US covert operation in Afghanistan

Dawn
WASHINGTON, Dec 12: Despite formal denials, the United States launched a covert operation to bolster anti-Communist guerrillas in Afghanistan at least six months before the 1979 Soviet invasion of the country, according to a former top US official.

"We actually did provide some support to the Mujahedeen before the invasion," former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told AFP 20 years after Moscow's ill-fated foray into Afghanistan.

Asked what form it took and what agency was in charge of it, he replied: "The difference between arms and money is theoretical, isn't it? ... It certainly was not run by the Red Cross."

The Carter administration had consistently denied any attempt to undermine the Afghan governments of Nur Mohammad Taraki and his successor, Hafizullah Amin.

But Brzezinski, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Stansfield Turner and others acknowledged that the Taraki-led coup in April of 1978 had been interpreted in Washington as an another Communist victory.

"We felt that he was more under the control of the Soviets than his predecessor," said Turner.

Faced with growing resistance, the Taraki government was indeed bombarding Moscow with requests for military assistance.

"We need practical and technical help in both men and weapons," Taraki told then Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin in a March 18, 1979, telephone conversation, according to Soviet archive documents.

The Soviets, at first reluctantly then more eagerly, began to yield to the blandishments.

"They acquired a greater stake in what was happening in Afghanistan," said Teresita Schaffer, a veteran US diplomat, who served at the State Department's Pakistan desk at the time of the Soviet invasion.

By the summer of 1979, said Brzezinski, Soviet intentions were clear to him.

"I gave the president (Jimmy Carter) a memorandum in the middle of that year, about six months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that in my view, the Soviets would invade," he recalled.

There would be many obstacles to overcome before the programme initiated by Brzezinski would grow into the largest US covert operation since World War II worth a staggering $2 billion.

As Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan on December 27, skeptics in the Carter administration argued the country was doomed.

One of the most prominent member of that camp was, surprisingly, CIA Director Turner.

"I believed that they would be able to conquer Afghanistan with 120,000 well-equipped troops," he reminisced in an interview with AFP.

According to Schaffer, the State Department was split between Soviet specialists and Asia experts.

"The Russian experts felt that Afghanistan would become like Soviet Central Asia, that ... ultimately the resistance would fail," she said. "The South Asia watchers, I think, had a more open mind."

Brzezinski said that on the first day after the Soviet invasion, he gave President Carter a memorandum, "in which the most significant sentence was 'We now have the opportunity to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam'."

But it would not be until 1985 that the Reagan administration would decide to aim for full military victory in Afghanistan, implicitly adopting the Brzezinski approach.-AFP