OpEdNews Op Eds - Afghanistan War: Forgotten but not over

One reason that the US is not leaving Afghanistan is because of a myth that Afghanistan became a breeding ground for al-Qaeda because the US abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviets were defeated in 1989.

The truth is more likely that the mistake the US made was not honoring a United Nations peace agreement worked out by the then Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva. Instead the US was pumped up with triumphalism and stayed in Afghanistan and continued to fund chaos, even after the Soviets left.

In 1986 the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was desperate to get out of Afghanistan. In 1987 Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would be withdrawing its military from Afghanistan. He thought that he had negotiated a peace deal with the US to stabilize Afghanistan after Soviet troops left. (HERE )

Under that deal the Soviets would withdraw its forces and in exchange the US would stop funding the mujahedeen. Instead the US reneged on the deal and continued funding the civil war in Afghanistan until the overthrow of the government of President Mohammad Najibullah in 1992 (HERE ).

The US had thought that the Najibullah government would quickly fall after the Soviets pulled out in 1989. Instead with the continued Soviet financial support, the government of Najibullah held on until the Soviets finally withdrew their financial support in 1992. Without financial support the Najibullah government in Afghanistan fell to the US backed mujahedeen.

During all those years the US just handed over billions of dollars in military aid to Pakistan to distribute how and to whom they wished. Never mind that Pakistan had very different national security goals in mind than did the US.

And what is Pakistan's most important national security concern? It is India. Pakistan saw how effective and relatively inexpensive (especially when the funding was coming from the US and Saudi Arabia) a motivated force of fanatical Islamic guerillas could be in defeating a super power such as the Soviet Union. They decided to turn that force against India too.

With the fall of the Najibullah government in 1992 the mujahedeen, which later became known as the Northern Alliance, took power. The Northern Alliance was made up of mostly non-Pashtun mujahedeen lead by Ahmad Shah Massoud.

The Northern Alliance tried but failed to form a unified government. Instead the country broke out in civil war between the many different factions. The civil war raged on until 1996 when the Pakistan backed Taliban took over government control and the mujahedeen withdrew from Kabul. Read More at David William Pear

Afghanistan War: Forgotten but not over.