for quite a while.
John Stuart Blackton
January 21, 2006 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Prof. Blackton,
in addition to your response to your response above it might be helpful for people to have this BBC roundup of the 1978 events. But after that I have some big picture questions of my own.
My big picture question:
Hindsight 20/20: was it worth it? Or did we just jiggle the world some more, making it go in slightly different directions? Can one really say that draining the Soviets in Afghanistan lead to their downfall? How so? If they hadn't done it there, might not have Chechnya turned out different? Etc. etc.
Isn't meddling like this trying to predict the future and ending up with the same odds that most gamblers have?
Doesn't ideological
I realize what the appearance at the time was, that the Soviet Union was trying to make the entire world communist, to support all communist regimes, and that if we didn't stop it, it would happen. Does that look realistic to you now? Don't you think that if "the people" didn't like the results of a communist regime, that they would chafe and chafe and eventually, eventually get out from under it some way?
What would have happened if Afghanistan had stayed communist for a while longer? I recall some very interesting testimonies on an anti-Taliban Afghan's women's site about how good women had it then, how the Islamists had to put up and shut up with women in government functionary jobs. That cultural change allowed to ensue until 1989 might have taken the whole world in another direction, don't you see?
Could it be that we start to have a god-like belief that intervening in some of these types of things will go our way when we get involved in "ideological war"? That we do things that aren't too realpolitik or practical when we've been carried away by ideological fights? What I am asking you about is the same thing I was getting at here on your other thread.
I just wonder if Jimmy Carter could have been a little less enthralled with cold war ideology, things may just have turned out better or equivalent. Of course, he had to compete against people like ol evil empire Reagan!
I recall hearing Carter interviewed a month or two ago on Larry King in which Afghanistan came up. Larry asked him if in hindsight he thought he shouldn't have called for a boycott of the Olympics over the invasion, that in hindsight, wouldn't it have been better to have them go and wear armbands or something like that. He said yes, in hindsight, maybe so. I sure did wish the conversation had gone a bit further into what we are talking about here, but it didn't....
How can you predict the future? Pre-emptive ops, ops to effect certain results in foreign countries, how many historians see them as having done what they intended to do? Isn't it just best to leave a lot of these things that involve civil war type splits to the people in their own countries? It seems like no one ends up liking the meddler, Soviets or Americans or Romans. Why not wait until they are screaming for help, like with WWII? I do realize what I am saying, and I do realize that my favorite president of my lifetime, Clinton, regrets mightily not having intervened in Rwanda. But one of the main things that I liked about him, what made me think him exceptionally qualified, was the draft dodger guilt....always, always, think twice, three, four times before putting a single big fat American boot on the ground.
BTW, I would like to state clearly that it's definitely not the C.I.A.'s fault in any case. I find those paranoid of and obssessed with CIA to usually be off on a nonsense trail. The only danger with the CIA is a director who gets like Hoover was with the F.B.I., when they wish power for themselves against the wishes of the executive or congress. For the most part, the CIA's job is to furnish intel and give it and then execute the orders of those that judge what to do with that intel. Someone asked why the CIA is trusted more than the president, well, that's why. Because the president is supposed to be smart enough to judge what they give him and to request competing and conflicting CIA opinions and analyses. If black ops are done that you don't like, if you focus on blaming the CIA, you aren't getting at the real problem!
January 21, 2006 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
To me, what this really comes down to is the Law of Unanticipated Consequences, which tends to bite badly when you (1) see the world in black and white, and (2) announce "Mission Accomplished!' and leave, without hanging around to what happens next.
All the black and white pieces are clear enough: the Soviets started it with their incursion. The Soviets were the bad guys, so therefore the insurgents who were fighting them were the good guys. We could claim the moral imperative to help the good guys with arms, and by encouraging our friends the Saudis to provide funding and volunteers, do it without facing off against the Soviets directly. And if the Soviets got bogged down in their own Vietnam, it could reduce their ability to take action elsewhere while encouraging dissent at home and possibly forcing major changes (even the fall of the Soviet Union). And by all of those standards, Afghanistan turned out just the way we wished.
But once it had, we completely lost interest. The American people certainly didn't have any taste for nation-building in a corner of the world that had no oil, or spending any of their tax dollars to help the Afghanis rebuild a destroyed country, establish some sort of responsible government, and find <i>something</i> other than opium that would feed their people and economy. If the Americans and the Saudis had been able to spark a cleanup (of land mines, etc) and rebuilding effort -- and particularly, been able to harness the energy and now-idle hands of the mujihadeen to take it on, the outcome might have been much different. But that's one of those fuzzy gray liberal approaches, that spends out money but doesn't give us good guys to cheer and bad guys to hate, and Americans don't generally see any self-interest in doing that.
