Cumplimiento de los mandatos de detención

Until the invasion, the U.S. paid little or no attention to Afghanistan. Because it shares a long border with the Soviet Union, successive administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter accepted Afghanistan as a Soviet buffer state. The State Department’s March 9, 1976,

Annual Policy Assessment described it as “a militarily and politically neutral

nation, effectively dependent on the Soviet Union.” The U.S. could afford to be calm because during this time it could project military power into South Asia from Iran.

Iran became the linchpin of U.S. Middle East policy after 1953, when the CIA and MI6 destabilized the elected nationalist government of Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the pro-Western, anti-Communist autocrat Shah Reza Muhammad Pahlevi. The linchpin broke in 1978, taking with it the U.S. government’s equanimity about Soviet influence in Afghanistan. The inability of the U.S. to cope with the ramifications of the fall of the shah would lead to profound policy blunders, including the massive, indiscriminate arming of the mujahedin. Like the Soviet Union, the U.S. suffered from geopolitical blindness.

Under Shah Pahlevi, Iran seemed to be a stable outpost of American power and influence in the Persian Gulf. It gave the U.S. access to military bases and intelligence facilities, and the U.S. provided military assistance in return. The U.S. and Israel even helped create Pahlevi’s secret police, SAVAK, and provided training in terrorist and torture techniques.

The image of Iran as an unflagging ally of America became an idée fixe, which meant that basic questions about Pahlevi’s rule were never asked, even though the country was collapsing from within. Discontent with Pahlevi grew in the early 1970s as oil revenues began to rise. The rich lived in opulence, the poor endured famine, and intellectuals were tortured in SAVAK dungeons. Pahlevi was scarcely more popular among his people than Taraki was among the Afghans.

On Jan. 16, 1978, Pahlevi was forced to flee. With no domestic political opposition to speak of, the only alternative leaders were Iran’s ultra- conservative Shi’ite Muslim clerics led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was in Paris. If nothing else, the clerics’ unyielding anti-Westernism appealed to Iranians. On Feb. 1, 1979, Khomeini returned from 15 years in exile to proclaim the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The end of the shah and of the mirage of Iranian stability should have been expected, but the U.S. was incapable of rational thought on the subject. As Time reported in its Jan. 7, 1980, “Man of the Year” cover story on Khomeini:

The depth of its commitment to the Shah blinded Washington to the growing discontent. U.S. policymakers wanted to believe that their investment was buying stability and friendship; they trusted what they heard from the monarch, who dismissed all opposition as “the blah-

3. The Mujahid

blahs of armchair critics.” Even after the revolution began, U.S. officials were convinced that “there is no alternative to the Shah.” Carter took time out from the Camp David summit in September 1978 to phone the Iranian monarch and assure him of Washington’s continued support.12

America’s blindness would continue until the end. Despite repeated demands from the new Khomeini regime to return Pahlevi to Iran, the Carter administration allowed him into the U.S. to be treated for a liver condition, and froze Iranian assets in the U.S. In retaliation, 500 Iranians stormed the U.S. embassy compound in Teheran on Nov. 4, 1979, and took the employees hostage. Of the 90 hostages, 52 were held for the full 444 days.13

The collapse of Iran led the U.S. to re-examine its attitude toward Afghanistan within weeks of the Herat uprising. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was now telling Carter that the Soviet Union might use Afghanistan to penetrate into South Asia, and even influence Pakistan, the remaining ally of U.S. containment policy in the region. This scenario was nonsense since no change had occurred in the Soviet attitude towards Afghanistan, and the U.S. was being kept apprised of Soviet activity. Brzezinski’s motive was to provoke a conflict to ensnare the Soviet Union in its own “Vietnam.”

