Blowback - S4 Episode 2 - "Bleeders and Dealers"

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

The build-up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

How about a nice relaxing afternoon of murder and betrayal? Speak about this love sign. Welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James. And this is Season 4, Episode 2, Bleeders and Dealers. In this episode, we'll explore the prelude to the war in Afghanistan, from the ancient empires to British colonialism, right up to the eve of the Soviet invasion in 1979. We'll see how decades of Soviet assistance and American, Pakistani, and Saudi sabotage

led to a communist revolution and the rise of the so-called Mujahideen. As the Afghan revolution goes to pot in the late 1970s, an anti-communist alliance will descend on the country, an axis made up of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United States. What comes next is a 40-year-s war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is still the buffer between big nations involved in the Indian subcontinent, as it was a century ago. But the nations are more powerful today, and the issues more dangerous. Quote, when the British first began their military moves against Afghanistan, the British resident in Balochistan said to the Khan of Kalat,

The British army has entered Kabul without firing a bullet. And the worldly wise Khan, instead of answering, began to stare at the sky. The British resident made another attempt. You make no answer. You seem lost in thought. The old Khan replied, yes, I am thinking. You people have entered this country. But how will you get out?

Raja Anwar, the tragedy of Afghanistan. For at least 10,000 years, the place we now call Afghanistan lay at the center of the greatest empires in Asia. With Persia to the west, China to the east, Central Asian kingdoms to its north, and India to the south, Afghanistan naturally became a hub of exploration, a crossroads for great powers, and a choke point of trade and commerce. The country has always been divided by the massive Hindu Kush mountain range. In the south, writes Ahmed Rashid, live the Pashto-speaking Pashtun tribes, intermingled with

other ethnic groups. To the north, live the Persian and Turkic-speaking peoples, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Turkmen, and others. Ever since it became a part of the Silk Road, which connected China to Rome, everyone from Persian kings to Alexander the Great wanted a piece of Afghanistan. Islam arrived with Muslim Arab conquerors in 651 CE and remained embedded in the culture even in the wake of Genghis Khan and his conquests in the 13th century. For hundreds of years after the Khan's death, the moguls of India and the Safavids of Persia

carved up Afghanistan between one another. If one were to nominate a founder of modern Afghanistan, the honor would probably go to Ahmed Shah Durrani. A Pashtun general, Durrani was elected king in 1747, in Kandahar to the southwest. He pieced together an Afghan empire in the mid-1700s, right as the surrounding mogul, Safavid, and Uzbek empires were coming apart. The Afghan empire spanned from northeastern Iran, west to Kashmir, from modern Central Asia, southward to the Arabian Sea.

things came unglued after Durrani's death in 1772. And with that, the Afghan Empire fell apart. Afghanistan would struggle in the modern era to unite its peoples, as new and hungry nations rose to power in the West. Coke is fucking dead as dead. Heroin is coming back in a big fucking way. The 19th century did not promise peace in Afghanistan. While it was surrounded by the Russians, the Persians, and Ottoman forces,

Afghanistan's biggest challenge would come from British invaders at the dawn of the empire's opium trade. Among other unsavory businesses, drug profits fueled the expansion of the British Empire. The British had the monopoly on exports to China, where opium would play a disastrous role in that fading empire. By 1818, the British completed their conquest of Western India, writes historian Alfred McCoy, author of the classic book The Politics of Heroin. According to McCoy, poppy production in Western India and Afghanistan

doubled the amount of opium reaching the China coast in just one year. Down the line, we'll see a similar effect when the Americans take over in 2001. This one is a little more expensive. This is 500 a gram. But when you shoot it, you will know where that extra money went. Afghanistan was not only valuable turf for drug dealing. It was also strategic territory for the British in their longstanding conflict with the Russian Empire.

Now that the Napoleonic Wars were over, Britain saw the Russians as its biggest rival in the East. By the mid-19th century, the borders we now think of, between Afghanistan and its neighbors became a constant, violent negotiation. On October 1, 1838, the British Empire declared its intention to install a friendly regime in Afghanistan so that tranquility will be established upon the most important frontier of India. The very next year, around 21,000 British and Indian troops invaded Afghanistan. Their mission was to replace the more independent-minded King Dost. Muhammad with the pliant, British-friendly Shah Shuja. It was, per journalist Philip Bonoski,

in fact a secret war, launched by and for the East India Company, without the knowledge of British Parliament. Once the war was in progress, of course, propaganda was needed. For this, writes Braithwaite, the British government forged incriminating documents to make it seem like Russia was about to take over. The first British invasion was initially successful until the British learned that it is very hard to control Afghan territory. Afghanistan had turned into a virtual hell for the British in less than three years, writes Raja Anwar.

By 1842, they were fleeing Kabul, leaving almost 20,000 soldiers dead along the way. Meanwhile, the empire's supposed consolation prize. their hand-picked ruler Shah Shuzha. He was assassinated before very long. Still, the British took over Kashmir in 1846, conquered the Punjab to the south in 1849, and absorbed sizable chunks of Afghan territory

between the Indus River and the Hindu Kush. This campaign of imperial expansion ended, only at the turn of the century. The second British-Afghan War came in 1878, after a Russian diplomatic mission arrived in Kabul. The British were outraged at the Afghan's decision to even talk to the empire's rival and demanded their own permanent diplomatic and military presence.

When the Afghans rejected this ultimatum, 35,000 British troops invaded the country. The victorious British again realized they couldn't sustain Afghanistan as a part of their Indian Empire. And a few months after the Second War's conclusion, the Afghans and the British signed a treaty. It gave the British territory east of the Hindukush, which they would later incorporate into Pakistan. Britain's ambassador was once again given the power of a king.

