Josh Messite, Editor at Negation Magazine, begins his five-part series on US imperialists’ unsuccessful attempts to subjugate Afghanistan and secure their unrivaled position atop the world-system.
The longest war in American history is over. This series is an attempt to understand what happened, a project motivated not by a politically-neutral desire for knowledge but by a communist desire to destroy the capitalist-imperialist system that the American war in Afghanistan emanated from. If we want to annihilate the current world order, I believe we must study its origins, its functioning, and its potentials. In this effort to shed light on American intervention in Afghanistan for the purpose of offering useful information to present and future combatants in struggles for liberation, I will ask and try to answer the following questions: What does the withdrawal of American soldiers from Afghanistan suggest about the trajectories of both countries? Why did the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan fail? Why did America invade Afghanistan in the first place? Why did the September 11th attacks occur? What is the nature of the relationship between America’s rulers and the ruling classes aligned with the American Empire? What explains the decisions of the Afghan masses and the imperial elites?
These topics cannot be tackled in the space of a single article, so I have broken this story up into five pieces. Part 1, “World Domination,” covers the three phases of American-Afghan entanglement in the 20th century: 1946-1978, 1979-1988, and 1989-1998. Part 2, “Course Correction,” traces the roots of American and Saudi deep politics. Part 3, “American Vision,” is my attempt to unravel the mysteries of 9/11. Part 4, “Land of Opportunity,” focuses on the post-9/11 transformation of the American Empire. Part 5, “Afghan Subjectivity,” surveys the history of mass politics in Afghanistan. Each part is intended to serve as both a stand-alone essay and as one component of a cohesive whole. Before I lay out these dense and disorienting webs of power and resistance, I’ll do you a favor and condense the last 25 years of American imperialism into four words: they wanted too much.
When the faction of the American ruling class that spearheaded the war in Afghanistan laid out their “Project for the New American Century” in the late 1990s, I contend that there were two fatal flaws in their plan that they could not foresee: the contradictory drives animating their capitalist empire and the potent subjectivity of the unconquered masses of Afghanistan. Those unsolvable problems did not prevent them from deriving certain benefits from the collective grief, mass hysteria, and patriotic bloodthirst that were produced by 9/11 and rapidly funneled into the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The imperial maximalists were able to drastically expand the repressive powers of the American government, significantly increase the number of resources allocated to the American military-industrial complex, serve the interests of American energy companies, and eliminate many of the American intelligence community’s allies-turned-foes. But the forces driving and opposing them prevented these Reaganite neoconservatives and CIA-aligned “realists” from being able to subjugate Afghanistan or reverse the decline of the American Empire. Their ultimate goal was to use 9/11 and the War on Terror justified by the 2,605 Americans killed in the attacks to guarantee the post-Cold War American Empire’s position as the unchallenged global hegemon — an outcome they could not achieve.
It is reasonable to interpret the Biden Administration’s humiliating withdrawal from Kabul twenty years later and the immediate collapse of the Americans’ puppet regime as the supreme symbols of the imperial extremists’ utter failure to turn the “new Pearl Harbor” they had been openly pining for into an opportunity to establish an unassailable 21st century Pax Americana. Their arrogant pursuit of long-term world domination was doomed from the start by the dynamics of imperial capitalism and by the refusal of the Afghan people to be beaten into passive submission by their invaders — objective and subjective realities which the ultra-militaristic wing of the American imperial elite could never afford to perceive.
Part 1 of 5: World Domination
“There’s no sacrifice too great for a chance at immortality.”