In language that now seems eerily familiar, Brzezinski convinced the Special Coordination Committee of the National Security Council to be “more sympathetic to those Afghans who were determined to preserve their country’s independence.”14 _{The day after the first Soviet troops crossed the} border, he wrote a memo to Carter that outlined the new “reality:”

As mentioned to you a week or so ago, we are now facing a regional crisis. Both Iran and Afghanistan are in turmoil, and Pakistan is both unstable internally and extremely apprehensive externally. If the Soviets succeed in Afghanistan, and [blacked out] the age-long dream of

12. “Ayatullah Khomeini: The Mystic Who Lit the Fires of Hatred,” Time, Jan. 7, 1980. 13. The hostage-taking ended on Jan. 21, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in, which was no coincidence. In the run-up to the 1980 election, the Reagan campaign team feared that Carter could score a political coup by securing the release of the hostages before the election. The possibility of such an “October Surprise” led Reagan campaign staff to commit one of the grossest acts in American history.

Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey, who would become CIA director, ran an intelligence operation against Carter that involved stealing debate briefing books and question- ing military and intelligence officers about the October Surprise. Richard Allen, head of the “October Surprise Working Group,” and Robert McFarlane—both of them future national security advisors—met with an emissary from the Khomeini regime in Washington in early October 1980 to delay the release of the hostages until after the November 1980 election.

The moment Reagan was sworn in and the hostages were released, Iran’s assets were unfrozen, and a shipment of U.S. arms left Israel for Iran. In 1984, the U.S. would again involve Israel in an arms-for-hostages backroom deal with Iran that would lead to one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. See Chapter 9.

14. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), p. 427, <nsarchive.chadwyck.com/afessayx.htm#10>.

Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean will have been fulfilled… [The] Iranian crisis has led to the collapse of the balance of power in Southwest Asia, and it could produce Soviet presence right down on the edge of the Arabian and Oman gulfs. Accordingly, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan poses for us an extremely grave challenge, both internationally and domestically.15

Carter, preoccupied by the hostage crisis, accepted Brzezinski’s opportunistic revisionism:

The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position; therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil…. Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.16

This last sentence would become known as “The Carter Doctrine,” but it was little more than bravado and bluster. The U.S. was in no position to engage the Soviets in Afghanistan, so Carter sought indirect methods to hinder “Soviet expansionism.” One such method was to increase covert aid to the mujahedin.

Although such aid officially began in 1980, Brzezinski admitted in a 1998 interview that the CIA had been involved since the summer of 1979:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahedin began during 1980; that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, on July 3, 1979, President Carter signed the first directive for covert aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.17

Carter and Brzezinski read into the Soviet invasion what they wanted, but it would take incoming president Ronald Reagan to distort U.S. Afghanistan policy into a full-blown crusade. Reagan viewed the world though a simplistic moral prism in which the U.S. was the bastion of virtuous Christian democracy, and the Soviet Union was the embodiment of atheistic evil. In a famous quote Reagan said: “No one who disbelieves in God and in an afterlife can possibly be trusted.”

15. Memo from Zbigniew Brzezinski to President Jimmy Carter, Dec. 26, 1979, Cold War, Episode 20, op. cit.

16. President Jimmy Carter, State of the Union Address, Jan. 21, 1980.

17. “The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan —Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,” Le Nouvel

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During his Feb. 16, 1985, State of the Union Address, Reagan made a statement that would later become known as “The Reagan Doctrine”—the rollback of the Soviet Union in the Third World:

We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives--on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua--to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth… Support for freedom fighters is self-defense and totally consistent with the OAS and UN Charters.18

This last statement is, of course, highly specious—one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist—but it is in essence the same false reasoning that presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would later use to justify the “war on terrorism,” a term that Reagan coined.

In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Directive 166 authorizing what would become the largest covert military operation in U.S. history. Until then, the U.S. had been content to fund opponents of the Communist government in Kabul; now the objective was to crush the Soviet Union. In all, the CIA would provide $3.5 billion to the mujahedin, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars drawn on a secret joint Swiss bank account with Saudi Arabia. By 1987, annual supplies of U.S. arms to the mujahedin, including Stinger missiles from 1986 onward, totaled 67,000 tons.

U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was the Cold War continuation of the “Great Game” played by Britain against Russia for Eurasian domination, a cruel game paid in Afghan blood.