The empire remained responsible for Afghanistan's foreign policy for eight decades. This is the famous Kaibah Pass in the northwest province. It separates India from Afghanistan. It's the one place in our great empire where England is always at war. In the final decade of the 19th century, the foreign sense of the foreign system, Secretary of British India drew the most important border in our story. A 1,500-mile-long border separating Afghanistan from British India, and therefore, in the future, separating Afghanistan from Pakistan. This would be known as the Durand Line, after Foreign Secretary Mortimer Girand.

Afghans, quote, took no notice of the Durand line, except when they were compelled. They feuded, smuggled, traded, and fought indifferently on both sides of the border. The British attempted to control the border in the 1920s and the 1930s by a policy called Butcher and Bolt, that is, quick bouts of air raids and bombing. But it did not make their Durand line any more real. To the fierce tribesmen who infest the frontier hills between the northwest province and Afghanistan, this must be a new strange kind of warfare. An interesting aside, the United States, it turns out, was not the first Western power to ever try and jumpstart Holy War in Afghanistan.

For years, the British had taken advantage of, and sometimes even jump-started, religious revolts in order to sabotage or outright dispose of an uncooperative Afghan government. Then, during World War I, Germany made plans for a, quote, Muslim uprising that would encompass Russian Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, Burma, and in the end, India. But at a certain point, the Germans were losing badly enough that the Afghans decided to pass on any cooperation with the Kaiser and the Ottomans. Number two bomber squadron is drawn up on the aerodrome at Ryssalpur, about 50 miles from the Afghan border, the center of nearly all the tribal disturbances. Once that World War was over, the third and final Anglo-Afghan War broke out.

Afghanistan's new leader, King Amanullah, challenged the Durand Line and raised a mutiny on the frontier with India, drawing Britain in once again. Some of the natives have quaint ideas on torture that make the Spanish Inquisition look like a children's birthday party. Despite King Amanullah's offers to negotiate territory for loyalty, the British ignored him, seeking their own solution. A five-day orgy of destruction resulted in thousands dead on both sides. After a ceasefire, three years of negotiations, the two sides signed a treaty in the early 1920s. But much to Britain's disgust, King Amanala had also opened direct talks with Russia's new Bolshevik regime. In fact, Afghanistan was the first government in the world to open talks with the new USSR. The Soviets and Afghans agreed on financial support, a telegraph line between my

Moscow and Kabul, and a supply of Soviet military specialists, weapons, and aircraft. There was also an overlooked precursor to Soviet moves later that century, which turned out very differently. Joseph Stalin sent about a thousand men to Kabul to shore up the king during a period of domestic strife. The Russians captured Mazzari Sharif and other places after heavy fighting, but they rapidly lost the sympathy of the local people. Stalin recalled the force.

So now with a friendly Russia to his north, King Amanullah embarked on a major program of reform. Until the communists took power decades later, King Amanola was by far Afghanistan's most radical reformer. He set out to outlaw the oppression of women, slavery, honor killings, and forced labor, while also introducing secular education, civil rights, modern courts, and a constitution. But by the late 1920s, this momentum kicked into reverse. The King's plans for the emancipation of women, a minimum age for marriage, and compulsory education for all angered religious conservatives and provoked a brief rebellion. Here, as the Germans had planned to do in World War I,

and as the Americans would do in the Cold War, the British secretly allied with religious conservatives inside of Afghanistan, fanning the flames of revolt against an uncooperative leader. Mobs burned down the royal palace in Jalalabad and marched on Kabul. By the end of the 20s, Amanullah had fled into exile in Italy. Aminola's progressive reforms were reversed by a new king, with the cooperation and approval of Britain. By 1933, however, this Comprador king in Afghanistan was assassinated.

His throne passed to his son, Zahir Shah. But since King Zahir was only 19, he would wait in the wings while his uncles ruled the country. After World War II, in which Afghanistan got what it could from various powers, American Afghan relations got off to a rough start. By 1946, the U.S. initiated the Helmand River Valley Project, an attempt to install a modern irrigation system in southern Afghanistan. The project was an exercise in corruption. The powerful Morrison-Nudson company sucked Afghanistan's harder-end dollar reserves into an agricultural disaster that resulted in repeated floods and useless crops. And then came Britain's final bloody act.

Preparations for the handing over of power to the separate rules of Muslim and Hindu mean hectic activity as the two zones of government take shape. Britain's partition of India and the creation of the new state of Pakistan resulted in widespread violence in the region, with millions upon millions ethnically cleansed, forcibly relocated, and at least one million estimated to have died. Afghanistan, the first country to talk to the Soviets, now became the only country to vote against Pakistan's admission to the UN. The now-grown-up King Zahir renounced the Durand line,

claiming rights to the territory that the British had bequeathed to Pakistan. All over the globe where the retreating British Empire left a vacuum, Americans soon appeared. So began the long-standing and fruitful relationship between the United States and the Pakistani government. Says one Afghan minister, the Americans were impressed by the English-speaking, British-trained, pro-Western Pakistani officials, who, together with Britain, quickly convinced Washington of the value of Pakistan as a bulwark. It was President Dowd, Prime Minister until 1963, who first encouraged Russian assistance. and Moscow did not hesitate to take advantage of the invitation. In the 1950s, we meet a supremely important Afghan leader,

Prime Minister Mohamed Daoud. Sporting Western suits in a Qbald dome, Daoud was the real strong man while his cousin, the king, was still growing up. His desire, he told reporters, was to, quote, light my American cigarette with a Russian match. Over the next 10 years, Daoud's government continued the traditional. of King on Manila, modern state craft, public works, and national independence.

All the while, a student-led movement, known as the enlightened youth, began to form the modern, progressive, and socialist political leadership of the future. One of these enlightened youth was Noor Muhammad Taraki. Taraki would go on to become a famous poet, work for the United States as interpreter, and by the early 1960s, help found the Afghan Communist Party. Because however small, it's proletariat, Afghanistan was beginning to experience the typical class conflict that came with modern life. Truck drivers, fruit workers, workers at textile mills, cement plants, oil fields, mining operations, all were staging strikes and organizing across the country. By the mid-1960s, Tauraki's small but hardcore Communist Party had finally hatched.

