In early July 1979, President Carter authorized a $500 million ‘covert action’ program to overthrow Afghanistan’s socialist government. CIA named this Operation Cyclone. This was earmarked to train and arm Islamic fundamentalists, christened Mujahideen. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and democratic US’ new friend, communist China joined the effort to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Soviet Central Asia, and dismember the Soviet Union.
The sombre events of Afghanistan that we see today perhaps began in July 1973.
King Zahir Shah, who had ascended the throne of Afghanistan in 1935 as a youth of twenty, was well loved by his people. The country was enjoying a brief respite from the Great Game of earlier years because the Pamir Convention of 1907 had demarcated spheres of influence between Britain and Russia to combat the threat of German militarism. The affable and well-educated young king travelled widely and witnessed imperialist deliberations at the League of Nations in Geneva. A decade earlier, his kinsman, King Amanullah had taken measures to modernize Afghanistan and make it a secular state. The Muslim clerics and feudal landlords resented the king’s attempts and began stirring trouble between warring sides. To avoid civil war, King Amanullah abdicated and left the country for India with his queen. This was a turning point in the tragedy that was soon to take shape in Afghanistan.
Witnessing the cynical Anglo-French games at the League, where they covertly encouraged Nazi Germany to wage war against Soviet Russia, Zahir Shah declared his country’s neutrality during World War II. Thus, Kabul became an espionage paradise where combatants met and spied on each other. The Soviet embassy at Kabul was the centre of crucial information gathering. Zahir Shah assisted Subhas Chandra Bose’s journey to Singapore in 1940, where the latter raised the Azad Hind Fauj. Thus, Afghanistan remained safe from the violence that raged in five continents.
When Soviet Union emerged as a nuclear superpower after World War II, King Zahir Shah became a close ally of that state. The informal alliance was beneficial to Afghanistan. This king had inherited his uncle’s dreams of a modern Afghanistan. He introduced a new Constitution in 1964, whereby elected representatives would form the Loya Jirga or Grand Assembly. He established a Constitution, excluded members of the royal family from the Council of Ministers and abolished royal powers. Wanting to reform Afghanistan’s medieval laws, the king declared that the laws passed by Parliament would supersede Sharia law. Once more fearing curtailment of their prerogatives the Muslim clerics opposed this. They would oppose secularism many times.
When the United States refused economic assistance to Afghanistan—to please its ally Pakistan—Afghanistan turned to the Soviet Union, who readily offered aid for the Helmand Valley Project, a $25 million arms deal and an economic aid package worth $550 million. Roads were built between Kabul, Herat and Kandahar that outflanked the Hindu Kush, constructed tunnels through gaunt hills, built grain silos for stocking food grains, and invested in small scale industries. Aeroflot planes and Afghanistan’s modernized Ariana Airlines regularly flew between Kabul and Moscow. Defence personnel were trained in Russia, 40% of Afghan exports went to Russia including the famed Karakul fur. Young Afghan men and women received medical and technical education in Soviet universities. Russia invested in Afghanistan, who remained a friend on the frontier of Soviet Central Asia.
King Zahir was revered by his people because he had brought peace and stability. They called him “Baba” or Father. Amidst the welter of tribal feuds, he was the symbol of unity. The king implemented development projects in irrigation and communication. However, economic progress slowed down when drought and famine adversely affected the country in 1971-72. Afflicted by eye problems the king went to Italy for surgery.
Events now began to take a tragic turn. On 17 July 1973, BBC radio announced that while King Zahir Shah was abroad, his cousin, Prince Daoud Khan deposed the king and declared Afghanistan a republic. As Prime Minister, Daoud had supported militias on the Durand Line; this had prompted Pakistan to close its borders. Fearing a war the king dismissed Daoud as Prime Minister in 1963. Prince Daoud now took revenge.
Unfortunately, President Daoud was a dictator and did not believe in collective decision-making for planning the country’s future. The President favoured his own privileged class; social and economic inequalities remained. This led to the growth of the socialist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). When President Daoud began imprisoning some of its members, they staged a coup, which overthrew and assassinated Daoud Khan and his adherents. Soviet hand was hinted but President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoir: “We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.”
New York Times and Wall Street Journal correspondents in Kabul reported that most Afghans supported the new PDPA government, which began land reforms that infuriated the landed class. The PDPA government introduced free medical care. A huge literacy campaign was launched. Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. During PDPA rule, half the university students were women; they comprised 40% of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70% of its teachers and 30% of its civil servants. A woman surgeon later reminisced: “Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked… We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday…it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning… These extremists were the people the West supported.”