So we walked out and left the Afghanis fighting among themselves with all those weapons we gave them. What wasn't destroyed before was knocked down in the next decade of war, and the only ones with any further interest in the country were the Pakistanis who supported the Taliban. And Bin Laden, of course, scooping up all those trained and now-idle Arab fighters into Al Qaeda. But without the Soviets to draw our attention to it, Afghanistan was just another remote place on the other side of the world.
Frankly, I think we're doing it again. Instead of sending enough troops to do the job (especially capturing or killing Bin Laden and the top Al Qaeda leadership at Tora Bora), and then following up with a real rebuilding of the country and its infrastructure so that it could be a successful state with something other than opium driving its economy, Bush spent everything on where he <i>really</i> wanted to go -- Iraq. You really have to search these days to find out what's happening in Afghanistan, but it isn't good, and holding up a purple finger doesn't mean that you've got a successful country.
Afghanistan will come back to bite us -- again -- because we always forget about the Law of Unanticipated Consequences.
January 21, 2006 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
These really are good questions. And like most really good questions they could probably be intelligently answered in several quite different ways. I'll offer a short answer to a few of them.
Q1 was it worth it?
A1 Definitely "yes' for the Afghans. Harder to say for us, but probably "yes".
Q2 Can one really say that draining the Soviets in Afghanistan lead to their downfall?
A2 I don't think so. Just as Bin Laden created Bin Laden, the structural weaknesses of the Soviet Union created Soviet failure. The Afghan defeat was a proximate contributing factor, but it would have happened anyway.
Q3What would have happened if Afghanistan had stayed communist for a while longer? I recall some very interesting testimonies on an anti-Taliban Afghan's women's site about how good women had it then.
A3 Only God knows what would have happened. The Afghans really hated the Russians. In fact, the progressive social agenda of the Russians (e.g. equal treatment of women)was more hated than communism. This was particularly true because foreign infidels were driving the social agenda. Most Afghans didn't have enough financial capital to see an ideological threat in the socialist part of the Soviet worldview. But to answer your question, probably the Afghans would have thrown the Russians out (in 15 years without our help vs 10 years with our help)
Q4 It seems like no one ends up liking the meddler, Soviets or Americans or Romans. Why not wait until they are screaming for help, like with WWII?
A4 They were screaming. But that isn't why we came. If the Azerbaijanis had invaded or the Omanis, we probably would have left them to suffer. The fact that it was the Russians was central to our commitment
John Stuart Blackton
January 21, 2006 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ducktape: "But once it had, we completely lost interest. The American people certainly didn't have any taste for nation-building in a corner of the world that had no oil, or spending any of their tax dollars to help the Afghanis rebuild a destroyed country, establish some sort of responsible government, and find something other than opium that would feed their people and economy."
JSB You are right we abandoned them when they needed us. Once the Russians were out of the picture, our commitment waned.
Ducktape:"Frankly, I think we're doing it again. Instead of sending enough troops to do the job (especially capturing or killing Bin Laden and the top Al Qaeda leadership at Tora Bora), and then following up with a real rebuilding of the country and its infrastructure so that it could be a successful state with something other than opium driving its economy, Bush spent everything on ...Iraq."
JSB: Are you familiar with Thomas Gresham's warning to Queen Elizabeth I that "that good and bad coin cannot circulate together"? Gresham's law that "bad money drives out good" often works in foreign affairs when two competing claims are made on a strong power. I think you are right that Iraq may well lead us to abandon Afghanistan (Again!!!).
John Stuart Blackton
January 21, 2006 1:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hmm. Maybe a better way to phrase it would be "are there any lessons we should take from the history of our relationship with Bin Laden (whether direct or indirect)"...?
If you feel inspired to write more, I (and I think others) would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this question (or some version of it).
January 21, 2006 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Witting v. witless collaboration. A handful of CIA operatives in country with the ISI as buffer and intermediary.
Interesting angle that. Witting collaboration at least would have created ossibiities of contact, penetration, leverage and appreciation of the unintended consequence.
Believe me I am no CIA conspiracy theorist. Though I imagine that the CIA enjoys the omnipotent rep, there've been too many Boris and Natasha moments.
January 21, 2006 1:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Only a fool or a knave, Mr. Alabaster Jones, could write that "The US's intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s subjected the country to a brutal war that killed over a million people". Which are you?
Probably a little bit of both. I was basing that on Zbigniew Brexinki's interview with Le Neveau Observateur, where he takes credit for provoking the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Do you agree with his version of events?
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.
January 21, 2006 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Zbig: "We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."
JSB: I generally quite like Zbig, but I think his Middle European ego clouds his recounting of this. He loves the idea that a brilliant Polish aristocrat trapped the Russians in a maneuver that led to their destruction and the ultimate freedom of Poland. There are a lot of these myths in and around Poland.
