Soviet-Afghan War Options

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Topic Introduction

This is when and where it all started. Zbigniew Brzezinski set the world straight in an interview in 'Le Nouvel Observateur' who's idea it was, it was his. The US goaded the Soviets into invading Afghanistan in 1979 so the US could fight a semi-covert conventional war against them, which they did for 10 years.

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Whoever got the job of administering the CIA's war in Afghanistan would have risen to become a prominent Islamic figure, the job happened to go to Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden met Sheik Abdallah Azzam, a teacher who became a large influence on Osama, while he was studying for a degree in civil engineering at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah. A Palestinian and once confidant of Yassar Arafat, Azzam aroused bin Laden’s interest in Arab politics and religion. The overthrow of the Shah in Iran and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets accelerated the change in Osama’s perception of the world. Soon he made a visit to Pakistan where his hosts accompanied him to Karachi and Peshawar to meet some of the Afghan leaders and see for himself the refugee camps there. Returning to Saudi Arabia he began raising funds and support for the mujahedeen and their fight against the Soviet occupation. By degrees he established a residence in Peshawar and by 1986 was building roads, tunneling hideouts for the mujahadeen and establishing his own camps inside Afghanistan.

The relationship between Osama bin Laden and the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is a contentious topic. While both bin Laden and the CIA deny having any direct contact there, there is some evidence to the contrary. Also, the relationship was mutually beneficial and it is not in dispute that the CIA was single minded in it’s objectives and was not above putting sophisticated weapons in the hands any Muslim willing to take up arms against the Red Army. As a result of this policy the U.S. willingly funded Osama bin Laden’s rise to prominence. Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time said of the CIA’s involvement, “Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.” “It was worth it.”

As the war expanded, Bin Laden, confronted with a growing administrative problem, called for Abdallah Azzam's help, and together they created the Maktab al-Khidamar. “MAK” as it was called, acted as a recruiting center and clearing house for money and weapons. At first helping to operate and finally taking charge of the organization, bin Laden worked closely with the Pakistani Inter-services Intelligence agency which was the CIA’s main conduit for directing money and resources to the mujahadeen. Billions in U.S. dollars flowed into the country through the ISI, much of it administered by MAK. To better keep track of his massive administrative needs bin Laden in 1988 created a database which he called al-Qa’eda, or “base” in Arabic. It has been estimated that, including the money contributed by both the CIA and Saudi Arabia and the money generated by Afghanistan’s opium trade that was funneled into the conflict a total of between 6 and 40 billion dollars was spent on the Afghan war. (New York Times 8/24/98)

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Tens of thousands of Muslims flocked to the mujahedeen camps. CIA chief William Casey committed the agency’s support in 1986 to an ISI plan to recruit muslims from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. According to former ABC-TV journalist John Cooley, Muslims were recruited in the U.S. and sent to Camp Peary, a CIA training camp in Virginia where they were taught “sabotage skills”. Additionally, operatives of bin Laden were recruited and trained in New York under the Washington approved “Operation Cyclone” whereby Muslims recruited at the al-Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, NY were then given paramilitary training by the CIA before being sent to Afghanistan to fight. In other instances the CIA transported bin Laden recruits to the U.S. for training, then returned them to Osama’s tutelage. Michael Springman, the former head of the American Visa Bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, complained to his superiors that he was repeatedly ordered by the State Department to issue visas to people he saw as unqualified. He said to Newsnight on the BBC, “what I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets.”

The Soviet-Afghan War has been called Russia's "Vietnam". Russian soldiers became hooked on heroin en mass rendering the Red Army next to useless as a fighting force, the war dragged on and on in the face of international critisism depreciating Russia's moral self-image, and it put a significant strain on their economy. The last of the Red Army finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

To things emerged from the vaccuum left after the dissintigration of the Soviet Union. Islamic Mosques and Madras began popping up all over Central Asia, and Islamic nationalism took hold in a giant swath (or, "arc of Crisis" to use Zbigniew Brzezinski's own words) extending from Iran to Pakistan. Brzezinski then began alerting his contemporaries in the US of this emerging "Islamic threat" (that he himself helped to create). Meanwhile, US energy giants began buying up oil and gas rights in the newly independent republics of Central Asia. As the US has been using the War on Terror card to establish military bases there, Russia, China, India and now Iran have banded together (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) to counter US influence in the region.

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Articles


Bin Laden - the Afghan War
@ Eurolegal Services
http://www.eurolegal.org/terrorism/terror104.htm


The Mastermind
A founder of Al-Jihad and Al-Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahri grew up as a gentle boy in Maadi who said it was “inhumane to hurt another human being”
By Azza Khattab
Egypt Today, October 2004
http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=2484


Analysis: The roots of jihad
by Fiona Symon
BBC News, February 16 2003
short but instructive article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1603178.stm


Zbigniew Brzezinski, neocon?
Or maybe better, a neo-lib
by Laura Rozen
War and Piece, January 18 2004
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000239.html


"The Nobel War Prize"
by Michel Chossudovsky
@ globalresearch, 25 October 2002
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO210B.html

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Posts and Threads

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Other Resources


Video

Power of Nightmares:
Part II
The first half of Part II of this excellent documentary deals with the Soviet Afghan war
http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-79...r+of+nightmares


Timeline

Complete 911 Timeline:
The Soviet-Afghan War
Open-Content project managed by Paul Thompson
@cooperativeresearch.org
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timelin...sovietAfghanWar