Throughout this whole period, Afghanistan's new neighbor, Pakistan, became increasingly hostile. Pakistani elites viewed Afghanistan as their raggedy neighbor to the West and a strategic threat, and so Afghanistan turned once again to the USSR for help. Barter and trade agreements, infrastructure, oil and gas exploration, and permission for the free import of goods from Soviet territory. Mao Zedong denounces the Khrushchev doctrine. The Chinese leader and the men who speak for him attack the Soviet premier as a traitor to the basic communist

doctrine of violent world revolution. The Soviets, of course, needed allies in the region, now that their growing split with communist China was developing into a full-on rivalry, even punctuated at times by border clashes with Maoist paramilitary groups. Confrontations on the border, now become more numerous and explosive. What the future holds for Russia and China, no one knows.

But millions of people everywhere are waiting to see and to learn who in the communist world is truly number one, the dragon or the bear. By the middle of the 1950s, U.S. analysts had already concluded that, quote, the longstanding opportunity to win Afghanistan had been lost. By contrast, a decade later, American Watchers of the Kremlin conceded that, quote, Soviet foreign aid has been immensely successful. The Russians have avoided most forms of political interference and Russian aid projects have been well suited to Afghan needs. What the Americans lacked in diplomacy, they made up for in Spycraft.

As part of the larger Cold War, the United States launched programs designed to make inroads with the next generation of third world leaders. The goal was to secretly cultivate influence and undermine nationalist, progressive, pro-Soviet, or just secular forces abroad. One key pipeline for this kind of thing was the Asia Foundation, through which, as according to Fitzgerald and Gould, the CIA began furthering the course set by British intelligence a century before, by aiding religious extremists intent on subverting the government.

the modernization efforts of the Afghan government. Another tried and true method was to pick promising young Afghans and to send them to American universities. And here we come across the curious case of Hafizullah Amin. An ambitious man from a middle-class Pashtun family, in the 1950s, Amin was ushered into Columbia University in New York. Amin returned in 1966. for a doctorate. By the end of the 1970s, he would be General Secretary

of the Afghan Communist Party. Ramparts Magazine would later reveal CIA sponsorship of the Afghan Student Association, of which Hafizala Amin was president. Quote, Amin's teacher training school operated largely on funds from a Columbia University Aid Project which, legendary Afghan expert Louis Dupree recalled,

operated as a front for the CIA. Amin was selected for the Columbia program at the same time that future national security advisor Zbigno Brzezinski was teaching at the university. The idea that the future leader of Red Afghanistan would ever have anything to do with American clandestine operations seems a little conspiratorial. And really, was there ever any precedent of the American government siding with the most violent and extremist communists in a given country just to destabilize a rival?

Well, as it turns out, there was. Specifically, thanks to the efforts of National Security Advisor Zbigno Brzynski, it happened in Cambodia. According to journalist in Cambodia expert Elizabeth Becker, Brzezinski himself boasted about how he wrangled the Chinese into supporting the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, led by the infamous Pol Pot. Well into the 1980s, the United States itself would support the Khmer Rouge against Cambodia's neighbor and America's old wartime enemy, the Vietnamese communists. And so some, in the communist world, were left to wonder,

was the Afghan radical Hafizela Amin, Afghanistan's answer to Pol Pot? Deepened the pages of a memoir by a Soviet general, we found a very interesting passage. Years later, during a meeting of the Afghan communists in 1977, Hafizela Amin reportedly admitted his CIA connections to his comrades. Friend of the show, Marissa Shepard, translated the text, based on an internal Afghan Communist Party transcript and long-kept secret by the Soviet government.

It reads as follows. During the meeting, Amin was charged with having had ties to the CIA during his time in the United States. Documentation confirming that he had received cash from the agency was read aloud. Amin, however, managed to weasel his way out. He claimed that he was just playing with the CIA. because he needed to finish his studies in the United States and had nothing to live on.

Was Hafizalah Amin a CIA asset? A communist manipulating the Americans? Or perhaps just a free agent who used whatever and whomever he could to advance his own position inside his country? Whatever way you slice it, Hafizalah Amin was viewed with suspicion by comrades in Moscow and Kabul.

and he would play a key role in the coming chaos. What happened next in 1973 would seal Afghanistan's fate for the rest of the century. This year, events have caught up with and overtaken feudal Afghanistan. Traditionally, a buffer state, standing alone between major powers, it has suddenly caught world attention. New men have seized control. By the late 1960s, Prime Minister Daoud had been benched by the more conservative King Zahir,

who aimed to please increasingly resentful landlords and mullis. Economic progress under King Zahir languished. By 1969, strikes and demonstrations plagued the economy. Meanwhile, the Afghan Communist Party was at war with itself. The faction known as Kalk, or people, locked horns, with the faction known as Parchum or Flag. While the Soviets were more suspicious of the radical Kalkis, like Afizelah Amin, they weren't holding out much hope for either side.

The 1960s had also seen the rise of political Islam, which was until now foreign to Afghanistan. The Islamic Party of Note was Jamati Islam, which functioned as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood's Afghanistan connection, was Burhanadine Rabani. He would soon lead Mujahideen supported by the United States. Two of Rabani's Afghan recruits in particular

would go on to become marquee names in the war against the Soviet Union. Gobedin Hekmetyar and Ahmed Shah Massoud. Both Hekmetyars and Masoud's followers were known to be violently misogynist, throwing acid in the faces of women who did not wear the veil. By 1970, the United States Embassy officer Charles Dunbar saw religious demonstrations in the streets, noting that, quote, it was the clerical Mojadidi family, supported by the Asia Foundation, that had spurred to the protests.

