American Foreign Policy and Soviet Afghanistan War Essay Example

a dramatic shift in the Middle East.

Muslim and Islamic sentiment toward western culture turned hostile, the Soviet Union and its communist regime began to crumble, and the United States foreign policy took a dramatic shift toward ensuring it’s stronghold in the Middle East. In the years prior to the invasion, the United States had little to no interest in Afghanistan, after WWII the United States instead focused on aligning itself with neighboring Pakistan. This relationship would be reaffirmed in various ways in the 1970's. During the Indo-Pakistan war in 1971 the Nixon administration pushed for a "tilt toward Pakistan. This policy not only firmed up US relations with Pakistan but also alienated both India and Afghanistan, thus pushing India and Afghanistan closer to the Soviets. Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger further agitated India by setting up secret meetings with the Chinese. Both China and Pakistan were India’s closest boarder enemies. In August 1971 India signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union; the treaty was a significant deviation from India's previous position of Non-alignment in the Cold War and in the prelude to the Bangladesh war.

The Bangladesh war between India and Pakistan once again pitted the two super powers against one another, with the soviets backing India and the United States pledging full support to Pakistan. The United States was now locked into an agreement with Pakistan as their main ally in the region, an agreement which allowed the Soviets to extend diplomatic relations to not only India, but also Iran and more importantly Afghanistan. These changes lead to what some have dubbed as The Second Cold War or increased military tension between the

United States and the Soviet Union.

It would set off a series of events which drew the Soviets into war in Afghanistan and opened the door for the United States to conduct a covert war against the Soviets there. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan stems from a series of events dating as far back as the mid 1960’s when the pro-soviet, Afghan government and its ruling party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) dominated the state. Yet the first major event that would lead to the invasion occurred during the summer of 1973.

In July of that year, former Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan staged a military coup against his cousin King Zaher who he accused of corruption and of not doing enough to boost poor economic conditions of the time. Once in power, Daoud put an end to the Afghan monarchy and declared a Republic. Daoud would prove to be no better than his predecessor; government corruption would increase under Daoud causing members of the PDPA to conspire to overthrow his regime. By 1978 the Soviet Union had become cynical of Daoud leadership and thus backed the PDPA and their desire to overthrow the government.

On April 27, 1978, the Afghan army, which had been sympathetic to the PDPA cause, helped members of the PDPA overthrew and executed Daoud along with members of his family. Recognized as the Saur Revolution, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan held close ties with the Soviet Union and on 5 December 1978 a friendship treaty was signed between the two nations. Once in power, the PDPA implemented a socialist agenda to promote state atheism and suppress the Islamic faith [] and

it carried out an ill-conceived land reform, which was resented by virtually all Afghans. Their actions quickly provoked outrage nd by mid-1978. Rebels attacked the local military garrison in the Nuristan region of eastern Afghanistan. Soon civil war spread throughout the country. In September 1979, Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin seized power after a palace shootout that resulted in the death of President Taraki. Soviet leadership quickly realized that the rebellion could have a drastic effect on their influence in the region. The emergence of a fundamentalist challenge would risk the whole network of Soviet gains. Fearing the government under Amin was in danger of being toppled by the growing rebellion, soviet leadership took action.

On December 28th 1979 the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan, killed President Amin and chose the former Deputy Prime Minister Babrak Karmal as the new President of Afghanistan. Within two weeks the Soviet Army had one hundred thousand troops stationed within Afghanistan to protect their political, economic, and military interests. The invasion moved the Soviet Union southward toward its historical goal of a warm water port on the Indian Ocean and to also afford access to the heart of the Indian subcontinent and ultimately to the Persian Gulf and it’s rich oil.

The Soviets saw the invasion as a major victory in the Cold War with the United States. Their puppet regime in a traditional Islamic nation, they believed would secure their political sphere in the region. Yet what they hadn’t anticipated were the major political, economic, and military consequences from the invasion and the resulting covert wars and foreign policy of the United States. Prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the

Carter administration began to take interest in the events unfolding in Afghanistan.

Carter and his advisors were wary of the geopolitical impact that a soviet invasion might have on the Middle East. In particularly that the Soviet army would easily pass through Afghanistan and would be on their way to gaining influence across the Middle East and more importantly to the rich oil producing nations in the Persian Gulf. Nearly six months prior to the invasion, On July 3, 1979, President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Lead by the CIA, Operation Cyclone was aimed at training, arming and financing anti-soviet guerilla warfare within Afghanistan.

When the soviets invaded Afghanistan on December 24th 1979, Carter made his intentions very clear. During his state of the union address on January 23rd 1980, Carter announced what became known as the Carter Doctrine: that the U. S. would not allow any other outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf. Carter declared that "an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force. On the heels of the state of the union address, The Carter administration made it a point to send a clear message to the Soviet Union and the world that they were against the invasion. In January 1980, the U. S. placed grain and weapons embargoes on the Soviets and his administration also terminated the Soviet Wheat deal, officially ending Nixon’s

detente. The deal was an effort to establish a trading partnership between the two nations and in effort to ease Cold War Tensions.

