The Blowback Chronicles, Part 2: The Unholy Alliance Forged in Afghanistan

How the US' unholy partnership with radical Islam in Afghanistan ended up biting it in the rear.

Aug 25, 2024

If there’s one distinctive feature of United States foreign policy over the last century, it is its penchant for generating chaos in whatever region it insinuates itself in. The US will initially meddle in a country — launch a military intervention, impose brutal economic sanctions, organize a color revolution, or foment a proxy war — with the aim of toppling a government or sticking it to a geopolitical rival in the vicinity.

The US’ track record is quite spotty in this regard. There are cases where the US’ schemes fall flat and the targeted regime is able to live to see another day. Other times, the US initially succeeds in overthrowing a government or drawing a rival into a prolonged proxy conflict. For the myopic statesman, this would count as a foreign policy win for Uncle Sam. However, astute observers of politics fully understand that a public policy action should ultimately be measured by its long-term consequences.

The US’ intervention in Afghanistan towards the final stages of the Cold War is indicative of this trend.

Before the Soviet’s invasion of Afghanistan, the South Asian nation kept equidistant relations from the US and the Soviet Union. This dynamic changed after the Saur Revolution, when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) deposed the Republic of Afghanistan. Once the dust settled from this revolution, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) was formed and quickly fell into the Soviets’ orbit.

Afghanistan’s instability did not end though. The DRA was caught up in factional infighting from the jump, putting its Soviet patrons in a nervous state. The DRA was repressive towards its opposition as well. A brutal crackdown meted out against the city of Herat in the spring of 1979 kicked off a national insurrection that made the possibility of a civil war a harsh reality in Afghan politics. The opposition to the DRA regime was diverse, although an Islamic fundamentalist element emerged as the dominant force of the anti-DRA rebellion.

The Soviets were already disturbed by the proliferation of Islamist movements in Afghanistan’s proximity, namely the Iranian Revolution (1979) right next door. For Soviet strategists, the downfall of Afghanistan to Islamist movements could potentially endanger the Central Asian Soviet republics due to the large Islamic populations that transnational Islamist movements could tap into in this region.

The prospect of a jihadist pipeline going straight into the Soviet Union’s Central Asian constituent republics was something the Soviets would never tolerate. Further, the Soviets’ anxiety over the DRA’s repressive, yet unstable rule in Afghanistan made the concept of intervening in the rapidly destabilizing nation’s internal affairs a matter of securing the Soviets’ periphery. In late December 1979, the Soviets finally pulled the trigger and invaded Afghanistan.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan offered a great opportunity for US policymakers to experiment with the use of Jihadi proxy fighters against a geopolitical rival. Moreover, the Soviet’s brutal military campaign in Afghanistan acted as a bat signal for Islamist fighters hailing from Gulf Arab states to join the ranks of the mujahideen. They were eager to repel the Soviet invaders from Afghanistan, who were viewed as Marxist infidels violating the sovereignty of an Islamic nation.

Eager to bounce back from its previous military quagmire in Vietnam, the US carried out clandestine operations in Afghanistan as part of the Zbignew Brezinkski-sponsored Operation Cyclone, where the US government provided military aid and training to Afghan militants resisting the Soviet Union's invasion of the country in 1979. The goal here was to give the Soviet Union its very own Vietnam.

Operation Cyclone would end up becoming the highest-funded and longest-lasting CIA operation in US history. In sum, the Carter administration and its successor in the Reagan administration spent $20 billion to train and supply arms to Afghan insurgents to fight the Soviets. The Islamic resistance fighters, the mujahideen, received lavish aid from countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan. They were also depicted as “freedom fighters” by the American corporate media.

One of the most notable of the Afghan Arabs who was involved in the jihadist onslaught in Afghanistan was Islamist dissident Osama Bin Laden, who would later become the mastermind of the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Bin Laden and his co-militants took advantage of the military aid bestowed upon the mujahideen and other rebels and used the money and weapons to start building their own independent networks.

The well-armed Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan eventually shocked the world and made Soviet forces cry uncle. In 1989, the Soviets ended up pulling out of Afghanistan and two years’ later the Soviet Union dissolved. Whatever restraint the US exercised in the Lebanese case earlier in the 1980s flew out the window after the US was able to successfully bog down the Soviets in Afghanistan.

To those who politically came of age during the Global War on Terror era, the kind of praise legacy outlets heaped on Islamist fighters in addition to the military support they received from the US would have seemed bizarre. But during the Cold War the US had a habit of supporting Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and even boosting fundamentalist strains of Islamism like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia in an effort to undermine secular nationalist states in the Middle East such as Kemalist Turkey, Baathist Iraq and Syria, and Nasserite Egypt — who were largely feared to be drifting towards the Soviet’s sphere of influence.

The US was committed to maintaining hegemony abroad no matter the strange bedfellows it consorted with and the potential long-term consequences of such partnerships. It didn’t help that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 presented another opportunity for the US imperial machine to continue churning along. During Operation Desert Storm, US forces thrashed the Iraqi military and prevented the Hussein regime’s annexation of Kuwait.

One of the ironies of Operation Desert Storm is that the CIA previously helped Hussein ascend politically throughout the 1960s. Iraq would later be used as a battering ram against the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). International relations are a harsh enterprise, where alliances and partnerships can be quite fleeting. Today’s ally can turn into tomorrow’s enemy under the right political circumstances.

After the successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US ruling class believed it could still maintain a large military footprint in the Middle East without facing any negative consequences. Never mind that the US’ presence in the Middle East angered many Islamic fundamentalists who were repulsed by the proximity of foreign troops and bases to holy sites of Islam. Although many of these Islamists were previously strange bedfellows of the US in the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they still viewed the US’ imperial project as a hostile endeavor.

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Al-Qaida would assume the mantle of resistance against the US’ encroachments in the Middle East and the broader Islamic world. Al-Qaida and its affiliates gradually launched attacks against American citizens and military assets during the 1990s. The terrorist network took credit for a series of attacks such as the Aden Hotel bombings, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the USS Cole.

Even with these attacks, DC policymakers’ minds were completely warped by the US’ unipolar status. The national security establishment could not even fathom the idea that the US’ zealous ambitions abroad would be met with fierce resistance from actors who firmly disagreed with its universalist agenda.

However, reality hit the US square in the face after Al-Qaeda carried out the horrific September 11, 2001, resulting in the deaths of almost 3,000 people. Although the US’ initial instinct of going after the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks was correct, it went off the rails by pursuing a 20-year nation-building experiment in Afghanistan that cost over $2 trillion and claimed the lives of over 2,300 US soldiers.

Although the US withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in 2021, its leaders still believe the country is equipped to carry out great power competition against the likes of nuclear powers such as China and Russia. Such is the mindset of a foreign policy class that’s obsessed with maintaining global primacy no matter the costs.

Unlike non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda, nuclear-armed state rivals to the US are capable of dishing out serious damage to the US. The US is undoubtedly sleepwalking its way into great power conflicts that could irreversibility set back its imperial ventures.

If the US’ foreign policy track record is any indicator, it has not learned a thing about its imperial misadventures.

NEXT: The Blowback Chronicles, Part 1: The Iranian Misadventure

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