By Mushahid Hussain*
The collapse of the Kabul regime, with its head fleeing with cash stashed in his luggage, and the ignominious panicky exit of the American military coincided with the surprisingly subdued return of the Afghan Taliban to power. Messy exits are now a hallmark of the United States in the Third World countries the Americans once dominated.
The dizzying speed of these developments reinforce what Lenin once said: ‘There are decades when nothing happens; and then there are weeks when decades happen”!
There is now a glimmer of hope that the 42-year old Afghan conflict can perhaps come to an end after three Afghan Wars (1979-1989 Afghan Jehad funded by the US against the Soviet Union’s occupation), then the Afghan Civil War (1989-2001), and finally the ‘War of Terror’ undertaken by the US after 9/11.
President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, claimed in his memoir, ‘Power and Principle’, that Carter had signed a directive on July 3, 1979, to start funding the dissident Afghan Mujahideen with an initial funding of $ 695,000 which would be distributed by the CIA via Pakistan. This was six months before the Soviet military invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Eventually, Afghanistan became the Center of the biggest CIA covert operation after World War II, which was code named ‘Operation Cyclone’. When the Geneva Accords were signed a decade later, providing the framework for the defeated Red Army’s exit from Afghanistan, almost $ 5 billion had been funnelled for this guerilla war, with Saudi Arabia providing matching funds to the American money ($ 2.1 billion each), plus another $ 1 billion from other countries over a 10-year period. 100,000 Afghan Mujahideen had been trained and armed, plus about 10,000 Arab and other Muslim volunteers. The Afghan Taliban, who now are in power, are the ideological offspring of the Afghan Mujahideen, some actually having fought in the war against the Red Army.
During an interview with the French newspaper, ‘Le Nouvelle Observateur’, published in its issue of 15-21 January, 1998, Dr Brzezinski was asked whether he had regrets in funding a struggle that spawned religious extremism, destabilising parts of both the Muslim and Western Worlds, he answered without batting an eyelid: ‘What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and end of the Cold War’?
It was largely an American-created genie that the US tried, albeit abortively, to put back into the bottle when Washington under President Bush launched the ‘War on Terror’ after 9/11. Pakistan was coerced into joining the war, although India was the first in the region to offer unstinted cooperation to the American war effort. And Saudi Arabia too was cajoled into the post 9/11 war effort because it feared American reprisals as 15 of the 19 hijackers that attacked the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were from Saudi Arabia (of the remaining 4, 2 were from Egypt, 1 each from Lebanon and the UAE).
America’s Afghanistan Project came unstuck for three reasons starting in 2003. First, that year, the US went to war with Iraq, instead of stabilising and strengthening Afghanistan, the US ‘took its eye off the ball’ and shifted attention to Iraq, fighting a war of choice because of George W Bush’s ideological foreign policy where he labelled Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’, although none of these countries had anything to do with 9/11 and, in fact, Iran had actively cooperated with the US in the removal of the Taliban regime.
The prominent New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, famously told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, on April 3, 2003 (two weeks after the Iraq invasion), that: “I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are within a 5 block radius of the White House) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq War would not have happened.” So much for the world’s most vibrant democracy, whose decision to go to war can be manipulated by a small, influential neoconservative cabal.
The second reason was imperial hubris and US duplicity with allies like Pakistan. For example, in his book, “Lawless World”, Philippe Sands reveals the contents of a telephone conversation between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair on January 30, 2003, just a few weeks before launching the war on Iraq on March 20. In that conversation, recorded and transcribed by Blair’s staff, Bush tells Blair that he ‘wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) proliferation, mentioning in particular Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan”, at a time when Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were supposed US allies. And by 2005, the US, violating its own laws as well as IAEA rules, went ahead to sign a major civil nuclear deal with India, with a view to rope in India against China.
The third reason for failure was the confusion why the US was in Afghanistan and lack of clarity of objectives, other than perpetuating its military presence by propping up a small self-serving Kabul elite that was knit together by corruption and dole outs from Washington. The Washington Post did an excellent expose of the deception and lies that lay at the heart of America’s ill-fated Afghanistan Project, as there was a yawning chasm between was publicly stated and what was privately believed.
On the eve of the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, the Afghanistan debacle has evoked memories of Cambodia and Vietnam 1975 or Iran 1979, where the departing American Ambassador, Stars and Stripes wrapped & folded in his arms, announced somewhat bitterly: ‘till yesterday, we were ruling this country’!
Afghanistan is much more than an intelligence failure or an error of policy judgment. 75 years ago, when the US emerged as the victor of World War II in 1945, it was heralded as the harbinger of the ‘American Century’. This view was reinforced when the Afghan War against the Soviet Union sparked the collapse of the USSR and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, symbolised by the demolition of the Berlin Wall. The ‘sole superpower’’s President, George H.W. Bush, triumphantly proclaimed in 1991 that ‘what we say goes’!
That was 30 years ago. Today, the image, clout and confidence of the ‘sole superpower’ lies buried in the debris of the destruction of the war in Afghanistan, which has lived up to its reputation and name as ‘the graveyard of empires’.
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* Chairman of the Senate Defence Committee Pakistani, senator Mushahid Hussain was Bureau Chief in Islamabad of Inter Press Service (IPS) during 1987-1997 & in 2014. He launched the first Public Hearings on Environment & Climate Change in the Pakistan Parliament. As Senator, he chairs the Senate Sub Committee on ‘Green and Clean Islamabad’ which has launched a campaign to ban plastic use in the Pakistani capital.
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Read also:
Will Americans Who Were Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored?
America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place. That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars:
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