History to Trump: CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded in ’79 - washingtonpost

Newly declassified documents detail U.S. covert actions, and Russian motives, in 40 years of war.

It’s true that the United States has been in the Afghan jihad for a very long time — so long that we sometimes forget we became part of the war precisely 40 years ago — 10 months before the Soviets blundered into Kabul.

The CIA smuggled billions of dollars in weapons into the hands of the Afghan resistance. That bled the Red Army, leaving at least 15,000 soldiers and commandos dead on the battlefield. The United States thought it had won the last great battle of the Cold War. Victory has proved fleeting.

A thousand-page trove of just-declassified White House, CIA and State Department documents adds significantly to our knowledge of what happened before and after the Soviet invasion. It shows that in 1980, President Carter’s CIA spent close to $100 million shipping weapons to the Afghan resistance.

Carter’s global gun-running was more aggressive than we knew. He aimed to oust the Soviets. The United States even enlisted revolutionary Iran, which held American hostages. In the 1980s, it grew to become the biggest American covert action of the Cold War. President Reagan eventually upped the ante to $700 million a year.

One moral of the story: When we walked away from our Afghan allies at the end of the Cold War, we created a vacuum. And that vacuum became a whirlwind. It spawned the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And then the war came home.

The documents detail the start of a road to hell.

The American ambassador in Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was kidnapped and killed on Valentine’s Day 1979. He had been the American charge d’affaires in Moscow. The killing bore the hallmarks of a political murder. “His death certainly seemed to involve the responsibility of the Afghan government, and probably the Soviets,” Bruce Flatin, the embassy’s political counselor, reported to Washington. As with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo 1914, a handful of bullets sparked a great conflagration.

The White House, propelled by national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, began thinking about covert action to support the armed Afghan resistance, which was three months old. Brzezinski knew the CIA’s ability to do that was “extremely limited.” It had the barest grasp on who the resistance leaders were and what they thought. It also believed strongly that the Soviets “would be most reluctant to introduce large numbers of ground forces into Afghanistan.” - Read More

History to Trump: CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded in ’79