Roger Morris: Robert Gates now has to deal with the Islamist movement he himself helped create years ago
[Roger Morris is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who served in the Foreign Service and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Before resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, he was one of only three officials comprising Henry Kissinger's Special Projects Staff conducting the initial highly secret "back-channel" negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War in 1969-1970.]
... The very post-Vietnam détente-restraint of most of [Jimmy] Carter's advisors -- and the President's own inner hawkishness -- opened the way for his presidency to become (contrary to conventional wisdom) a precedent-setting period for covert intervention. And Gates, as [National Security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski's hard-line staff officer for Soviet affairs, and later his personal outer-office assistant in the White House West Wing, was at the center of it all.
In his 1996 memoir, he would write contemptuously (and, in the case of Secretary of State Vance, falsely), "Because Vance was unwilling to use diplomatic leverage against the Soviets, and [Secretary of Defense] Brown and others wanted no part of U.S. military involvement in the Third World, their standoff gave Brzezinski an enormous opportunity to put forward covert action -- which was under the purview of the NSC -- as a means of doing something to counter the Soviets."
Gates and Brzezinski promptly impressed upon Carter that, "It is his CIA," as Gates described it. Within weeks of his inauguration, at the urging of the national security advisor and his Soviet affairs specialist, the new president approved the first covert actions inside the USSR. These operations were aimed at inciting religious discontent in Soviet Central Asia by smuggling in tens of thousands of Korans, as well as radical Islamic literature. In that and other actions to come, it would be Jimmy Carter who first fanned Islamic fundamentalism -- which would have devastating consequences in our own era.
By July 1979 -- less than two weeks after the Sandinista rebels took power from the 43-year Somoza-dynasty dictatorship in Nicaragua, a long favored Washington client in Central America -- they would begin mounting the first covert actions against the popular, and populist, new regime in Managua, as they would soon be shoring up a ruling oligarchy that faced a mounting leftist insurgency in neighboring El Salvador.
There would be similar interventions and intrigues in the Horn of Africa, on the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere, always justified by the Soviet (or proxy Cuban) menace. "On the march" was the way both Gates and his boss were fond of describing the communist hordes. The result would be a rash of secret wars, assassinations, terrorist acts, and manifold corruptions around the world by the administration of the "human rights" president. Moreover, these acts preceded, sometimes by several years, the vaunted covert actions of the Reagan regime, which were often only continuations of Carter policy, in some cases even on a lesser scale. "Jimmy Carter was the CIA's first wholly owned subsidiary," an Agency operative would boast to a friend later, "and the beauty of it was that so few people, even on the inside, ever knew it."
Nowhere would their penchant for the covert prove more fateful than in the remote Hindu Kush. To an already seedy history of American covert intervention there, they now added their own bloody chapter.
At the behest of Pakistan, Communist China, and the Shah of Iran (and their intelligence services), the CIA had begun offering covert backing to Islamic radical rebels in Afghanistan as early as 1973-1974. The explanation for this was that the right-wing, authoritarian regime of Mohammed Daoud, then in power in Kabul, might prove a likely instrument of Soviet military aggression in South Asia. This was a ridiculous pretext. Daoud had always held the Russians, his main patron when it came to aid, at arm's length, and had savagely purged local communists who supported him when, in 1973, he overthrew the Afghan monarchy. For their part, the Soviets had not shown the slightest inclination to use the notoriously unruly Afghans and their ragtag army for any expansionist aim.
Support for the anti-Daoud religious insurgents, far more anti-American than the Kabul regime, actually served distinctly local interests. The Pakistanis and Iranians wanted to fend off Afghan irredentism on their disputed borders and Pakistan was eager to secure a pliant regime in Kabul on its western flank as it faced rival India in the East. The Nixon administration casually supported these aims in deference to its clients with little or no thought for the Afghans, a policy-atrocity which would be repeated for the next quarter-century.
All the backing ceased, however, after an abortive rebel uprising in 1975, as Daoud launched his own détente policy with Iran and Pakistan. Then, in April 1978, his blundering crackdown on Afghanistan's small communist party provoked a successful coup by party loyalists in the army. This happened in defiance of a skittish Moscow which had stopped earlier coup plans. Aware of these facts, Vance's State Department coolly adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the new regime.
But with predictable alarm bells ringing in Iran, Pakistan, and Russophobic China, Carter's covert interventionists at the NSC saw an irresistible "opportunity," as Gates put it, "to counter the Soviets." Three weeks after the Kabul coup, Brzezinski was in Beijing discussing, among other matters of state in his Kissingeresque debut as a diplomat, the "Soviet peril" in Afghanistan.