— Humphrey Bogart, “In a Lonely Place,” 1950
American involvement in Afghanistan did not begin with “Operation Enduring Freedom” in October 2001. America’s efforts to turn Afghanistan into one of its subservient client-states started with the ill-fated Helmand Valley development project, launched during the Golden Age of American imperialism, the halcyon years following World War II when America replaced the British Empire as the single most dominant global power. The Helmand Valley project was initially handled by the prestigious American construction contractor Morrison-Knudsen and then run directly by the American government until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Apart from its sizable Baloch minority, Helmand Valley is mainly inhabited by Pashtuns, the largest and most powerful ethnic group in ethnically-diverse Afghanistan; the Americans were invited to take command of the effort to develop the region by the Pashtun ruling family, the Mohammadzai Dynasty led by young King Zahir Shah. Pashtun rebels in the countryside had just killed 4,000 of the Pashtun monarchy’s soldiers only a decade after a radical high-school student from the oppressed Hazara ethnic group assassinated Zahir Shah’s father. The embattled, Western-educated royal family envisioned this rural modernization project as a technocratic-nationalist strategy for the central government to win the loyalty and docility of the notoriously unruly Pashtun peasants and nomads, turning a destabilizing threat into a unified, productive, moderately-prosperous base of power to be wielded against their foreign (Pakistani) and domestic ethnic (Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek) rivals. The United States envisioned the “nation-building” infrastructure program as a way to use its wealth and state-of-the-art technology to “outbid” Afghanistan’s neighbors to the north and to the east, the USSR and newly-Red China; the American government wanted to show the ruling classes of Afghanistan and the other countries in the region that they would be better off depending on them as their patron than on the Soviet or Chinese governments. But America’s post-WWII effort to develop Afghanistan — much like America’s post-9/11 do-over — is a tale of hubris and condescension rather than an example of mutually-beneficial imperial soft power.
The statistics tell a muddled story about the Helmand Valley project’s impact on total wheat and cotton production or average farm incomes in the area, but the ambitious initiative can only be assessed as an unambiguous debacle. The Afghan and American planners’ disinterest in the knowledge and perspectives of the farmers blinded them to the pitfalls which inevitably caused the project to fail. The Afghan aristocrats’ preference for cynical and flashy symbols of industrial modernity over sincere and serious efforts to improve the material conditions of the rural masses led them to encourage the American contractors to begin construction on their impressive dams without undertaking inconvenient soil and drainage surveys which would have exposed the ecological impracticality of their plan. The greedy American consultants and technicians had some misgivings but were getting paid too well by the Afghan king to worry too much about the well-being of the local farmers who were supposed to benefit from their work. Entirely-predictable waterlogging and soil salinization soon threatened to drag down the entire program, but the bureaucratic coalition’s ideological elitism and administrative incompetence prevented them from properly training the farmers on water management techniques or prioritizing sustainable soil fertility. Efforts to provide the inhabitants of Helmand Valley with modern education and healthcare were lackluster and ineffective. When the American experts were forced out by the arrival of the Soviet Army, they did not leave behind a relatively-educated and politically-reliable rural middle class built on the sturdy foundation of a functional agricultural economy, the outcome desired by their Afghan hosts — thirty-three years and tens of millions of dollars later, the farmers of Helmand Valley were impoverished and illiterate, struggling to survive on salinized soil. Those conditions would have terrible repercussions once Afghanistan’s political situation changed.
Unfortunately, it is not the American Way to go gently into that good night. America’s postwar attempt to gain a geopolitically-valuable foothold in the region through aid and infrastructure resulted in a local fiasco that had a negative impact on the thousands of Pashtun and Baloch inhabitants of the Helmand River Valley; the subsequent stage of American imperialism in Afghanistan — set off by the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in April 1978 — generated a horrific and immense chain of catastrophes which continues to destroy people’s lives throughout the rest of the country and the rest of the world. 1979 can be considered the year America’s ruling class stepped onto the “road to 9/11,” the title of Peter Dale Scott’s invaluable 2007 book on the networks of oil wealth, state power, and covert operations from which the September 11th attacks emerged.
The Jimmy Carter Administration (1977-1981) was split between the militaristic faction led by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and the diplomatic faction led by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance Sr. As Peter Dale Scott argues, the 1979 bureaucratic victory of Brzezinski’s national security clique over Vance’s State Department clique had devastating consequences which have not ceased to this day. Vance1 represented the segment of American capitalists who believed they would benefit more from relatively-peaceful coexistence and commerce between America and the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union than from costly, unwinnable, and unpopular wars like the one America had just lost against the People’s Army of Vietnam/Liberation Army of South Vietnam. Shortly before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Vance and his ally Paul Warnke successfully negotiated a mutual disarmament treaty with the USSR. Vance’s pro-détente faction believed a deal could be struck to deescalate the situation, negotiate a quick Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and establish an uneasy equilibrium between the two global powers. Brzezinski and his allies in the Pentagon, CIA, weapons industry, and energy industry did not want a quick withdrawal negotiated by the State Department or a more stable arrangement of the territorial division of the world. They wanted to annihilate their primary competitor, to trap the Soviets in Afghanistan for as long as possible, to make them bleed a death by a thousand cuts, turning the occupation into the Soviets’ own Vietnam War, an endless cascading nightmare that would cause the overextended Soviet Union to decline, fracture, and implode, leaving America as the world’s only remaining superpower.