The Russians had carefully cultivated a Communist party in Afghanistan. From 1948 onwards the Russians and the Americans were in direct competition for influence in Kabul and throughout the land.
The Kabul gov't, in the manner of many cold war states, played us both against the middle.
But the Russians were better players of the Great Game. They had been at it for centuries, while we only began in 1948.
We had influence in the "soft" ministries.
The Russians had not only influence, but committed agents in the "hard" ministries.
When the time came to spring the coup, there were Spetznaz guys all over the place taking over key infrastructure and insuring that the impending invasion would go like clockwork. These lamplighters were the KGB owned special ops troops and they were the Soviet creme de la creme.
We didn't "set this up" a la Zbig's version.
Two decades of world class intelligence work, penetration, cell-building and planning went into the Soviet anschluss into Afghanistan.
When the Russians were firmly in place, we sent a Russian language speaking Ambassador to see if we could pick up a few of the pieces (this was on Zbig's watch).
Amb "Spike" Dubs was snatched by Russian KGB guys, taken to a Kabul hotel, tortured in front of senior Afghan intelligence and interior officials (to make sure they got the point) and then shot five times.
I wonder whether Zbig would say "oh that was all part of our little plan to trap the russians,after all you have to break eggs to make omelets"?
I don't think so.
Those of us who were in Kabul at the time were absolutely stunned that the Sovs would kidnap and execute our Ambassador on a nice sunny day in the Capital city.
The fact is that the Soviets won the first fifteen or twenty hands of this long game, but we and the Afs won the final pot.
John Stuart Blackton
January 21, 2006 2:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right, I really believe anything said by the CIA and the US government to cover their ass over the issues raised by "blowback."
This is drivel. This is the same crap about "creating" bin Laden. This is a red herring at best. The term "creating" is obviously no the issue, even if many people use the term.
The issue is CIA INITIATION of the Muslim jihadist movement against the secular Afghan administration in an attempt to destabilize the Afghan government because the US didn't like its leftist nature - and to lure the Russians into a "Vietnam" of their own - and the fact that the jihadists supported by the CIA subsequently turned their guns on the West for the exact same rsasons they turned them on Russia - interference in the Middle East's affairs.
Milt Bearden is quoted. This is the SAME guy who specifically states that while he never met bin Laden, he was WELL AWARE that bin Laden was out there raising $200 million a year to support the jihadists.
The rest of this is nothing more than CIA and neocon propaganda.
We now today have TWO large articles on this site: one of which defends the CIA from a red herring, the other recommends imposing unworkable embargoes on Iranian oil using all the standard neocon arguments.
I begin to wonder if this site is little more than a CIA front.
January 21, 2006 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nascardaughter asks about "any lessons we should learn" from all of this.
Last month, as a TPM reviewer of another book on this subject I opined at one point that perhaps we should pay some attention to Brent Scowcroft's case for living with the status quo in preference to stirring things up when we can't foresee all the consequences.
The post bombed with TPM readers. I think that some of that had to do with readers' distaste for Scowcroft and some of it had to do with my habit of including bits of French poetry in my postings (which nobody seems to like with the exception of our TPM host, Kate Cambor, who is a distinguished French Historian).
DÉFAIRE UN EMPEREUR QUE POUR EN FAIRE UN AUTRE ?
Jane Arraf writes: "None of that is lost on Iraqis and other Arabs and Moslems who have seen the United States prop up pro-American dictatorships while trying to topple anti-American ones."
And Bob Dreyfus writes: "During the Cold War, the United States saw itself as defending the status quo. It was terrified about nationalists, socialists -- in fact, about anyone who wanted change. The United States consistently took the side of the reactionary forces: the monarchies, the wealthy elites."
It is hard to fault either Bob or Jane when they illuminate the ways in which America's inclination to invest in the status quo has produced outcomes which we have come, in the fullness of time, to regret.
Yet, as a card-carrying realist, pragmatist, Arabist, and policy practitioner, let me offer a qualified defense for the other side of the argument.
A fellow realist, Brent Scowcroft, has often said that the status quo is not necessarily a good thing, but it might be better than what follows. "My kind of realism" says the good General "would look at what are the most likely consequences of pushing out a government. What will replace it?"
The status quo has recently gone out of fashion, as the realists in the American foreign policy establishment have been replaced with a special variant of idealists.
Now George Bush surprises us by saying:
"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe-because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."
The truth is that sometimes it is, indeed, reckless to accept the status quo (American acquiescence to the Anschluss was probably not wise) and sometimes it may be very wise to accept (even an unpleasant) status quo.
A key step in deciding which option is preferable is to ask the Scowcroft questions: "what are the most likely consequences of pushing out a government? What will replace it?"