Gates memoir dutifully notes the ensuing stream of bland speculations by the CIA's Soviet analysts about what the Soviets might next do in their tortured relationship with a faltering, needy, yet independent Afghan communist regime. But he spares us the covert actions the CIA carried out, amid a stream of memos Brzezinski and he sent Carter about the Soviet "threat" in South Asia -- an intervention kept secret from their hated rival, Secretary of State Vance, and the rest of government.
By summer 1978, the old insurgent training camps in Pakistan were open again and thronged with Islamic radicals. They were eager to fight a regime pushing land reform and education for women, while establishing a secular police state. By fall 1978, more than a year before Soviet combat troops set foot in Afghanistan, a civil war, armed and planned by the U.S., Pakistan, Iran, and China, and soon to be actively supported, at Washington's prodding, by the Saudis and Egyptians, had begun to rage in the same wild mountains of eastern Afghanistan where U.S. forces would seek Osama bin Laden a little more than twenty-three years later.
In April 1979, with arms and agitators paid for by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the Shah fell in January ending SAVAK's role), a radical Islamic uprising in Herat in western Afghanistan led to the slaughter of thousands on both sides, including more than 200 Russian military and civilian advisors and their families. Even so, the Soviets stoutly refused to intervene militarily. They even made their refusal absolutely plain to Washington by pointedly conducting telephone conversations with the Afghan leadership en clair for the Americans to intercept. But Gates, Brzezinski, and Carter were having none of it in what had become a deliberate plot to "suck" the Russians into Afghanistan.
The old Great Game was now in cynical full swing. In the sort of mad plan not even Rudyard Kipling could have imagined, they plotted to personally "give the Soviets their Vietnam," as Brzezinski was fond of saying.
The ceaseless machinations and bloody civil strife culminated, of course, in the December 1979 Soviet invasion. The Politburo had resisted it for more than a year and hesitated, even at the eleventh hour. It is, by any measure, one of the more dramatic, and chilling, stories in the annals of world politics. By now, Brzezinski and Gates had essentially created a new foreign policy for the United States and put it into action in secret with few co-authors and no parallel.
By the time, they and their co-conspirators are through, a course will have been set that will take the Afghans into a nightmare universe in which a million-and-a-half of them will die, millions more will become homeless (in what the UN will call "migratory genocide"), and, for more than a quarter-century, their country will be a continuing catastrophe beyond any other in the history of nation-states. In part, it is his own work that Gates now faces as secretary of defense....
Read entire article at Excerpt from a three-part series at TomDispatch.com
... The very post-Vietnam détente-restraint of most of [Jimmy] Carter's advisors -- and the President's own inner hawkishness -- opened the way for his presidency to become (contrary to conventional wisdom) a precedent-setting period for covert intervention. And Gates, as [National Security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski's hard-line staff officer for Soviet affairs, and later his personal outer-office assistant in the White House West Wing, was at the center of it all.
In his 1996 memoir, he would write contemptuously (and, in the case of Secretary of State Vance, falsely), "Because Vance was unwilling to use diplomatic leverage against the Soviets, and [Secretary of Defense] Brown and others wanted no part of U.S. military involvement in the Third World, their standoff gave Brzezinski an enormous opportunity to put forward covert action -- which was under the purview of the NSC -- as a means of doing something to counter the Soviets."
Gates and Brzezinski promptly impressed upon Carter that, "It is his CIA," as Gates described it. Within weeks of his inauguration, at the urging of the national security advisor and his Soviet affairs specialist, the new president approved the first covert actions inside the USSR. These operations were aimed at inciting religious discontent in Soviet Central Asia by smuggling in tens of thousands of Korans, as well as radical Islamic literature. In that and other actions to come, it would be Jimmy Carter who first fanned Islamic fundamentalism -- which would have devastating consequences in our own era.
By July 1979 -- less than two weeks after the Sandinista rebels took power from the 43-year Somoza-dynasty dictatorship in Nicaragua, a long favored Washington client in Central America -- they would begin mounting the first covert actions against the popular, and populist, new regime in Managua, as they would soon be shoring up a ruling oligarchy that faced a mounting leftist insurgency in neighboring El Salvador.
There would be similar interventions and intrigues in the Horn of Africa, on the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere, always justified by the Soviet (or proxy Cuban) menace. "On the march" was the way both Gates and his boss were fond of describing the communist hordes. The result would be a rash of secret wars, assassinations, terrorist acts, and manifold corruptions around the world by the administration of the "human rights" president. Moreover, these acts preceded, sometimes by several years, the vaunted covert actions of the Reagan regime, which were often only continuations of Carter policy, in some cases even on a lesser scale. "Jimmy Carter was the CIA's first wholly owned subsidiary," an Agency operative would boast to a friend later, "and the beauty of it was that so few people, even on the inside, ever knew it."