Two unconventional weapons were selected by the imperial extremists for their covert mission (codenamed “Operation Cyclone”) to create a death trap in Afghanistan which would fatally poison the Soviet Union and guarantee America’s total geopolitical supremacy: Islamic extremism and opium. There was a Western imperial precedent for the use of both weapons. The British imperialists had a complex and often mutually-beneficial historical relationship with Islamic fundamentalists combatting pan-Arab nationalists and Communists in Egypt, and opium had been at the heart of British imperial value extraction in China and India. Opium was also central to French imperialism in Vietnam, and the use of Islamic fundamentalism in the struggle against both the PDPA and the USSR was an idea first promoted by aristocratic French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches. Count de Marenches — a member of the medieval Catholic “Sovereign Military Order of Malta” — was the leader of the “Safari Club,” a shadowy coalition of Saudi, French, American, Egyptian, Iranian, and Moroccan elites that funded and coordinated interventions against “secularist Marxism” and “Soviet atheism” in Congo, Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Chad in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The second prong of de Marenches’ Afghan proposal, which he codenamed “Operation Mosquito,” was his recommendation that the CIA use Afghan opium to intentionally turn Soviet soldiers into heroin addicts. By 1979, the Americans had already engaged in strategic support for opium trafficking in Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos (The Golden Triangle), as well as strategic support for Islamic fundamentalism in the resource-rich Soviet republics of Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan.
Brzezinski and the CIA commissioned two Pashtun men to take the lead in wielding these weapons in Afghanistan: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Hekmatyar was the leader of an ultraviolent, deeply unpopular Islamic fundamentalist organization — he had been in prison five years earlier for murdering the Afghan Maoist student leader Saydal Sokhandan. Hekmatyar’s power came from his positions as the leading opium trafficker and Pakistani intelligence asset in Afghanistan. Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was the Egypt-educated leader of a tiny Afghan Islamist party who relied on his connections to the Saudi royal family to secure American patronage.
It should be emphasized that American support for these politically marginal Afghan ultra-reactionaries was not a desperate response to (real or perceived) Soviet expansionism. As Brzezinski admitted years later, the covert backing was a tactic intended to “induce a Soviet military intervention.” In March 1979, nine months before the Soviets invaded, a CIA officer named Arnold Horelick suggested that American support for Pakistan’s allies in Marxist-Leninist Afghanistan could “turn the tables on the Soviets for their actions in Africa and Southeast Asia” and “encourage a polarization of Muslim and Arab sentiment against the USSR.” At a meeting hosted by Carter’s Deputy National Security Advisor David L. Aaron a few days later, a Pentagon bureaucrat named Walter B. Slocombe raised the idea of “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire” in Afghanistan. Agents working for the head of Pakistani intelligence, General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, put the CIA in touch with Hekmatyar in May 1979. Brzezinski and his aide Robert Gates (a former CIA officer) convinced President Carter to funnel American aid to Saudi-backed Afghan Islamic extremists like Sayyaf in July 1979.
