Our Disaster in Afghanistan Did NOT Begin With 9/11
[Author’s Note: This essay is a work in progress. I would appreciate any factual corrections in the historical record that I have laid out below.]
What has really disturbed me over the past few days is the way our whole national discussion of how we failed Afghanistan begins with 9/11. That is not correct. Maybe it takes a white-bearded and somewhat irreverent political historian to correct the record and go back farther. It starts with Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter— as well as Leonid Brezhnev. And it involves much more than how America failed Afghanistan and paid for it — for example, it includes the fall of the Soviet Union.
It is a story of hubris, of cold-blooded calculation based on a calculus of Cold War diplomatic thinking and anti-communism gone wild, of Western contempt for Islam and traditional Islamic societies, of the delusions of statesmen and generals, both smart ones and simpletons, of wishful thinking, of putting off tough decisions by indecisive political leaders. Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires, the joker in the deck of the Great Game, would once again confound mighty empires and bring the high low.
The story begins when, in 1978, the Soviets set up a client regime in Afghanistan. This was their last adventure in making Central Asia over in *their* image and it cost them dearly. Then, by 1979, their client communist regime was in trouble, threatened by the Islamist fundamentalist mujahideen. So, in December 1979, they invaded Afghanistan.
There is an interesting and very troubling side story here.¹ The Soviets, it turns out, were not keen on invading Afghanistan at all. In fact, according to none other than Carter’s national security adviser, the Cold Warrior par excellence Zbigniew Brzezinski, the United States tricked the Soviets into it by starting to fund and arm the Islamic militant mujahideen in July 1979, months before the Soviet invasion. Nineteen years later, Brzezinski boasted in an interview to the French journal Nouvel Observateur that this was a strategy he sold to Carter on the grounds it would destabilize the Soviet regime. Asked by the interviewer if he regretted that decision in retrospect, Brzezinski responded with his traditional arrogance and anti-communist obsession,
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?…What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Yes, read that again.
The United States’ reaction was predictable. Here, just six years after the end of the Vietnam War, was another falling domino. (We always fight the last war.) Of course we immediately condemned the invasion, and for good measure President Carter canceled US participation in the 1980 Olympics, which were to be held in Moscow, and other nations followed suit. No Olympics. (Not such a bad precedent).
The United States, through the CIA, continued to fund and arm the mujahideen against the Soviet invaders. Oh, we had learned our lesson all right from Vietnam. We weren’t going to send American soldiers into an Asian war again — not then, at least. So instead, we conducted a proxy war. The heavily armed mujahideen eventually exhausted the Soviets, but not before the brutal Soviet occupation destroyed the entire traditional fabric of Afghan society. For the graphic details, read The Kite Runner.
By 1988, the Soviets were wasted and overrun. More than that, the combination of the impact of 15,000 Soviet dead soldiers — the greatest number of Soviet casualties since the Second World War — and the drain on the Soviet economy left the communist regime reeling. This, combined with a drastic fall in world oil prices (the Soviets were a major oil exporter), undermined the system’s very stability. Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to the Soviet Politburo in the early 1980s as a hardliner and then became General Secretary after the deaths of two elderly former KGB heads who succeeded Brezhnev, understood that his country was in crisis and that change was imperative. So he pivoted to the role of reformist, introduced glasnost and perestroika, and the rest is history. He is rightly credited as having vastly and desperately overrated the ability of Soviet-style communism to reform and adapt (with apologies to my late mentor, Stephen F. Cohen), and the result was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Gorbachev also signed a treaty in 1988 with the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and agreed to withdraw its troops.
But that was just the beginning of the sorry story of Afghanistan. The fundamentalist mujahideen had become an awesome fighting force as well as a political force, not only in Afghanistan but also throughout the Muslim world. They became the source and center of Islamic fundamentalist activity and ideology, now known as “Islamism.” They attracted radicals and terrorists from other Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia. One of them was Osama Bin Laden.
And that, dear friends, set the stage for the tragedy of 9/11. By that time, under a new US president who spent his college years drunk in his fraternity house and who evaded military service in Vietnam by service in the National Guard (and who, unlike me, was AWOL for his drills but still managed to stay out of the brig), we had forgotten all the lessons of engaging in land wars in Asia. We were hyped, mad, and ready to fight. We were also, as the more recent saccharine saying goes, “all in this together.” There was a national consensus that we had to march to Afghanistan and rid the place of…Osama Bin Laden. As usual, we focused on a single individual, and not on a powerful historical movement, one, moreover, that we had a major responsibility for creating and strengthening.