Nowhere would their penchant for the covert prove more fateful than in the remote Hindu Kush. To an already seedy history of American covert intervention there, they now added their own bloody chapter.
At the behest of Pakistan, Communist China, and the Shah of Iran (and their intelligence services), the CIA had begun offering covert backing to Islamic radical rebels in Afghanistan as early as 1973-1974. The explanation for this was that the right-wing, authoritarian regime of Mohammed Daoud, then in power in Kabul, might prove a likely instrument of Soviet military aggression in South Asia. This was a ridiculous pretext. Daoud had always held the Russians, his main patron when it came to aid, at arm's length, and had savagely purged local communists who supported him when, in 1973, he overthrew the Afghan monarchy. For their part, the Soviets had not shown the slightest inclination to use the notoriously unruly Afghans and their ragtag army for any expansionist aim.
Support for the anti-Daoud religious insurgents, far more anti-American than the Kabul regime, actually served distinctly local interests. The Pakistanis and Iranians wanted to fend off Afghan irredentism on their disputed borders and Pakistan was eager to secure a pliant regime in Kabul on its western flank as it faced rival India in the East. The Nixon administration casually supported these aims in deference to its clients with little or no thought for the Afghans, a policy-atrocity which would be repeated for the next quarter-century.
All the backing ceased, however, after an abortive rebel uprising in 1975, as Daoud launched his own détente policy with Iran and Pakistan. Then, in April 1978, his blundering crackdown on Afghanistan's small communist party provoked a successful coup by party loyalists in the army. This happened in defiance of a skittish Moscow which had stopped earlier coup plans. Aware of these facts, Vance's State Department coolly adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the new regime.
But with predictable alarm bells ringing in Iran, Pakistan, and Russophobic China, Carter's covert interventionists at the NSC saw an irresistible "opportunity," as Gates put it, "to counter the Soviets." Three weeks after the Kabul coup, Brzezinski was in Beijing discussing, among other matters of state in his Kissingeresque debut as a diplomat, the "Soviet peril" in Afghanistan.
Gates memoir dutifully notes the ensuing stream of bland speculations by the CIA's Soviet analysts about what the Soviets might next do in their tortured relationship with a faltering, needy, yet independent Afghan communist regime. But he spares us the covert actions the CIA carried out, amid a stream of memos Brzezinski and he sent Carter about the Soviet "threat" in South Asia -- an intervention kept secret from their hated rival, Secretary of State Vance, and the rest of government.
By summer 1978, the old insurgent training camps in Pakistan were open again and thronged with Islamic radicals. They were eager to fight a regime pushing land reform and education for women, while establishing a secular police state. By fall 1978, more than a year before Soviet combat troops set foot in Afghanistan, a civil war, armed and planned by the U.S., Pakistan, Iran, and China, and soon to be actively supported, at Washington's prodding, by the Saudis and Egyptians, had begun to rage in the same wild mountains of eastern Afghanistan where U.S. forces would seek Osama bin Laden a little more than twenty-three years later.
In April 1979, with arms and agitators paid for by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the Shah fell in January ending SAVAK's role), a radical Islamic uprising in Herat in western Afghanistan led to the slaughter of thousands on both sides, including more than 200 Russian military and civilian advisors and their families. Even so, the Soviets stoutly refused to intervene militarily. They even made their refusal absolutely plain to Washington by pointedly conducting telephone conversations with the Afghan leadership en clair for the Americans to intercept. But Gates, Brzezinski, and Carter were having none of it in what had become a deliberate plot to "suck" the Russians into Afghanistan.
The old Great Game was now in cynical full swing. In the sort of mad plan not even Rudyard Kipling could have imagined, they plotted to personally "give the Soviets their Vietnam," as Brzezinski was fond of saying.
The ceaseless machinations and bloody civil strife culminated, of course, in the December 1979 Soviet invasion. The Politburo had resisted it for more than a year and hesitated, even at the eleventh hour. It is, by any measure, one of the more dramatic, and chilling, stories in the annals of world politics. By now, Brzezinski and Gates had essentially created a new foreign policy for the United States and put it into action in secret with few co-authors and no parallel.
By the time, they and their co-conspirators are through, a course will have been set that will take the Afghans into a nightmare universe in which a million-and-a-half of them will die, millions more will become homeless (in what the UN will call "migratory genocide"), and, for more than a quarter-century, their country will be a continuing catastrophe beyond any other in the history of nation-states. In part, it is his own work that Gates now faces as secretary of defense....