By the end of the 1980s, Hekmatyar had received over $1 billion from his foreign backers, probably the highest level of support any individual CIA client has ever received. His opium networks rapidly metastasized, with plenty of help from top officials in Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. General Zia overthrew wealthy left-wing populist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in July 1977, executed Bhutto in April 1979 (even though the Saudis and Americans asked him not to), and presided over the Islamization of Pakistan until his suspicious death in an August 1988 plane crash that also killed Director-General Akhtar and the US Ambassador to Pakistan. Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush called General Zia’s inexplicable demise a “great tragedy” and announced that he “felt horrible” about the death of this Islamist military dictator, whom he described as his personal “friend.” A key node in the covert Afghan network was Pakistani Lieutenant General Fazle Haq, a drug lord in his own right who stored his heroin revenues in the CIA’s favorite money-laundering institution, the rogue Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI, also known as “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International,” was founded by Pakistani weirdo Agha Hasan Abedi in 1972, embraced by CIA Director George H. W. Bush in 1976, and shut down by regulators in 1991. Before the 1970s, Afghanistan produced and exported a negligible amount of opium; just two years into the American-Pakistani-Saudi program, Afghanistan was the source of 60% of America’s heroin. Turkish traffickers and Sicilian distributors stepped up to serve as the well-compensated middlemen between the Afghan producers and American consumers of heroin. As President Carter’s Drug Policy Advisor David F. Musto lamented in May 1980, the number of drug-related deaths in New York spiked by 77% within the first year of the Brzezinski-backed surge in Afghan opium production and trafficking. Heroin addiction rates increased by 50% in NYC and heroin-related deaths shot up by 30% across the US as “Golden Crescent heroin flooded the West” for the first time in 1979-1981.
On an accidental and darkly-comedic level, the American transformation of Afghanistan into the global Ground Zero of Heroin was quite literal — the salinized soil from the failed Helmand Valley development project proved to be perfect for growing opium poppies. By the end of 1999, the farmers of Helmand Valley were the source of 39% of the global heroin supply. Afghanistan’s neighbors have some of the highest opiate use rates in the world; millions of Iranians and Pakistanis have become addicted to the heroin that floods in through Afghanistan’s western and southeastern borders. During the Clinton Administration (January 1993-January 2001), the primary source of the heroin trafficked into the United States shifted from Afghanistan to Mexico and Colombia (countries whose powerful drug traffickers also make deals with American intelligence agencies), but the Afghan farmers still produce the vast majority of the world’s opiate supply, including virtually all of the heroin currently being smuggled into Europe, Central Asia, and Russia. Beginning with their 1979 decision to fund and arm Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the American imperialists and their regional allies turned opium into the fulcrum of the entire Afghan economy.
Their other principal Afghan beneficiary, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, is not well known in Western circles, but two of the proteges whom the Americans and Saudis paid Sayyaf hundreds of millions of dollars to cultivate went on to become very famous: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Baloch central planner of the 9/11 attacks, and Osama bin Laden, whose involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War started under Sayyaf’s leadership. Sayyaf’s enlistment campaign was part of a project theorized by Alexandre de Marenches, refined by Pakistani intelligence, and helmed by William J. Casey to create a “foreign legion” of young Muslim men recruited from all over the world to fight the Afghan Marxist-Leninists and the Soviet troops sent in to “pacify” Afghanistan. Bill Casey was a Catholic fundamentalist, crooked businessman, co-founder of the American conservative magazine National Review, and known associate of the Epstein-esque sex trafficker Craig Spence. Spence was found dead in a Ritz-Carlton hotel room before he could testify about his DC prostitution and blackmail ring; in the weeks prior to his death, Spence told a friend: “Casey’s boys are out to get me”.2 Casey became Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director after he helped The Gipper win the Republican Party primaries, forge an electoral alliance with Reagan’s vanquished rival George H. W. Bush, and defeat incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 general election (thanks in no small part to a Casey-H. W.-de Marenches conspiracy to sabotage Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran). Whenever Director Casey and Vice President Bush checked up on their Afghan project in person, the man-on-the-ground they met with was Pakistani heroin trafficker/military commander Fazle Haq; General Zia’s chief enforcer continued to dominate the North-West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan until he was assassinated in Peshawar in 1991.