The protests, quote, devolved into an anti-leftist free-for-all, led by the conservative Mullahs. To top things off, by spring 1972, over 80,000 Afghans were estimated to have died a mid-day. drought and famine conditions. And so, in 1973, Daoud made his comeback. And now there has been a revolution. King Zahir Shah was ousted, and his cousin, Mohamed Daoud, decreed Afghanistan a republic. The king went into exile. It was at this moment that foreign-backed Islamic soldiers were put to work inside

Afghanistan. Investigative journalist Lutz Cleaveman reports. Pakistani General Babar, the governor of the Northwest Frontier provinces in Pakistan, he had first meddled in Afghan affairs in 1973. He brought Rabani and two of Rabani's most outstanding students, Ahmed Shah Masud and Golbid in Hekmetjar, to Peshawar, set up secret military camps to train young men as guerrilla fighters, and then Babar sent the talented Massoud for a bloody partisan attack on Afghan government forces. And Pakistan by this point had also begun recruiting members inside the Afghan military. In the summer of 75, writes the diplomat Braithwaite, Hekmet Yarr and others backed by Pakistan launched a series of failed uprisings. The leaders were executed, imprisoned, or fled to

Pakistan, where they were taken under the wing of the Pakistani Intelligence Agency, the ISI. A few years later, these guys would not be put down so easily. How involved was the United States in backing Muslim fighters during the 1970s? Cleveland reports, quote, the Pakistani general took his young with jihadine to Islamabad and introduced them to the U.S. ambassador, and a successful, yet ultimately tragic alliance was born. In The New York Times, an American official going by the name of Abel Baker put the date of the CIA's direct intervention in Afghanistan's internal affairs as also being in 1973.

These new pressures, Islamic uprisings, socialist opposition, and increasing foreign meddling, drove the formerly progressive Daoud to the right, and it also drove him into the arms of some unsavory allies like the Shah of Iran, who offered him $2 billion. The Shah, however, was in fact part of a massive covert operation against Afghanistan. This was a scheme that linked the intelligence agencies of a half-dozen countries together. This was a plot, a plot to strike at the underbelly of the Soviet Union. U.S. cables refer to this as a Chinese, Iranian, Pakistani, Saudi, Axis. But to understand its origins, we must check in on some rumblings.

over in the United States. After Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's breakthrough diplomacy with communist China in 1972, a larger international club was formed to shape events in Asia. Quote, a kind of foreign policy version of the Watergate Plumbers Unit, right Fitzgerald and Gould. Now, this group went by many names, the most memorable being, the Safari Club. The Safari Club included the Shah of Iran, members of Saudi intelligence,

the enigmatic chief of French intelligence, Count Alexandre de Moranche, the Chinese communists, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who had by now flipped Egypt from pro-Soviet to pro-U.S. And even, quote, young Baathist Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. The resort were the Safari Club men. belonged to Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi financier and arms dealer. Sounds like conspiracy theory babble, right? Well, here is a direct quote from Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turkey, years later at an address at Georgetown.

In 1976, after the Watergate Matters took place in America, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. This outsourcing of CIA dirty work was part of a larger phenomenon taking place

under the new director of the CIA, George H.W. Bush. It began on Halloween, 1975. After the Watergate scandal, a series of congressional investigations, much discussed on this show, uncovered some, but not all, of the CIA's covert programs at home and abroad. The dirty wars, the assassinations, the drug running, the false flags, the surveillance, the mind control experiments, and yes, the spying. These investigations led to serious limitations on the CIA's budget, and it created a new system of congressional oversight.

However, the new CIA director, George H.W. Bush, writes Peterdale Scott, found a way to avoid the newly imposed rules of congressional oversight. He accelerated the delegation of covert operations for foreign intelligence services and also to assets not only off the books, but sometimes offshore. The intelligence agencies of America, Saudi Arabia, and the Shah of Iran went to work finding new channels, new banks, to funnel money.

Investigative journalist Joseph Trento writes, With the official blessing of George H.W. Bush, the head of Saudi intelligence transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank. the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, or BCCI, into a worldwide money laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history. BCCI's founder was, in fact, also a close friend and advisor to Pakistan's new military dictator, General Zia,

who would soon be America's greatest ally, in a certain anti-Soviet jihad. One-time Nixon insider turned muckraker journalist Kevin Phillips lays out the network taking shape. George H.W. Bush, while running the CIA, enlisted as an asset the U.S. representative of a major BCCI investor, as well as the wealthy, Saudi BCCI-linked bin Laden family, about which more later.

Supported by the dark money flowing through banks like BCCI, agents of the Safari Club moved into Afghanistan to undermine both Daoud and the secular socialistic left. According to false profits, BCCI handled transfers of funds through its Pakistani branches and acted as a collection agency for war material and even for the Mujahideen's pack animals. The Shah of Iran's dreaded secret police, Savak, funneled, quote, American communications gear, money, and weapons to the numerous right-wing Afghan extremists, right Fitzgerald and Gould.

Soon after, the Saudis got in on the action. Quote, as oil profits skyrocketed, emissaries from these newly affluent Arab fundamentalist groups arrived on the Afghan scene with bulging bankrolls. In the late 1970s, one-time smooth operator Prime Minister Daoud, he was reduced to paranoid rule over a one-party state. He had gone from a popular reformer to a lame duck autocrat. Veteran Afghanistan observer Henry Bradshaw points out that by now, Daoud's cabinet, quote, represented the worst of Afghanistan's old system, packed with his old friends and their sons, royal hangers-on,

all opposed to a promised land reform program. Pushed to the right by his new friends, as well as his increasing paranoia. Daoud tried to both accommodate the Islamists and crack down on the communists. The murder of one leading Afghan communist led to tens of thousands of sympathizers pouring into the streets protesting Daoud. As the Prime Minister cracked down even further, Hafiz al-Amin and his hardcore fans. of the Afghan Communist Party,

they decided to make their own move. Tanks loyal to young communist army officers now guard the palace where President Dowd the last of the Afghan royal family ruled. Inside, he and his family, including his young grandchildren, were shot dead when his palace guard lost their courageous battle to defend him. The government claims they had to shoot them

because they refused to surrender. Men from the different tribes who live in this people, who live in this backward country, swarm all over tanks knocked out in the battle. They seem pleased to see the end of the old feudal regime. The coup against Daoud itself was brief. Units loyal to the calque wing of the communist stormed the leader's palace, and within minutes, Dode was dead. The Americans once again publicly charged the USSR with engineering a coup.