So now we bemoan the fact that, well, we should have just killed Osama and then left. Wrong!! If we had killed Osama, there would have been others to take his place (and who did). We forgot all the lessons about guerilla warfare we had learned in Vietnam — if, indeed, our military leaders had learned anything at all. Osama was just one individual, a really evil-looking one at that, and if we killed him we’d solve the problem, right? No way.
We may compare Osama to the sacred dragon of Greek myth. When Cadmus killed the dragon, the story goes, he sowed the dragon’s teeth, which turned into new warriors. Of course, it took much longer to slay the dragon Osama. But the warriors appeared anyway — and they came from everywhere.
So we might see George W. Bush, he of the DKE frat house, seeking to play Cadmus to Osama’s dragon…except that while W. failed to slay the dragon, he sowed the dragon’s teeth anyway, like a mangled version of the innocent Johnny Appleseed. The teeth became warriors, and this time they rose up against the seed-sower. There is a time to sow, and a time to reap.
That was the beginning of the second chapter of the American tragedy in Afghanistan. We are now at its end. After twenty years, after grievous loss of life and treasure, we are now at the infuriating and humiliating end of our Afghanistan tragedy.
Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else. [The next few paragraphs were significantly edited by the author — GSS.]
“Biden has blood on his hands,” we hear. Yes, sadly that is true. The unanticipated speed with which Afghanistan fell on his watch, contrary to his assurances, was anticipated by the CIA, but Biden, as a new president firmly committed to ending the US presence there, apparently ignored that assessment. And he surely could have started ferrying people out, including those still applying for visas, much earlier in the year. Additionally, though he publicly opposed Obama’s massive troop surge of 2009, he was unable to prevail in Barack Obama’s consultative decision-making style against the generals, who were sure that military might would win the day. For this, Obama bears responsibility for caving to the generals — as he did in Syria, as well. The great shame of all this is that this year’s debacle in Afghanistan is bound to have a profound impact on the next presidential election, just as the Ben Ghazi affair tarred Hillary Clinton, whether she deserved it or not.
What about the former guy? We don’t hear peep about his role in all this. Arguably, one of his more rational moves was to begin the withdrawal of American troops and even, perish the thought, negotiate with the Taliban (as Biden might have been well-advised to do, but surely he had no interest in replicating the former guy’s actions). True, as in so many other cases, he gullibly accepted their assurances that they would behave nicely, and, like those before him, including Obama, pusillanimously kicked the bucket to the next president.
But far more importantly, and this helps to exonerate Biden but not completely, Trump’s evil angel Stephen Miller, that misbegotten shame of the Jewish people, did everything he could, very successfully, to wreck the entire immigration system and block those brave Afghans who helped the US from getting visas. This resulting in the horrifying backlog facing Biden. It was a purely racist, nativist, anti-Muslim, white supremacist animus, as he has said, that drove him to it. I do not understand how this man can daven in a Jewish congregation, much less how others could allow him to do so. If there is evil personified in this world today, it is embodied in Stephen Miller. If there is a Hell, he will go there.
Bush…well, God bless, as he would say. If there is anyone with blood on his hands, it is he. His was the tragic decision to keep our troops in Afghanistan after the failed event to kill Bin Laden. His GWOT (“Global War on Terror”) became the sacred mantra not only of the hawks, but also the national consensus. This scion of privilege, in the role of American cowboy, doubled down on his mission of going after all the terrorists after he had ignominiously failed to get Bin Laden, but admitting defeat was not in his limited vocabulary.
Clinton? I don’t know, but let’s just say he was distracted by his crusade to make Russia over in our image, waging the racist (yup!) War on Drugs, as well as by young women in his office.
George H. W. Bush, let us recall, had headed the CIA that was funding and arming the mujahideen. And let’s not forget his sorry adventure of Operation Desert Storm, in which in which we stationed American troops in Muslim Kuwait (including women — anathema to fundamentalist Muslims, no doubt further radicalizing many, perhaps including the Saudi Osama Bin Laden). But to his credit, he refrained from going into Iraq. Dana Garvey described Bush’s posture perfectly: “Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.” He, at least, had the wisdom to refrain from vain temptation — and to have a good laugh at himself as well. I doubt that he wasted his Yale education as his son did.