Brzezinski-aide Bob Gates wrote in his 1996 memoir that he “intensely disliked” working in the “very screwed up” Carter White House, so he returned to the CIA in January 1980 and became Bill Casey’s right-hand man in March 1981. Gates saw the Reagan-Bush-Casey years as a “reawakening,” the “resurgence of the West,” a restoration of “a long-absent sense of confidence and optimism about the future” of America. Gates eventually became the director of the CIA under President Bush Sr. after Casey died — Gates described H. W. as “a delight to work for,” “patient” but “bold and courageous,” “tough” but “kind and generous,” a “genuinely warm, decent human being.” Gates considered Bush Senior’s inner circle — Secretary of State Jim Baker, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and four-star General Colin Powell — to be the “best national security team since the Truman Administration.” In the 21st century, Bill Casey’s Kansan protege re-positioned himself as a Wise Bipartisan Elder Statesman, serving as Bush Junior’s second-term Pentagon chief and Barack Obama’s first-term Pentagon chief.
Osama bin Laden’s role in Bill Casey’s operation was to help finance and assemble the foreign legion that Casey and his allies envisioned as a bulwark against the Godless Communists. bin Laden’s intelligence supervisor was Casey’s Saudi counterpart, Prince Turki bin Faisal, who traveled to the Pakistani-Afghan border region several times a month during the Soviet-Afghan War. Prince Turki told journalist Steve Coll that he considered Osama’s father, royal construction contractor Mohammed bin Laden, to be a “worthy man” and a “genuine hero”; when Osama condemned the Saudi kings for “becoming attached to the American outlook” instead of “serving the interests of the global Muslim community,” the lone exception he made was Turki’s father, King Faisal bin Abdulaziz. When Mohammed bin Laden died in 1967, King Faisal said: “Today I have lost my right arm.” Faisal’s mother/Turki’s grandmother, Tarfa Al ash-Sheikh, was the daughter of the highest-ranking Saudi religious scholar and a descendant of the founder of the Wahhabi sect. Ahmed Badeeb, Prince Turki’s American-educated Chief of Staff, told Steve Coll that high-ranking Saudi royals like Turki, Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, and future-King Salman bin Abdulaziz “liked and appreciated” Osama in the ‘80s (although Prince Bandar bin Sultan was not as impressed, recalling that he “thought Osama couldn’t lead eight ducks across the street”). According to Coll and fellow investigative reporter Lawrence Wright, Prince Turki and future-Crown Prince Nayef arranged for the increasingly-controversial Soviet-Afghan War hero to leave Saudi Arabia in May 1991 and fly back to Peshawar to participate in the (unsuccessful) peace negotiations between Pakistan-backed Hekmatyar, Saudi-backed Sayyaf, and Iran-backed Ahmad Shah Massoud. Badeeb elaborated on elite Saudi affection for Osama: “We were happy with him. He was our man. He was doing all what we ask him.” Badeeb, who knew Osama from Jeddah and had ancestral roots in the same region of Yemen as the bin Laden family, professed that he “loved Osama and considered him a good citizen of Saudi Arabia.” In 1984, the 27-year-old Saudi intelligence asset co-founded a fundraising and recruitment organization named Makhtab al-Khidamat (MaK) in Peshawar along with Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. Azzam was a Palestinian anti-Communist scholar who joined the small Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood after the Nakba, rubbed shoulders with the Islamist bigshots in 1970s Cairo, then blossomed into the demagogue who mentored lanky young Osama at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Azzam’s slogan was “Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues.”
Other figures associated with MaK included Wa’el Hamza Julaidan, a well-connected Arizona-educated 26-year-old businessman from Medina, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, a 33-year-old surgeon from a wealthy and respectable conservative Cairo family whose rise to stardom within the Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist movement began when he was an anti-Nasserist student organizer in the late-‘60s. al-Zawahiri was “radicalized” by President Nasser’s execution of leading Egyptian jihadist Sayyid Qutb in August 1966; Qutb’s brother was Osama bin Laden’s professor in Jeddah; Abdullah Azzam’s first political act was a protest against Qutb’s death sentence, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar cited the hanging of Qutb by the secular nationalists as a turning point in his ideological journey. Hundreds of notable Egyptian Islamists who were tortured and exiled by President Hosni Mubarak — the successor and avenger of President Anwar Sadat — congregated in Peshawar in the 1980s. Ayman al-Zawahari and Mohammed Atef (a MaK affiliate who was a former Egyptian cop, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri) eventually emerged as the reactionary Egyptian expats’ most militant and formidable leaders. al-Zawahiri described his milieu as “the real Islamic front against Zionism, Communism, and imperialism” — the Egyptian Qutbists were known to chant: “The army of Muhammad will return, and we will defeat the Jews!” Unlike bin Laden, al-Zawahiri was a cold and calculating volunteer, drawn to Afghanistan not by humanitarian sentiment or Islamic solidarity but by his theory that “a jihadist movement needs an arena that would act like an incubator, where its seed would grow and where it can acquire practical experience in combat, politics, and organizational matters.”