Seeing growing Soviet influence in the Afghan government and among ordinary people, the US decided to overthrow the PDPA government. (President Eisenhower had approved a similar plot to overthrow Iran’s first democratically elected Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadeq in 1953.) In early July 1979, President Carter authorized a $500 million “covert action” program to overthrow Afghanistan’s socialist government. CIA named this Operation Cyclone. The project was kept secret from both the House of Congress and the American people. This was earmarked to train and arm Islamic fundamentalists, christened Mujahideen. According to Bob Woodward of Washington Post, $70 million was used as bribes to depose the Afghan socialist government. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and democratic US’ new friend, communist China joined the effort to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Soviet Central Asia, and dismember the Soviet Union.
The Mujahideen comprised unemployed youth and warlords who controlled the heroin trade and despoiled rural women. They were trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani ISI, the CIA and British MI6. Others were trained in Chinese Xinjiang. One of the leaders was a Saudi engineer, Osama bin Laden and a powerful Saudi politician Jamal Khashoggi.
In August 1979, the American embassy in Kabul bluntly declared that “the United States’ larger interests…would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”
The tragedy for Afghanistan gained momentum.
Faced with this threat, Mohammed Taraki’s government sought Soviet assistance who sent food grains but no guns. Soviet leaders admonished and advised the PDPA to govern justly, to include peasants and workers in their team, to implement land reforms. The PDPA was not blameless; they resorted to reprisals against both educated dissenters and illiterate rebels, which led to more violence. When the moderate Taraki’s deputy, Hafizullah Amin had him murdered, there was more chaos and violence. Soviet Union sent more advisers and more food grains, but refused to intervene. Two incidents prompted Soviet Union to its ill-starred decision to intervene in Afghanistan.
One was the murder of some 200 Soviet advisers at Herat instigated by Iranian mullahs in late 1979. The second was when Hafizullah Amin began negotiating with the US to keep him in power in return for US military bases on the Afghan-Soviet border. Zbigniew Brzezinski, US’ Security Adviser, publicly declared that he had instructed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia “for a joint and coordinated response”.
Thus the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIL were born.
Faced with the grim prospect of destabilization of Soviet Central Asian republics and of nuclear arsenals there falling into the hands of the Mujahideen the Soviet Army moved into Afghanistan on 26 December 1979. The National Army of Afghanistan joined forces with the Soviet Army to halt the violence created by the mullahs, warlords and Mujahideen armed with stinger missiles.
Money made the Afghan rebels pawns in a tragic game. The Mujahideen destroyed their country’s infrastructure. They mined the land, blew up power transmission lines, oil pipelines, radio stations, government offices, hotels, cinema houses and even hospitals. They killed indiscriminately—passengers in airplanes and buses, doctors, teachers, students, and government officials. The Afghan Taliban became enemies of the Afghan people.
The Soviet government replaced the paranoiac Amin by the moderate Babrak Karmal. The Soviet and Afghan armies tried to bring a semblance of stability to the strife-torn land. The Soviet Army, which had defeated the formidable German army at Stalingrad, was defeated by the guerrilla warfare of the well-armed Mujahideen. Deaths and casualties on both sides were heavy. In 1989, a war weary Soviet Union signed the terms of withdrawal through the Geneva Accord. The PDPA government continued under President Najibullah, who brought some stability to Afghanistan. But the newly formed Pakistani backed Taliban comprising Hekmatyar and Rabbani assassinated him in September 1996. Freed now from all restrains the Taliban brought a reign of terror to Afghanistan. They hated infidels but they hated their secular compatriots even more. Kabul alone saw the massacre of 25,000 of its citizens. It was perhaps the darkest era in Afghanistan. But worse was to follow.
The attack on the Twin Tower brought the US to Afghanistan in September 2001 in search of Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in Pakistan. As US military planes began dropping bombs over this luckless land, convoys bringing food from Pakistan stopped. The drought was severe that year; 20,000 people died due to the resultant famine. Hungry children looking for food were blown up when cluster bombs exploded on them.
The renowned Australian journalist John Pilger writes, “The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a U.S. oil company consortium. In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the U.S. and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal Company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s vice president.”
John Pilger concludes: “When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of ‘our protection,’ isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?”
Will the old sins of powerful nations continue to cast long shadows on hapless people?
Achala Moulik, IAS (Retd) is the author of the soon to be released book “Treaty of Peace, Friendship & Cooperation of 1971: Commemorating India-Russia relations”.