But according to the former British diplomat Braithwaite, reliable evidence that the Russians were behind the coup is lacking. For one thing, if the Soviets were behind the coup, they almost certainly would have picked their favorites from the gradualist Partium faction. Instead, it was the dubious Hafezilla Amin's faction that took power. The writer, poet, and one-time U.S. embassy employee, Taraki, was made president. Adding to the idea that the Soviets themselves were surprised by the coup,

their embassy was, quote, caught in the crossfire. The coup came like a bolt from the blue to Soviet officials in Kabul, including the KGB representative, report Fitzgerald and Gould. And Brezhnev's diplomatic advisor claimed later that the Soviet premier had learned of the coup itself through foreign press reports. In fact, from the very beginning, the Soviets appeared very uneasy over the nature of the April 1978 revolution, its breakneck speed, its agenda,

and most of all, the deep unresolved tension between the Afghan communists themselves. The party issued its official program a month after the revolution. Eradication of illiteracy, equality for women, an end to ethnic discrimination, a larger role for the state in the national economy, and the abolition of feudal and pre-futal relationships. The Afghan communists had declared war on the power of landowners and mullahs.

But soon they would realize just how real That power was. I heard a young man speaking out just the other day. So I stopped to take a listen to what he had to say. He spoke straight and simple by that I was impressed. He said, once and for all, why not the best? he said his name was jennie carter and he was running for president then he laid out a plan of action

and made a lot of sense he talked about the government and how good it could be for you and me oh that's the way it ought to be right now once for all why not the best A communist revolution in Asia is a tough pill for any U.S. president to swallow. And for the fresh-faced ex-peonut farmer Jimmy Carter, it was an especially tough test of Oval Office manhood. And the question became, how could the U.S. move against the Soviet Union and their clear PDPA puppets in Kabul,

now that covert ops were supposed to be on ice? The French newspaper LaFiguero wrote the answer on July 3rd, 19, The United States wants to use the developments in Afghanistan as a lever for making the countries and parties deeply committed to the Muslim political concept, joined the camp hostile to the Soviet Union. Now, the Afghans were not the only ones with rival factions in their government. As Sig Harrison puts it, ever since Carter's election, there was a major split between, quote, the bleeders and the dealers.

The bleaters were hawks who wanted to abandon detente and go for the Soviets jugular. The dealers, while fine with meddling a little bit, ultimately favored negotiation and preservation of detente. In the end, the anti-Soviet bleeders would prevail, led by Carter's mercurial and ruthless national security advisor, Zbignu, Brzynski. Before this Afghan opportunity, Brzezinski. had already spearheaded, in his words, quote, a program in effect to destabilize the Soviet Union, end quote, by stoking nationalist and religious forces within the USSR. And this included deploying CIA propaganda in the USSR's smaller republics,

quote, above all, to Ukraine. It also meant working with the Pakistanis and Saudis to, quote, distribute in the Soviet Union thousands of Wahhabi-glast Korans, An important contribution to the spread of Islamism in Central Asia today, writes Peterdale Scott. Brzezinski was a loyal supporter of the Shah of Iran, and as many as 2,000 people were gunned down in Iran after Brzezinski urged the Iranian leader to stay tough

and handle the increasing street demonstrations with force as his rule came under threat. But now, the 1978 April Revolution in Afghanistan had Brzezinski's full attention, and he had concocted a long-term plan for a crusade against the Soviets, training, funding, and expanding the Islamic militants that the Safari Club had already been working with for years. Brzezinski later said that he sold the plan to Carter

on the grounds that, quote, the Soviets had engineered a communist coup in 1978, part of their master plan to reach the Persian Gulf. And this would have been a known falsehood, and one in fact might flip the script and point out, as Peterdale Scott does, that, quote, the CIA were now setting up an American pathway to the Caspian Basin at a time when American oil companies were already looking there for alternative oil sources to diminish their dependence on OPEC.

Against Brzezinski and the Bleeders stood the dealers, chiefly represented by the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and the ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolf Dubs. Dubs saw the radical Hafizela Amin as, quote, a fierce nationalist first and a loyal communist second. According to Sig Harrison, Amin had even bragged that the Soviets needed him more than he needed them.

Dubs saw an opportunity to get Amin to flip on the Soviets. But according to Prasinski in his memoirs, he had convinced Carter to move interagency policy on all covert action, away from the dealers of the State Department, placing control of the Afghan operation fully on the turf of the bleeders. By the end of the year, Brzezinski would successfully enlist the Chinese, who began to secretly train Gulbadine Hekmettyar's forces in, quote-unquote, ultra-subversive activities in secret camps over the border with Pakistan in Xinjiang province.

The CIA's jihad chief, Gus Avrakotos, called the Chinese enlistment, quote, quote, a marvelous con job. Just the thought of using Chinese communist guns to kill Russians, just the irony of it. Getting two guys on the same side fucking each other makes it easier for you to fuck both of them. The Afghan communists had inherited quite a mess in Afghanistan from the lame duck Daoud.