Saudi royals, Wahhabists, and businessmen donated hundreds of millions of dollars to MaK; current King Salman bin Abdulaziz was a “heavy contributor” who “worked closely with” Osama bin Laden. In an interview conducted by journalist Craig Unger for his 2004 book House of Bush, House of Saud, a Reagan-era Justice Department official named John Loftus said that Vice President Bush “was in charge of the covert operations that supported MaK.” The CIA allowed MaK to conduct its recruitment, fundraising, and training in the United States; Abdullah Azzam was encouraged to “radicalize” young men in dozens of cities in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Starting in 1986 and continuing until 1990, six American entry visas were granted by CIA agents in Egypt and Sudan to a fundamentalist firebrand from Cairo named Omar Abdel-Rahman. Abdel-Rahman’s connection to the extravagant 1981 assassination of President Sadat by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement landed him on a US State Department terrorist watch list, but the CIA still wanted “The Blind Sheikh” to recruit young Muslims living in the US to fight in Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Balkans. Abdel-Rahman was assigned to run MaK’s flagship location in Brooklyn, a five-minute walk from what’s now the Barclays Center. The year the CIA first snuck The Blind Sheikh into America was the same year Vice President Bush, Director Casey, and Deputy Director Gates launched the CIA’s “Counterterrorist Center.” Did Abdel-Rahman — who described Americans as the “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists” — know that the CIA was acting as his guardian angel, covertly lowering American defenses to enable him to serve their imperial interests? Did he just assume that the beastly Americans were too incompetent to stop him from achieving his goals, never suspecting that American intelligence officers had decided to allow him to conduct his operations in the US? Did it feel too easy?
Another Egyptian, Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, was tasked with training Abdel-Rahman’s young recruits, a job he was well-qualified for on the basis of his status as an Egyptian military intelligence agent, CIA contract agent, FBI collaborator, and active US Army Special Forces sergeant. Mohamed — an expert in martial arts who was fluent in Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew — taught Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri about assassinations, surveillance, kidnapping, and other Egyptian military, CIA, and Green Beret tactics. Mohamed also wrote a terrorist training manual called “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants.” Some high-level Islamic fundamentalist assets [“freedom fighters”] were trained in the US Army’s Fort Bragg special warfare school, a North Carolina military base named after an incompetent and unpopular slave-owning Confederate Army general who got fired after losing a ruinous string of battles. Other recruits were trained in the CIA’s covert facility at Camp Peary/The Farm, a site in Virginia named after a US Navy officer who stole from and kidnapped Inuit people before achieving celebrity status by falsely claiming to be the first man to reach the North Pole; Camp Peary is located ten minutes away from my university, the College of William & Mary (coincidentally, the school’s current chancellor is Bob Gates, W&M Class of ‘65). Recruits arriving in Afghanistan were hosted by the Pashtun militia commander and Hekmatyar-disciple Jalaluddin Haqqani, who received tens of millions of dollars from the CIA and glowing praise from President Reagan for his service of America’s quest for unrivaled global supremacy.
