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When are politicians going to learn to stay the fuck out of Afghanistan? You can’t win there. Don’t try. Even if you think you’re helping, you’re not.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 3, 1979--
Between 1839 and 1919 the British fought three wars in Afghanistan and still didn’t learn. The Soviets didn’t either. In 1978 they backed a communist coup d’état, and that dragged them into a war with anti-communist Islamic guerrillas called the Mujahideen, which is the plural word for one engaged in jihad: a holy war against enemies of Islam.
In 1979 the United States was still big into the Truman Doctrine—the containment of communism—and it bought into that enemy of my enemy is my friend stuff, so they decided to help out the Mujahideen because fuck the USSR, let’s give them their own Vietnam. Stinger missiles for everyone!
It was called “Operation Cyclone” and it was signed by President Carter on July 3, 1979 as a secret CIA program to support the rebels and draw the Soviets into a war they couldn’t win. (Britain’s MI6 ran similar operations, and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan gave massive support as well.) The program started small under Carter, but Reagan had a Republican erection for killing commies and he expanded the shit out of the operation. During the 80s Americans sent billions in aid, making it one of the most financially substantial and lengthy CIA operations in history. By 1989 the crumbling Soviet Union was sick of getting blown out of the sky by rebels on horseback using expensive American toys, and packed up its shit and left.
And so did the Americans. Having got what it wanted, the U.S. significantly reduced its funding to the rebels and to the millions of Afghan refugees who fled to Pakistan.
The rebel Afghan groups supported by the Americans were pretty fucking hardcore. I’m not just talking good fighters, but militant mindsets. In the late 80s Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said to President Bush, “You are creating a Frankenstein.” Undoubtedly, she intended to say the U.S. was Frankenstein and they were creating a Frankenstein’s monster. Although the monster from the story was . . . never mind.
Anyway, there definitely were monstrous side effects. The term “blowback” was coined by the American intelligence community to describe negative repercussions from covert operations, and that’s what they got; many critics assert the American support of the Mujahideen created a region ripe for the growth of terrorism, playing a role in the 9/11 attacks in 2001 (bin Laden fought with the Mujahideen), which led the U.S. back into Afghanistan to fight those they once assisted. It took decades before they finally got out.
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There are good reasons that Afghanistan is known as "the graveyard of empires."
Excellent ! My Dad (age 91) talks about running arms to the Indian Army stationed along their northern border with China to keep those Commies outta India, circa 1962. This hard on that the USA has for Commies is a huge problem. Can anyone say ‘Ukraine’?