The economy was underwater. Smuggling was rife. Foreign companies controlled most private industry. 40% of the country was estimated as undernourished and badly housed. And the general consensus was that the April revolutionaries lacked the chops to fix it. Ahmed Rashid calls the communist's reforms unrealistic. Roderick Braithwaid finds the party out of touch with the realities of their own country. And Raja Anwar sees the revolutionaries as, quote,

Marxist intellectuals in a hurry, whose program failed due to, quote, lack of experience, rampant inefficiency, and limited resources. By 1979, broad dissatisfaction percolated into political protest with heavy religious overtones. Anwar writes, agricultural production was severely hit by the unrest in the countryside in reaction to these reforms. The mullahs, quote, used these shortages to unleash highly poisonous propaganda against the government. All the while, the party leaders were making preparations to liquidate each other.

The party was cutting off its nose, despite its face, Anwarites. It did not have the wisdom or the vision to identify its real friends and enemies. Journalist Philip Anaski surveys the damage. From the point of view of counter-revolution, the situation was all positive. The Communist Party's program was almost in shambles. The land reform had stopped. Commerce was crippled. The clergy were in opposition.

Thousands had fled the country. And by November 1979, the economic situation would worsen drastically, with a drop in grain production by 10%. Industrial crop production would go down even further, and per capita income would drop to a new low. For the Soviets, communist victory in Afghanistan was, in fact, a growing nightmare almost from the beginning, writes Braithwaite. When the party began to enforce its failing program with terror against the rural population,

Moscow protested the violence. The party leaders replied that what had worked for Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union would work in Afghanistan too. But whatever Moscow's misgivings, Hafezella Amin and his buddies were now the government next door, and a new Soviet-Afghan treaty was drawn up. Under one of the treaty's articles, Afghanistan could call on Soviet military assistance in its hour of need, writes Braithwaite. Exactly one year later, Amin was to invoke this article, only himself to become the first victim of the invited Red Army. Good evening, a tearful Shah of Iran left his country today on a vacation from which he may never return.

Today there were more shots of Yankee go home. Yankee referring to any foreigner, be he American or Asian, or Pakistani, or Polynesian. In the meantime, there is a stepped-up campaign to replace the Shah's portrait with photos of exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. 1979. The fall of the Shah in Iran marked the end of the post-war order in the Middle East. The Shah was the leading customer of America's war industry in the 1970s, buying almost 30% of all congressionally approved weapons exports. The U.S. had showered Iran with billions of dollars worth of weapons and bombs.

But now the centerpiece of U.S. policy was gone. Who would follow? What would follow? The body of Ambassador Adolf Spike Dubbs was flown home today from Afghanistan where he was kidnapped and murdered on Wednesday. The next firebolt came a month later, in February, with the death of American ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolf Dubs. Dubs had been the man trying to court Huffizella Amin, rather than join Zbignu Brasinski's jihad.

President Carter stood next to Dubs' widow, Marianne, through the solemn ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base. Secretary of State Vance presented her with a secretary's met award. On Valentine's Day, Dubs was kidnapped, reportedly by a communist splinter group. He was taken to the Kabul Hotel, specifically the exposed, second floor, room 117. A government rescue team burst in to save him, but that triggered a firefight, and the ambassador was left dead on the floor.

Everyone watching could see it was a massive cluster fuck, except Zbignubrizinski, who saw it as a massive opportunity. Evacuation flights from Iran continued today with 800 more Americans flying out. That same February, Ruhullah Khomeini, a dissident Iranian cleric, was returned to Iran from his exile abroad, and he assumed the leadership of an Islamic government that was now extremely opposed to American interests in the region. Some in Washington believed that the nightmare scenario had come to pass, that the USSR might finally be able to reach its arm through an anti-American Iran and grab the oil-rich

Persian Gulf for itself. And that arm, so the thinking went, could come straight from Red Afghanistan. But things weren't looking so good from the Soviet's vantage point either. They, like the Americans, had little idea what was coming in Iran. But they had more than a hunch, it might look like the kind of Islamic fanaticism that they were beginning to encounter over their own border in Afghanistan. In fact, they were seeing a bit of that right at this moment in the northwest province of Herod. In March, writes Braithwaite,

locals in an outlying village protested their daughters being sent to school by rising up, killing local communist officials, and then the girls, for good measure, and marching on the main city. Chanting religious slogans, armed with ragged guns and knives, the locals sacked and torched banks, post offices, newspaper offices, and government buildings, and looted the bazaars. They tore down red flags and the portraits of communist leaders. They beat people not wearing traditional Muslim clothes.

Party officials, including the governor of the area himself, were hunted down and killed. So were some of the Soviet advisors. As striking as the revolt in Herat was, Western accounts ballooned the purported death toll, taking exaggerated figures from Mujahideen commanders. According to Raja Anwar's own investigation, about 800 people were killed during the uprising. In private, the Afghan communists panicked, fearing a wider challenge to their hold on power. And in this moment of need, they asked Moscow to send Soviet troops. Now let's step inside the Soviet presidium.

Who were the leaders trying to solve the puzzle in Afghanistan? The main decision-makers were Andre Grameco, top diplomat, whose sour demeanor earned him the nickname Grim Grom. Alexei Kossigin, the soft-spoken premier, Dmitri Ustinov, the stubborn defense minister, and Yuri Andropov, the ruthless and hyper-intelligent head of the KGB.

In their meetings, Andropov was direct, quote, "...tanks could not solve what was essentially a political problem. If the revolution in Afghanistan could only be sustained with Soviet bayonets, that was a route down which the Soviet Union should not go. Premier Kusigin and defense minister Ustinov agreed. Gromiko, grim as he added that, quote, everything the Soviet Union had done in recent years

to reduce international tension and promote arms control would be undermined. It would be a splendid present for the war. the Chinese. All the non-aligned countries would come out against the Soviet Union. The Brain Trust took all this to General Secretary of the Party, Leonid Brezhnev. Not known as a man of deep introspection, Brezhnev too apparently knew a Turkey when he saw it. When briefed on the Afghan's request for troops, he ruled it out. Premier Kasegan broke the news to President Taraki over the phone. If we sent in our troops, the situation in your country would not improve.