Zbigniew Brzezinski got the long, destructive, bloody war that he wanted. Estimated death tolls for the Afghan-Soviet War range from 870,000 to upwards of 2,000,000 Afghans killed. For the sake of comparison, approximately 400,000 Americans died in World War II, and the population of the United States in 1939 was ten times larger than the population of Afghanistan in 1979. The apocalyptic fighting and the Soviets’ ruthless scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategy wiped out the traditional Afghan agricultural system. The vacuum was filled by opium. All of that Afghan suffering and death ultimately bore fruit for the American imperialists and their anti-Communist partners. In 1987, the Soviet Union announced that it would begin pulling its soldiers out of Afghanistan. The Soviet withdrawal started in May 1988 and was completed in February 1989. They had lost “their Vietnam.” Under the leadership of former Afghan secret-police chief Mohammad Najibullah, the PDPA abandoned Marxism-Leninism, put down a Pakistan-backed coup attempt, stayed in power for a few more years as the nationalist “Homeland Party,” then collapsed in 1992. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, a few months after the last Soviet soldiers left across the Afghan-Uzbek border. The USSR began to fragment in 1988 and dissolved in 1991. The American elites had won the Cold War, and their Afghan “Bear Trap” strategy deserves at least some of the credit for that victory. The fall of the Soviet Union led to millions of excess deaths in its former constituent republics over the course of the 1990s. In 1996, Bob Gates described the Soviet-Afghan War as the CIA’s “greatest operational success” in its “glorious crusade” against the “evil empire,” but the former CIA Director felt compelled to add that “we expected post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly, but never considered that it would become a haven for terrorists operating worldwide.” Really? No one in the CIA saw it coming and decided it was an acceptable outcome?
Once the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden co-founded Al-Qaeda with his MaK partners, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Wa’el Julaidan. Julaidan, bin Laden’s closest Saudi friend in Afghanistan, helped finance the Islamist struggle in Bosnia before taking over the “Rabita Trust,” a Pakistani-Saudi charity founded by President Zia and accused by the US State Department of funding Al-Qaeda. Julaidan’s boss Abdullah Azzam was killed in November 1989 by a sophisticated multi-device bombing in Peshawar that could have been carried out by the Pakistani, American, Israeli, Soviet, or Afghan intelligence agencies.3 Mohammed Atef was named Al-Qaeda’s inaugural chief of security and later became bin Laden’s military commander. A violent young Bedouin-Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was greeted by Azzam’s son Huthaifa upon arriving in Peshawar, studied under Mohammed Atef in an Afghan training camp set up by Azzam, participated in a thwarted plot to attack Jordanian tourist sites in December 1999, sponsored the assassination of a USAID executive in Jordan, then moved to Iraq in 2001 (with “seed money” from Osama bin Laden) and founded the Salafi jihadist network that would become the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Ali Mohamed, playfully nicknamed “The American,” had previously pledged his loyalty [bay’ah] to his fellow Egyptian al-Zawahiri, and after his honorable discharge from the US Army in 1989 (with a commendation for “patriotism, valor, fidelity, and professional excellence”), Sergeant Mohamed became Al-Qaeda’s chief trainer, teaching Al-Qaeda operatives about making bombs and hijacking airplanes using boxcutters. Oops! When bin Laden left Peshawar for Sudan in 1992, Ali Mohamed helped organize the move.
One of Abdullah Azzam’s Pashtun disciples, Mohammed Omar, became the founder and leader of the Taliban movement in 1994. Two years later, Omar’s Taliban seized Kabul and established the first “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” In 1989 or 1990, a CIA officer told investigative journalist Robert Parry that “we want to see Najibullah strung up by a light pole,” and in September 1996 the triumphant Taliban granted the CIA’s wish — Omar’s men broke into a United Nations compound that was sheltering “Najib the Bull,” then the Taliban soldiers captured, tortured, castrated, killed, and “strung up” former-President Najibullah. Osama bin Laden accepted Saudi client Abdul Rasul Sayyaf’s invitation to return to Afghanistan in May 1996, and bin Laden formed a close personal, ideological, and financial bond with the Taliban leader, a relationship that was strengthened following the ineffective and politically-incendiary August 1998 American missile strikes on Al-Qaeda’s bases in Afghanistan. Jalaluddin Haqqani, described by Texas Democratic Congressman Charlie Wilson as “goodness personified,” provided protection and aid to Al-Qaeda and was convinced by bin Laden to join forces with Omar’s Taliban. The current leader of ISIS-Khorasan — the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan — is an Arab man named Sanaullah Ghafari (also known as Shahab al-Muhajir) who cut his teeth as a commander in the Haqqani Network. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar used his Afghan-grown opium and American-grown militias to help finance, supply, and train Al-Qaeda affiliates in Central Asia. Profits from the production and circulation of opium grown and harvested by farmers in Afghanistan were essential to the expansion of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1990s.