Other foreign policies decisions Carter made due to the Soviet invasion included, prohibiting American athletes from participating in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and reinstating registration for the draft for young males. These decisions would prove to be both ineffective and costly for the Carter administration. The trade embargo had little to no impact on the Soviet Union and the latter two decisions only alienated American voters in an election year. He would subsequently loose the 1980 Presidential election to Ronald Reagan due in part to these decisions.

Yet nevertheless, Operation Cyclone would prove to be a resounding success and would remain a staple of American Foreign Policy through the eight years of the Reagan administration. In the first year of Operation Cyclone, President Carter had earmarked roughly thirty million dollars to fund the project. By 1988 that number had reach over a half a billion dollars. In all, the United States funneled more than $ 2 billion in guns and money to the mujahidin during the 1980s, the largest covert action program since World War II.

The cornerstone of the operation was that the United States, through the CIA, would provide small arms weapons, money and general supervision to the mujahidin rebels. Saudi Arabia a long time friend of the United States had agreed to match dollar for dollar any U. S. financial contributions to the mujahidin and distributed funds directly to ISI. It has been estimated that the combined financial contributions of the U. S. and Saudi Arabia is over three billion

dollars. FOOTNOTE) The People’s Republic of China provided weapons, while other nations such as Britain, Israel, France, Egypt, and many other western European countries and Islamic nations also provide aid. By the mid 1980’s Operation Cyclone was no longer a plan focused on simply delaying Soviet victory in Afghanistan, it had now become a globally funded and supported operation set on ensuring Soviet defeat. In 1985 the Reagan Administration set out to do just that. By the spring of 1985, fighting in the Panjshir Valley began to favor the Soviets.

Realizing that they were unable to subdue the mujahideen rebels from the ground, Soviet forces began turning to the air. The Mil Mi-24 helicopter was used to provide air support to Soviet ground troops and armored vehicles and its guns and rockets proved effective at assaulting rebel resupply routes. Fearing that the new Soviet aerial strategy might dramatically increase the Soviets odds of defeating the rebels, in March 1985, the Reagan administration issued National Security Decision Directive 166, a secret plan to escalate covert action in Afghanistan dramatically.

Subsequently the Reagan Doctrine sought to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan by all means available. Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet forces, the Reagan team decided to covertly unleash an array of advanced military technology and military expertise in an effort to demoralize Soviet troops. Beginning in 1985, the CIA supplied mujahideen rebels with extensive satellite imagery, signal interception technology, fresh approaches to guerrilla warfare, anti-tank missiles and the most important technology the FIM-92 Stinger missile.

The deployment of stinger missiles in Afghanistan marked a dramatic shift in the United States involvement in Afghanistan. Up until this

point the U. S. had refused to provide any American made weapons or technology, insisting that they only provide financial support to buy weapons from countries like China and Britain. Many senior level CIA officials, such as then Deputy Director Robert Gates, believed that if the Soviets found American made weapons in Afghanistan, that this would risk counter soviet action and could escalate into more dramatic consequences like the Soviets retaliating against Pakistan.

Ultimately though, the decision to arm the freedom fighter’s with the stinger missiles was a reflection on the desire of the Reagan administration and the CIA to see the Soviet Union defeated. In September of 1986 the first stinger missiles were deployed in Afghanistan shifting the balance of power back to the Afghan rebels while the United States lost its plausible deniability. At the heart of Operation Cyclone, was the belief that the United States covert operations within Afghanistan must be oncealed from both the Soviets and the American people, and set out to ensure that nothing could be traced back to them. The CIA would be responsible for overseeing the operation, however they left the day-to-day operations, arming, training and direct contact with the mujahidin, to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. Pakistan, a long time enemy of Afghanistan, now found themselves in a position of power and the ISI used its coordinating position to promote Pakistani interests. The ISI refused to recognize any Afghan resistance group that was not religiously based.

Neither the Pushtun nationalist Afghan Millat party, nor members of the Afghan royal family were able to operate legally in Pakistani territory. The ISI did recognize seven resistance groups who

would come to be called the Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen, or the Peshawar Seven the ISI, would only meet with each individual group instead of meeting as a collective bunch, in order to maintain maximum leverage. This allowed Pakistan and the ISI to promote compliances from the different groups whom were fiercely competing for aid.

The ISI most notably tended to favor Gulbuddin Hekmatyar leader of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, or (HIG) providing Hekmatyar with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. Hekmatyar regarded as perhaps the most militant, extremist Islamist of the mujahideen commanders, never won a significant battle during the war, is known to have been responsible for the training of a variety of militant Islamists from around the world and of killing significant numbers of mujahideen from other parties during and after the war.