On the contrary, it would get worse. Our troops would have to struggle not only with an external aggressor, but with a part of your own people. And people do not forgive that kind of thing. And later in March, Tariki came to Moscow, and again there, the Soviets refused him. The Vietnamese had defended their country against the Americans and the Chinese without relying on foreign soldiers,

Kassigan said. Afghanistan could do the same. To requests for gunships, armored vehicles, and troops, Ustinov said the Soviet Union would supply 12 helicopters, but no pilots or crews. Then Brezhnev himself, told Taraki in a meeting, the Afghan government must broaden its political base and stop shooting people. He had emphasized yet again that in the present circumstances, the Soviets would send no troops.

The Soviets draw up a policy paper, listing all of the problems with the Afghan regime, calling out its, quote-unquote, half-baked socialist reforms, advising that it, quote, allow religious freedom and strengthen democratic rights. And Tariki and Amin asked again for Soviet troops, and still no dice. At the same time, troops on the frontier of the USSR were increasingly getting into clashes with rebel groups from Afghanistan. Soviet military intelligence began to organize a special Muslim battalion from the Soviet Muslim populations in Central Asia, just in case.

Back home, the Senate had refused to ratify the Salt II Arms Control Treaty. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, head of the dealers, was on his way out. Ambassador Adolf Dubs was dead. The bleeders were in control. In fact, after the Herod violence that spring, Prasinski ordered an increase in support for Muslim militants in Pakistan. He directed that American aid be sent to the burgeoning Chinese-supplied Mujahideen training camps in order to, quote, orchestrate and facilitate weapons purchases and related assistance.

In a fateful decision that still haunts the U.S., the CIA station chief in Islamabad pledged American military support to a known religious fanatic and drug trafficker. Golbodine Hekmatyar. May. Massive uprisings sweep six provinces in Afghanistan. June, an uprising in the capital itself. That same month, Tariqi and Amin move against their rivals.

Several figures were, quote, arrested, tortured, sentenced to death, though the sentences were commuted when the Soviets protested. July. Soviet paratroopers fly to Bagram Airport. Later that month, Afghan rebel was attempted to occupy the city of Gardez. Two Soviet advisors were killed. August, a commando battalion mutinies at Bala Hissar, an ancient fortress on the outskirts of

Kabul. Another government infantry division, quote, suffered heavy losses. The Afghan government's request for troops, quote, continued and multiplied throughout the month. Asked by a general if there were any plans to move troops into Afghanistan, defense minister Ustanov replied, In no circumstances. On September 1st, 1979,

the KGB sent a memo, which for the first time floated the idea of removing Hafizala Amin. The memo also said the PDPA should let in moderate religious leaders, representatives of national minorities, people who had been unjustly imprisoned, should be released. One of the men living in a kind of prison was Amin

supposed boss, President Taraki. Amin had effectively reduced his quote-unquote great leader Taraki to a figurehead, writes Anwar. He was not even allowed to receive newspaper correspondence or grand interviews, and it seemed like worse was coming. On the 14th of September, four Soviet officials met with Taraki at the presidential palace. Taraki said he was prepared to go on working with Amin, but only if Amin abandoned the repression. When Amin was invited to join the men, Gunshots were heard. Amin had apparently been shot at approaching the palace while Taraki's aid was dead in the stairwell.

Taraki told the Soviets it was a provocation by Amin. Amin said that it was an attempt on his life. At this point, the Soviets realized that Hafizullah Amin was preparing to knock off Taraki, the president of Afghanistan. KGB chief Uriandropov started to work on plans to spirit Tariki out of country. Kabul, but Tariki was as good as dead.

The commander of the Afghan presidential guard was now loyal to Amin, and he summoned three lowly officers to, against their better judgment, execute the president. The whole business, writes Braithwaite, lasted 15 minutes. The officers were in tears when they reported back to Amin's men. Later that evening, it was officially announced that tariki had died of a brief and serious illness. I'm very sorry that you call it coup. It was not coup.

First of all, I can never agree with calling it coup. It was a revolution. Meanwhile, Hafizella Amin himself was chatting with American charged affair, saying that he hoped for an improvement in relations. He told his foreign minister to push the same message to the U.S. Undersecretary of State. In an interview to the Washington Post and L.A. Times, he said, quote, we want that the U.S. should study the situation in this region

and provide us with more assistance. Amin also stepped up public criticism of the Soviets, accusing them of trying to assassinate him. In a few days, however, it turned out that the only assassination that had been carried out was that of President Tarek, Andropov, writes Braithwaite, mortified by his department's failure to keep control of events, was now determined to get rid of Amin. But Soviet influence in Kabul was practically nonexistent.

And Amin, Victor in the power struggle, was still mishandling the domestic situation in Afghanistan with disastrous brutality. Amin's rule, both from behind the scenes and after succeeding, Taraki, is estimated to have resulted in at least 27,000 people executed in just one of his more notorious prisons. So by the autumn of 1979, the Afghan government controlled maybe not more than half of the country. The Majahadin were on the move, and Amin was feeding all suspected opponents to the meat grinder. Soviet resolve weakened day by day. Going in might become a disaster, but the

The increasingly bloody regime of Amin or a takeover by Islamic warlords didn't look so good either. Wright's Braithwaite, step by step, with great reluctance, strongly suspecting that it would be a mistake, the Russians slithered toward a military intervention because they could not think of a better alternative. In October, a unit of KGB Special Forces secretly surveyed public opinion across Afghanistan. It reported back that, quote, an invasion would be opposed by the entire country.