Pakistan

Until the invasion, Pakistan did not enjoy warm relations with the U.S. In 1977, the Carter Administration reduced foreign aid because of Pakistan’s atomic bomb program and the repressive rule of its strongman Gen. Zia ul- Haq, who came to power in a coup that year.19

Carter was the first and last U.S. president to predicate foreign aid upon an ethical principle—respect for human rights—and Zia clearly didn’t measure up. However, after Iran fell, ethics suddenly became a luxury Carter couldn’t afford, as the “Carter Doctrine” showed. Almost overnight, Pakistan was granted Most Favored Nation trading status, and Carter offered Zia hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid, as well as

18. President Ronald Reagan, State of the Union Address, Feb. 16, 1985. The address speaks more to the Contras’ opposition to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, than to the mujahedin and their jihad, but Reagan clearly places both on the same moral plane.

19. Zia declared martial law on July 5, 1977, on the pretext that President Zulfikar Ali-Bhutto’s ruling socialist Pakistan People’s Party had rigged the March 7 vote. Under the new pro- Western régime, the private sector prospered, and Zia set about Islamicizing the country’s political, legal and economic structures. Zia cancelled elections planned for Oct. 15, and promised new ones within 90 days. They were indefinitely postponed, and Bhutto was executed.

protection against possible Soviet strikes. All Zia had to do was help train the mujahedin.

The rabidly anti-Communist Reagan administration proved to be even more obliging. Zia obtained a six-year economic and military aid package that elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. The facts that Zia was still pursuing a nuclear weapons program and had no intention of permitting democratic rule were irrelevant now that the U.S. had redefined Zia as a “freedom fighter.”

Another instance of moral backsliding concerned U.S.-Pakistani relations over drug policy. In 1995, former CIA director of Afghan operations Charles Cogan admitted that the CIA sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War.

Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade... I don’t think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout....20

When the operation by the CIA/ISI (the Inter-Service Intelligence agency, Pakistan’s CIA) to fund the mujahedin began in July 1979, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region grew opium only for regional markets, and produced no heroin. Within two years, it became the world’s top source of heroin, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand.

In 1979 Pakistan had virtually no heroin addicts; by 1981 it had 5,000; by 1985, 1.2 million. The CIA needed the drug revenue to fund the operation, so when the mujahedin seized territory, peasants were ordered to plant opium as a form of revolutionary tax. In Pakistan, Afghan leaders and ISI-protected local syndicates operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. All this time, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad did not initiate a single major seizure or arrest.21

In this mutually exploitative scenario, Pakistan ostensibly had a free hand. The CIA provided weapons and funding, but the ISI controlled disbursement and the training camps. Despite repeated requests, the ISI didn’t allow official representatives from the CIA or Pentagon to have any

20. Alfred McCoy, “Drug fallout: the CIA’s Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade,”

The Progressive, August 1997. The U.S. government didn’t really sacrifice anything, since it

had long been involved in the region’s drug trade. On July 17, 1973, the National Security Council sent a memo to Henry Kissinger stating that the U.S. should not be concerned about Daoud’s coup d’état:

“For the U.S., Daoud may be a little harder to deal with than was Prime Minister Shafiq or the King. He is likely to be more suspicious of U.S. motives, somewhat less co-operative, and a bit more pro-Soviet. Nevertheless, on the issues that affect U.S. interests—continued Afghan independence, stability in the region and narcotics—there is no reason to think he will reverse Afghan policies.” (Harold H. Saunders, Henry R. Appelbaum, “Coup in Afghanistan,” National

Security Council Memorandum, July 17, 1973,

<www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB59/zahir15.pdf>) (Spelling edited for consistency).

3. The Mujahid

first-hand contact with the mujahedin, lest they find out that these “freedom fighters” were really anti-Western Islamic warlords who hated the U.S. as much they did the Soviet Union.22 _{When the pressure finally became too} much to bear in the late 1980s, the ISI set up stage-managed tours so that American visitors would only see what the ISI wanted them to see.