In 1989, secular liberal Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto — whose father had been executed ten years earlier by the regime of America’s friend Zia-ul-Haq — cautioned newly-elected President Bush Sr. that “the extremists so emboldened by the United States during the Eighties are now exporting their terrorism to other parts of the world… you are creating a veritable Frankenstein’s monster.” Bush was undeterred; Bhutto was assassinated by the Islamic extremists she had warned Bush about. The growth of Al-Qaeda’s loose ideological network during Bush Senior’s only term and Bill Clinton’s first term — an expansion facilitated at every level by American policies or direct American support — quickly translated into terrorist attacks against Americans. In February 1993, a team recruited by Omar Abdel-Rahman, financed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and trained by Ali Mohamed detonated a truck bomb below the World Trade Center. The 1,300 lb (600 kg) device failed to bring down the towers as intended, but the large blast did kill six people in the North Tower’s garage and basement, including a pregnant woman named Monica Rodriguez Smith who was working her last shift as a building maintenance secretary before going on maternity leave.
A month later, Ali Mohamed hosted Ayman al-Zawahiri in California and helped him establish the fundraising contacts his terror network would tap into to finance their deadly attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in November 1995. Shortly after al-Zawahiri left for Sudan in mid-1993, Mohamed was detained by Canadian police while attempting to retrieve an Egyptian Al-Qaeda associate named Essam Marzouk who was in Mountie custody, but California FBI agent John Zent intervened to have Mohamed released (even though FBI agents in New York had actively monitored the weapons-training lessons that Mohamed gave to Islamist terrorists on Long Island in July 1989). The FBI’s get-out-of-jail-free card allowed Mohamed to lead a surveillance mission on the American embassy in Nairobi in late-1993 and deliver his recon team’s findings to Osama bin Laden in Sudan, who used Mohamed’s photographs and advice to plan the 1998 US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya — Ali Mohamed helped establish the Nairobi terror cell in 1992 and visited Mohammed Atef in Nairobi in 1994. The attacks on the American embassies killed over 200 people, most of them Kenyan and Tanzanian locals in buses and buildings nearby. Mohamed also helped bin Laden and his immediate family with the logistics and security of their 1996 move back to Afghanistan from Khartoum. But when several terrorists connected to the February 1993 bombing were indicted after FBI agents successfully foiled their New York City landmark bomb plot in June 1993, top prosecutors Patrick J. Fitzgerald (future Republican-appointed federal prosecutor in Chicago), Andrew C. McCarthy (future National Review columnist), and Mary Jo White (future Obama-appointed US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair) protected Ali Mohamed from even having to testify in 1994-1995, let alone stand trial — leaders in the FBI and CIA still considered Al-Qaeda’s senior operations adviser to be a valuable American intelligence asset. Why? Who manipulated whom?
Maybe it’s as simple as American leaders valuing their control over oil and gas and their desire to prevent the “re-imperialization” of post-Soviet Russia more than they valued American lives. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, impunity (and perhaps more) was granted to “Islamic Brigades” aligned with Al-Qaeda, funded by Afghan heroin, and opposed to continued Russian influence. These trouble-making Islamist insurgents served the extraction and pipeline-transportation interests of Exxon, Mobil, Enron, Chevron, Unocal (later acquired by Chevron), and Amoco (later acquired by British Petroleum) in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Dagestan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Much remains unknown about the links between American intelligence officers, American military officials, American energy companies, destabilizing Islamic extremists, and international drug traffickers in the 1990s. We know this much, however: the political entity at the heart of the tangled energy-terrorism nexus was Saudi Arabia.
- Secretary Vance’s son, Manhattan chief prosecutor Cyrus Vance Jr., notoriously attempted to reduce Jeffrey Epstein’s sex offender status in 2011 and declined to prosecute Harvey Weinstein in 2015.
- Michael Hedges and Jerry Seper, “In Death, Spence Stayed True to Form,” The Washington Times, November 1989.
- Thomas Hegghammer, The Caravan, 2020 (Cambridge University Press).