On November 4, 1979, militant students in Iran stormed the American embassy, occupying the building and triggering what would become known as the Iranian hostage crisis. Sixteen days later, in Saudi Arabia, fanatics took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, demanding, among other things, that the kingdom cut oil export, to America. And the next day in Pakistan, Islamic extremists burned the U.S. embassy to the ground. Hafizullah Amin had apparently gotten a taste for the religious as well. Quote, Amin appeared to turn rightward, reaching out in desperation to Gulbadine Hekmetiar, fellow Pashtun, and Pakistani dictator General Zia. In other words, America's two best

friends in the region. Quote, in what would seem a complete reversal of his radical Marxist policies, Amin was now said to propose abandoning the revolution and setting up an Islamic state with his fundamentalist rival. Braithwaite captures the moment. Assured that Amin was doing a sadat on them and convinced that the United States would not stand idly by as their massive investment in the Shah dried up, the Soviets creaking bureaucracy descended into panic mode. October, mutinies in Afghan's 7th Infantry Division, Amin unleashes troops and airstrikes, but even more of the countryside slides from his control. November, the KGB brings their favorite successor to Hafezella Amin, Babra Karmal, to Moscow.

December 6th, the Polypiro endorses a proposal to dispatch 500 men to Kabul, taking advantage of a desperate Amin's rather amazing request for Soviet troops to help him out against the insurgents. December 8th, Brezhnev meets Andropov, Grameko, and Defense Minister Ustanov to weigh the pros and cons of introducing Soviet forces. No record of this meeting has yet surfaced. December 10th, Defense Minister Ustinov informs his officers that the Politburo has taken the Utti Bureau has taken the preliminary decision to send troops into Afghanistan on a temporary basis. He orders the chief of staff, General Nikolai Ogarkov, to devise a plan to deploy 75,000 to 80,000 troops.

Ogarkov, Braithwaite notes, was surprised and angered. He was against sending any troops. In that evening, quote, forces on the Afghan frontier were mobilized, and parachute and other elite units were sent to Turkmenistan from their bases. Years later, the Soviet generals asked themselves why the Americans had made no comment, made no protest, and issued no meaningful warnings, Braithwaite rights. The Soviets concluded that the Americans had deliberately planned to entrap the Russians in a quagmire.

Zbignu Brzezinski would confirm the so-called Afghan trap theory in an interview with a French paper in 1998. The secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap. He added that, on the day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in essence, we now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War. This was later claimed to be a mistranslation.

One historian in particular has gone so far as to call the Afghan trap pure myth. But after speaking with us, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould sent us a videotaped interview they had done with Chuck Kogan, who was once chief of the Near East and South Asia, division in the CIA. And Kogan tells a story of running into Brzezinski at a funeral, where in person, Brzezinski very much doubled down on the Afghan trap thesis. This was at the funeral ceremony or the reception for Sam Huntington. Brzezinski was there. I'd never met it before. And I went up to him and introduced myself

and I said, I agree with everything you're doing and saying, except for one thing. You gave an interview to the Nouvelle Observateur some years back, saying that we sucked the Soviets into Afghanistan. I said, I have never heard or accepted that idea. And he said to me, you may have had your own perspective from the agency, but we had our different perspective from the White House. And he insisted that this was correct. And I still, I mean, that's obviously the way he felt about it.

So you really think that he knew more than you ever were aware of being made out? Yes, and what you say from the Gates book corroborates this. Then there was off-the-record testimony from Bill Odom. Odom was at the time military advisor to Brzeinski and just as anti-Soviet as his boss, writes historian Jonathan Haslam of Princeton and Cambridge University. Odom, in fact, would later go on to head the NSA under Reagan. As Odom told witnesses at a dinner years later, when the news of the Soviet invasion came in,

Brzezinski shot a clenched fist in the air triumphfully. They have taken the bait, end quote. Having improvidently let the cat out of, of the bag, writes Haslam. Odom froze in place and asked that it not be repeated anywhere. If there was an American trap, Braithwaite adds, the Russians should have had more sense than to fall into it. Sig Harrison, on the other hand, after interviewing the Soviets, was more sympathetic.

I think if we'd not had the specific circumstances which they regarded as CIA manipulation, they'd have stayed out. But our whole policy, the way we were treating the Soviet Union, definitely created a mindset which was partly responsible for their coming into Afghanistan. Even more striking is the testimony of U.S. negotiator Paul Warnke,

who was at the table during the arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union, known as Salt 2. If the dealers, not the bleeders, have been listened to, quote, I don't think there would have been any Afghanistan invasion by the Soviet Union.

I remember it was about Thanksgiving of 19, I was at a party given by some defense contractor, and there was a group of people from the Soviet embassy. I was told that the Politburo had voted on the Afghan issue something like six times, and five times those who were against moving into Afghanistan won. But by the sixth time, apparently the hardliners said, look, you're getting nowhere with the United States. You can't even get the Salt II treaty ratified, even though we've made all the major concessions. So why should we hold back? And I think that basically was the missed opportunity, that we could have, in fact, reached an overall agreement with the Soviet Union.

There's a famous interview you gave to a French paper where you talked about the decision to advise Jimmy Carter to arm the jihadists in Afghanistan. And you're quoted as saying that this would help induce or would lead to the Soviets intervening in Afghanistan, which might lead to their Vietnam. Is that a legitimate quote? That's not an accurate code. The crucial meeting of the Politburo took place on December 12, 1979. A Soviet diplomat later explained the Politburo's thinking thusly. Suppose Afghanistan fell to U.S. and Pakistani aggression. The U.S. could then deploy short-range missiles there. The Kremlin's inner circle had also taken as an article of faith by now that Hafizullah Amin was probably an American agent. Amin had met not only with

the acting head of the American embassy five times since February 1979, but he had also met with Pakistani dictator and Islamist leader General Zia. In planning their invasion, the Soviets had no intentions to stick around. The job was to go in, stabilize the government, and withdraw. And so, calendar. On Christmas Eve, 1979, 80,000 Soviet troops headed into Afghanistan. Their target, Afizela Amin. Thank you.