Pakistan’s training camps already existed before the Soviet invasion. They were started in 1973 to address an 80-year-old problem—the Durand Line. On Nov. 12, 1893, Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, Britain’s Foreign Secretary to India, forced the Emir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan, to define his the country’s eastern border, placing more than half of Afghanistan’s Pashtuns within British India. Pashtuns make up half of the population of Afghanistan, and virtually all of its leaders have been Pashtun.

When Pakistan (Punjab-Afghanistan-Kashmir-istan) was created out of the Muslim-Hindu partition of British India in 1947, the Durand Line defined Pakistan’s Western border. The Afghan government declared the boundary null and void, but the world paid not heed. Thus, a simmering sore point between the two countries would be the issue of “Pashtunistan”—a demand that Pakistan grant their Pashtuns autonomy, independence, or the right to join Afghanistan.

When Daoud overthrew Zahir Shah in 1973, he made the Pashtunistan cause a central theme of his government. In response, Pakistan began developing subversive rebel Afghan forces. Mediation efforts by Iran and the U.S. helped defuse tensions by 1977, and during a visit to Islamabad in March 1978, Daoud and Zia reached an understanding: Zia would release Pashtun and Baluchi militants from prison, and Daoud would withdraw support for these groups and expel Pashtun and Baluchi militants taking refuge in Afghanistan.23

One of these militants was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamist Pashtun from northern Afghanistan, who wanted to unite Afghans of all ethnic groups under Islamic rule. Hekmatyar was a terrorist, major heroin manufacturer, and a liability to mujahedin unity, but to Zia he was the perfect instrument to be installed in Kabul once the fighting ended. As Robert Kaplan writes in

Soldiers of God:

22. The principals in the relationship were ISI Director-General Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman, CIA Director William Casey, and Chief of Saudi Intelligence Prince Turki al-Faisal. On Aug. 17, 1988, Rahman, Zia and U.S. ambassador Arnold Raphael were among 33 who died when their Hercules C-30B suddenly crashed. Akhtar would be replaced by Gen. Hamid Gul. The charter of the ISI stipulates that its Director is a CIA appointee. To maintain the posture of “plausible deniability,” an imperialist intelligence service obligatorily employs proxies to do dirty work that would not pass muster with civilian oversight and public opinion. For the purpose, Pakistan is an ideal vassal, a creation of imperial divide and conquer on the subcontinent and dependent on protection from India.

23. Baluchistan is a province in Southwest Pakistan, straddling the southern border of Afghanistan.

In addition to being a militant fundamentalist like Zia himself, Hekmatyar was a talented politician backed up by almost no grassroots support and no military base inside [Afghanistan]. He was therefore wholly dependent on Zia’s protection and financial largesse (courtesy of American taxpayers)….24

Because Hekmatyar was Zia’s man, he became the CIA’s favorite

mujahid. The Soviet Union, the U.S. and Pakistan all had selfish motives for

involving themselves in Afghanistan. Our world today is a direct product of this selfishness.

BI N LA D E N A N D T H E M U J A H E D I N

For Muslims worldwide, the Soviet invasion justified jihad both in the classical sense of jihad fi sabil Allah and in the modern sense of anti-colonial liberation, although the religious sense prevailed among those who came to fight.

Osama bin Laden heeded Sheikh Abdullah Azzam’s call to jihad, and left for Pakistan on a secret orientation trip within two weeks after the Soviet tanks rolled in. Members of Jamiat-i-Islami (Society of Islam) met him at the port of Karachi and took him to Peshawar to see the refugees, meet the leaders of the mujahedin, and survey the organization.

Peshawar was Jihad Central. Located near the Khyber Pass Afghan border crossing, the capital of Pakistan’s heavily Pashtun Northwest Frontier Province was a veritable mujahedin university town for Muslim volunteers. They came; they trained; they fought. The star attraction was Sheik Azzam, who was persuaded to relinquish his post as lecturer at Islamabad Islamic University to come to Peshawar. The decision was extraordinary because