In addition to training and recruiting Afghan nationals to fight the Soviets, the CIA permitted its ISI allies to recruit Muslim extremists from around the world. Between 1980 to the end of the soviet invasion on February 15th, 1989, over 25,000 Arab volunteer’s came to Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Soviet Union, many who also held sharp anti-Western sentiment. Like the mujahideen fighters, these “Afghan Arabs” received paramilitary training by the ISI in the art of guerilla warfare and terrorism.

The ISI’s strategy to promote Pakistani interests had long-term consequences in promoting the Islamism throughout the Middle East and was responsible for raising tensions between the Peshawar Seven. However, the ISI could not have foreseen the consequences of a divided Afghanistan, which become clear after the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan. On February 15th 1989 the last Soviet forces

left Afghanistan, signaling an end to the Soviet-Afghan War. However it would not be the end of the fighting, from 1989 through April 30, 1992 Afghanistan was embattled in civil war.

The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) would continue to hold off the mujahideen fighters for several years. At the time of the Soviet withdrawal, the consensus in Washington was that the PDPA government, then led by President Mohammed Najibullah, would fall to the mujaheddin within months, if not weeks. In reality the PDPA had been left with an extensive amount of Soviet military hardware and was still receiving billions of dollars in from the Soviet Union. It was the collapse of the Soviet Union in December1991 (which ended PDPA funding) that would ultimately lead to the overthrow of the PDPA.

On April 30th 1992 the Islamic State of Afghanistan took over power under President Burhanuddin Rabbani, Hekmatyar was offered the position of Prime Minister but turned it down believing that he should not have to share power with Rabbani. The peace would not last, within days the country would again fall into chaos as Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami, refused to recognize the newly formed government and began launching bombing attacks against government forces in Kabul. As a result, the civil war continued and while Rabbani and Hekmatyar fought over Kabul, the rest of Afghanistan was seized by local warlords.

The lack of a stable central government opened the door for outside forces. Consequently, a new movement of religious students known as the Taliban saw the instability in Afghanistan as an opportunity to press their own agenda’s. The Taliban's brand of extreme Islam had no historical roots in

Afghanistan. The roots of the Taliban's success lay in 10 years of jihad against the Soviet Union, and further devastation wrought by years of internal fighting between the warlord factions.

The Taliban created there movement based on a platform of restoration of peace, disarmament of the population, strict enforcement of the Shari'(footnote) and defense of the "Islamic character" of Afghanistan. (footnote) Initially, these views were welcomed by a majority of Afghan villagers who had grown weary of the fighting and brutal rule of provincial warlords. They gained public support by appearing as the avenger against the warlords' raping of women and boys. (Footnote) With the aid of the Pakistani army, the Taliban swept across most of the exhausted country promising a restoration of order and ultimately capturing Kabul.

On September 27th 1996 the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan and Mullah Mohammed Omar, leader of the Taliban, took on the title of Commander of the Faithful of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and by 1997 held control of roughly seventy percent of the country. The other thirty percent was held by Ahmad Shah Massoud, a mujihadeen war hero during the Soviet invasion, and Minister of Defense under Rabbani. Massoud created the United Islamic Front and acted as the group’s military and political leader. Under Massoud the United Front sought to push back the Taliban in order to create a Democratic government.

Massoud a skilled fighter and leader was able to repeal a series of Taliban attacks in the first year of Taliban rule, many point to this as the reason why the Taliban forged a partnership with Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terrorist group. In May of 1996,

having been previously exiled from his home country of Saudi Arabia and feeling unsafe in his current home in Sudan, Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan. Quickly he formed a relationship with Omar, allocating hundreds of his well trained men to assist the Taliban in the fight against the United Front.

The Al Qaeda-trained 055 Brigade, integrated with the Taliban army between 1997 and 2001, participated in numerous massacres across Afghanistan during this time. An alliance was born between the two groups, the Taliban received soldiers and financial support from Al-Qaeda, which allowed them to continue their operations against the United Front and remain in control of Afghanistan. For their part, Al-Qaeda received safe refuge to train new recruits, solicit funding, and ultimately conduct terrorist activities across the globe with the end result being the September 11th attacks.

Looking back in the Post 9/11 world it is easy to criticize American foreign policy during the Cold War for its shortsightedness. Yet at the time Washington had only two options, either support the mujihadeen in Afghanistan or risk Soviet domination in the Middle East. Consequently, by supporting the Afghan Rebels and their defeat of the Soviets, the United States played a large role in collapse of the Soviet Union. In that respect, the American covert operations and foreign policy directives under Reagan and Carter are viewed as a success.

However where the United States failed and where they must accept some of the responsibility is in allowing Pakistan to spread their sphere of influence and desire to promote Islamic fundamentalism throughout Afghanistan in the Middle East. This failure resulted in the birth of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda terrorist groups and

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