Reagan? For sure; under his watch, H. W. armed the mujahideen while Ollie North was using money from our arms sales to Iran to arm the ultimately futile anti-communist resistance in Nicaragua. The hapless Jimmy Carter? Yes indeed; he deferred to the doctrinaire and forbidding Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski while bewailing the unfairness of life.
And what of the American people? We, who were so hyped by 9/11, so oblivious of that dark, distant place called Afghanistan, that we couldn’t think straight either, that we blissfully forgot all about the tragedy and lessons of Vietnam, that we just couldn’t rid ourselves of the mission to be the world’s policeman one last time, apprehend the perpetrator, and declare victory? Yes, we are to blame too. Moreover, having largely accepted the ill-fated war in Afghanistan, we bought into the idea of responding to terrorism with massive military force by allowing Bush to begin another war in Iraq. The real target of “shock and awe” was not Saddam Hussein or the Iraqi masses, who Dick Cheney believed would welcome us with open arms, but us. the American public, addicted to watching military violence on TV and to moral crusades against evildoers everywhere. And of course there were the politicians who authorized the Iraq war, notably including Hillary Clinton.
Who won? Nobody? Nope. The Taliban won, and they are hardly nobody. We may not have created them, but we empowered the mujahideen, from whose ranks the Taliban emerged, enabled them, funded them, and armed them — all in pursuit of an already discredited Cold War mindset.³ And now, thanks to our arrogant and deeply misguided adventure, they are the rulers of Afghanistan, more powerful than ever.
Perhaps we are chastened for the moment about foreign adventures, about the hubris of making over others in our image. Right now, our image isn’t that good, and our national politicians from the (Anti-)Republican Party are instead holding up Victor Orban and his autocratic rule in Hungary as the model to follow. But this too, we may hope, will pass. We may be sure, however, that in this world destabilized by climate change, polarization, and fundamentalist false narratives, there will be more uprisings, more crises, more disasters begging for our attention.
When indeed, as The Poet wrote, will we ever learn? Probably never.
The tragedy of Afghanistan is far from over. It is just beginning for Afghanistan’s women and for those who sought to help us, whom we persuaded that we were on the right side of history. (Today I doubt that there is really a right side of history at all. It is just history. If the arc of the universe bends toward justice, does that mean that the arc of history bends in the same direction? I don’t know.) There will be horror stories beyond imagining of their fate. Will we understand our role, our responsibility, in bringing this about? Maybe, for a while, for a generation perhaps. Each generation must discover and rediscover itself, in the world in which it lives.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.⁴
But just think for a moment, if you please, about the world-shattering impact that a relatively tiny, mountainous, inaccessible, highly traditional, religious country has had on world history. And of the arrogant folly of the high and mighty of our human race.
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¹This paragraph is based on a review essay by David Gibbs of the University of Arizona entitled, “Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect,” in the journal International Politics 37:233–246, June 2000. I am indebted to my colleague Marjorie Senechal for bringing it to my attention.
²Once again, here we focused on an individual villain, Saddam Hussein, without any understanding of what was going on in Iraq. Was Saddam Hussein, in the words we heard uttered so often in horror, killing “his own people” with chemical weapons? No way. He used them first again a foreign foe, Iran, and then against the Kurds, who were hardly “his people” at all. The very notion of an Iraqi “people” itself was without merit, since, first, Iraq was not (and is not) a nation-state and, second, the warfare engaged in by Saddam Hussein and others in Iraq was almost purely religiously and ethnically sectarian. The elder President Bush, like his son the president, viewed the “Middle East” and Northern Asia exclusively throuhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kite_Runnergh the lens of Western societies and the Wilsonian vision of a world of nation-states.
³There is also a theory that it was all about oil. At the outset, I do not think so, but I do not know enough one way or the other. On the basis of a little bit of research, it seems that oil was discovered in Afghanistan only in 2010. There was also a report just today that the Taliban has guaranteed the security of an oil pipeline crossing Afghanistan on its way from Turkmenistan to India; this is of even much more recent origin. Afghanistan in general is an extremely resource-poor country. In a way, its intense interest and focus in foreign affairs over the past 40 years has belied a strict materialist interpretation of history. Its main “asset” — or curse — instead, seems to have been “location, location, location” — bordering on some of the most volatile countries in the world, many of which have long been in conflict with each other.
⁴Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in ed. Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), 437.