To answer these simple questions intelligently one must be both wise and knowledgeable. On balance, as Bob Dreyfuss' book documents very nicely, America has, more often than not, been neither wise nor knowledgeable in framing its interventions in the Middle East.
My lead for this post is offered in deference to our very nice host at TPM café, Kate Cambor.
The irony of fighting wars to exchange one emperor for another (something with which the United States has much experience) comes from a very worldly19th century French poet writing just a little before the period of Kate's scholarly specialization, la fin de siècle.
Bêtise de la guerre
Ouvrière sans yeux, Pénélope imbécile,
Berceuse du chaos où le néant oscille,
Guerre, ô guerre occupée au choc des escadrons,
Toute pleine du bruit furieux des clairons,
Ô buveuse de sang, qui, farouche, flétrie,
Hideuse, entraîne l'homme en cette ivrognerie,
Nuée où le destin se déforme, où Dieu fuit,
Où flotte une clarté plus noire que la nuit,
Folle immense, de vent et de foudres armée,
A quoi sers-tu, géante, à quoi sers-tu, fumée,
Si tes écroulements reconstruisent le mal,
Si pour le bestial tu chasses l'animal,
Si tu ne sais, dans l'ombre où ton hasard se vautre,
Défaire un empereur que pour en faire un autre ? Victor Hugo
John Stuart Blackton
January 22, 2006 5:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: I begin to wonder if this site is little more than a CIA front.--------
You know I get duped easily as it is. However, I am equally stumped by the understanding that people seek out the opinions of, yet wish the worst, for the very individuals who, make possible their career paths. And so the lack of transparency manages to corrupt everyone in the process.
January 22, 2006 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your reply.
A key step in deciding which option is preferable is to ask the Scowcroft questions: "what are the most likely consequences of pushing out a government? What will replace it?"
To answer these simple questions intelligently one must be both wise and knowledgeable.
Amen. One would think even foreign policy ideologues could accept that ideology untempered by thoughtful and informed realism is dangerous...
January 22, 2006 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
While that may well be true, your explanation takes away the argument he was making. Mr. Mehta was advancing the argument that the CIA was helping to radicallize the local populace by aiding the muslim aspect of the insurgency. It sounds like this was actually a Saudi efort.
January 22, 2006 6:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
jblackton wrote:
Do you have a citation for this?
January 23, 2006 3:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Messrs. Blackton and Bergen contend that the CIA barely had contact with the Arab Afghan fighters, let alone "create" Osama bin Laden yet Muslims were being recruited to fight here in the United States.
Wadih el-Hage was one of those recruits. He and his wife and in-laws went to Pakistan during the Afghan War. In early 1992, he and his wife and children moved to Sudan after el-Hage accepted the position of secretary to OBL. El-Hage arranged to buy a plane owned by the US military and have it shipped from Arizona to Sudan. But the CIA didn't know any of this was going on?
Sudan had to have been on the CIA's radar then. Islamist fundamentalists had overthrown a corrupt pro-US government that has been propped up by the Saudis for several years. Oilhad been discovered in Sudan by then and two US companies, Chevron and Star were operating there. OBL built roads in Sudan. Surely the Binladen construction company was the source for equipment and manpower.
And yet Mr. Blackton would have us believe that OBL only came under scrutiny by the CIA in 1995. If that is true, we should fire everyone in the CIA and hire reporters from the NY Times instead. In March 2003, Chris Hedges, an NYT reporter, wrote about Osama bin Laden financing terrorist acts, including one in Yemen. The story was accompanied by a photo of OBL with a big smile on his face.
Mr. Hedges was also reporting on the Blind Sheik, Omar Rahman, and his followers. My understanding is that the CIA helped Rahman and some of his followers enter the US from Sudan, knowing full well about their radicalism. I am curious about how many Arab and Afghan veterans entered the US and how much help was extended by the CIA. I assume the Society of Afghan Engineers, based in northern Virginia, was one of the groups helped by the CIA.
Sometime after 9/11, I read a news story about a three-dayreunion of US Special Forces with Afghan freedom fighters that took place in, I think, Uzbekistan. I didn't save the story and have not been able to find it again but it made me think about the Pentagon's role in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Has anyone unequivocally denied or confirmed whether the US military had a presence in Afghanistan or Pakistan then?
$3.3 billion spent by the US, an expansion of the heroin business, dispensation of millions of violent school books. all handled by the 5 or 6 CIA agents who Peter Bergen claims were in Pakistan and Afghanistan at any one time during the 1980s and the CIA never noticed a 6"6" very rich Saudi from one of the wealthiest Saudi families until 1995?
Yeah, I've wondered too if the TPM Cafe isn't a rah, rah site for the CIA.
January 23, 2006 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink