Ambiguous Results of CIA Actions in Afghanistan
On October 22nd the New York Times reported that, “The C.I.A. is expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country…”
The CIA has been “involved” in Afghanistan ever since the CIA was first created in 1947. Afghanistan wasn’t unique in that regard. It is the primary job of the CIA to collect information and conduct analysis on the political, economic, and military dynamics of every country in the world in so far as those developments may impact the national security of the U.S.
The CIA’s role in Afghanistan changed dramatically, however, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and its attempt to pacify the country for ten years until the Soviet’s defeat and departure in 1989. The CIA’s primary role changed from simple information collection, to aggressively supporting and arming the Afghan resistance fighters opposing the Soviet occupation forces. This support grew over the course of ten years to become the largest program of “covert” support in the U.S. history, approaching $500 million a year by the mid-1980’s. (All this is extensively covered and documented in several published books including: “Ghost Wars”, “Charlie Wilson’s War”, “The Main Enemy”, and many others.)
The result of the CIA’s active involvement in Afghanistan providing lethal support to the Afghan resistance in the 1980’s is at best ambiguous, for both Afghanistan and the U.S. The “law of unintended consequences” is defined as, “…actions of people—and especially of government—that have effects that are unanticipated or unintended.” The U.S. policy of flooding the country in the 1980’s with weapons, which are still in use today, has enabled the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan for 38 years (1979-2017), while yet enabling the Afghans to defeat of the Soviet army of occupation.
The author of “Ghost Wars” asserts that the most lethal support was given to Islamic fundamentalist groups (who were the most ardent fighters) which inadvertently empowered these extremist groups to grow and metastasize beyond Afghanistan to Pakistan, Indian Kashmir, to the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, Bangladesh, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordon, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. All of these countries have individuals who participated as “volunteers” in the war in Afghanistan in one way or another in the 1980’s and who went on to become the “seeds” of indigenous terror groups in their home countries in the 2000’s.
The successful Afghan war of resistance that defeated the Soviet army in the 1980’s, enabled with CIA support as a part of U.S. policy, was also inadvertently the seminal event in the rise of global Islamic Jihadi terrorism in the 21st century. It was not the only contributing factor by far, but it was the inspirational example of an Islamic vanguard defeating a western, atheistic world power, the Soviet Union. It represented the first forceful “roll back” of foreign, non-Muslim powers that had occupied or culturally dominated much of the Muslim world for nearly 200 years, and vindicated Islam as the religion favored by God that would eventually come to govern the entire world, in the view of radical Islamic extremists.
We should be very careful about tasking the CIA with lethal activities in Afghanistan, or anywhere else for that matter, because of the unintended and unforeseen consequences that can arise from those actions.