Disclaimer

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This documentary series examines the influence of Western foreign intervention on the spread of global terrorist organisations, it is not intended to be an exhaustive exploration of all the factors contributing to the growth of international terrorism.

This is an independent production, it is not sponsored by any organisations: Governmental or non-governmental.

We have aimed to make this documentary as factual and accurate as possible, but it is not and does not claim to be unbiased or neutral, it represents a combination of evidence based research and our subjective personal opinions.

All sources used for the production will be cited throughout the article and in the credits.

Our use of an outlet as a source does not necessarily mean we agree with all of its views or contents.

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Intro

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On September the 11th 2001, the world changed forever. For the first time since World War 2, the United States of America was attacked on its own soil by a foreign enemy; This enemy wasn’t a country, a government or an army, it was an extremist militia, a terrorist organisation, hard to outmatch or understand, it was Al Qaeda, a battle hardened force led by the shadowy warlord, Osama Bin Laden.

The result was widespread grief and fury gripping the U.S., its people wanted answers and revenge for the thousands lost in the attack, the result was a war that cost millions of lives, billions of dollars, and defined a generation, the War on Terror. Our ideas on privacy rights, human rights, civil liberties and sovereignty were routinely brought into question, fear gripped the world and after a period of relative peace for the West, a new enemy was found.

So the question is, what brought us to this point? How did we end up in a world where these bands of fanatics are seen as the same level of threat as the global power blocs of the last century?

The First Link - Afghanistan

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Terror through Finance

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1. Context of the Cold War

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To find out, we have to go back many years to the 1970s, by this time the global conflict between East and West was in full swing, the Communist leaders of China and the Soviet Union and the Capitalist leaders of the United States faced each other off in proxy conflicts and direct military conflicts worldwide in a battle for hegemony.

The US was intensely fearful of Communism, seeing it as a vile ideology designed to control and oppress the people it was imposed on, one of starvation and dictatorship, and most importantly it was seen as a threat to the US’s standing in the world, this made the Marxist Soviet Union public enemy number one, the purges and interrogations of McCarthyism during the 1950s sought to root out Communists at home, while proxy wars across the globe aimed to remove Communist governments abroad.

The Soviet Union on the other hand saw the United States as a nation of poverty and elitism, where the wealthy Capitalists stole everything from the victimised Workers, they believed global Capitalism needed to be destroyed and the people liberated, a program of World Revolution and Class Struggle. To this end they played their own proxy game, seeking to remove Pro-Western governments and install Communist leaders, increasing their sphere of influence nation by nation.

The result was a world split in two, on one side the Red east and the other the Blue west, divided by the so-called Iron Curtain. Both sides wanted to push more nations to join their cause, by enticement or by force, to flip red states blue and blue states red. Smaller countries became playing grounds for the superpowers with little real interest in the wants or needs of the local populace, for most, staying out of the game wasn’t an option.

1.1 Afghan Revolutions

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One of these countries was Afghanistan, on the 17th of July 1973 the ruling Afghan King, Mohammad Zahid Shah, was overthrown in a military coup launched by his cousin, General Mohammad Daoud Khan, who declared the country to be a republic with himself as its President; The coup was supported by officers associated with the Afghan Communist movement, represented by the “People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan” or “PDPA” for short.

While initially Socialist oriented and supportive of the Soviets, Khan aimed to be non aligned with his foreign policy and over time reduced Afghan reliance on the USSR.

In 1978 Khan tried to arrest the leaders of the PDPA and in retaliation they launched their own coup to remove him known as the “Saur Revolution”; On April 27th 1978 Khan was assassinated, the Communists took over and the Afghan nation received a rebrand as the “Democratic Republic of Afghanistan”.

The newly established DRA government introduced sweeping reforms aimed at uprooting what they saw as the nation’s backwards, feudalistic elements, they pushed women’s rights, centralised authoritative government, anti-capitalism and land reform to the top of the agenda, this came as a shock to many in Afghanistan’s traditionalist, conservative society, and the threat of this rapid transformation turned the discontent from Conservative Afghans into armed rebellion.

The fighters of this rebellion called themselves the “Mujahideen”, roughly translated as “Strivers for Justice”, the Mujahedeen found their safe havens in Afghanistan’s rural countryside while the DRA’s strongholds were in the country’s urban population centres; Seeing an opportunity to push Afghanistan out of Communist hands the US began to send aid to the Mujahideen in July 1979, with US President Jimmy Carter authorising the CIA to spread propaganda in support of the Mujahedeen, provide radio communications to the Afghan rebels, and send aid in the form of cash and “non military supplies”.

Facing the violent backlash of the Mujahideen, the PDPA found itself tangled up in internal disputes over how quickly their changes should be introduced to the populace.

The party was split between two factions, the majority Khalqists¹, who believed in immediate, forceful revolution, and the minority Parchamites², moderates who thought Afghan Socialism had to be implemented gradually. The two leaders of the revolution, President Nur Muhammad Taraki and his Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin, were both Khlaqists and formerly close friends, but over time they grew apart and turned on each other, eventually in September 1979 Amin decided to take power for himself and murdered Taraki.

Amin saw himself as someone poised to bring a great transformation in his country, but his inability to control the growing rebellion led the KGB to believe that he had paralysed the Afghan government and alienated the local population, he was viewed by the Soviets as power-hungry and distinguished by brutality and treachery; Despite his loyalty to the USSR he was thought of as a poor leader and a liability, a kind of new Stalin in an era when Stalinism was out of fashion³.

After several failed attempts to assassinate Amin⁴ the Soviet leadership decided a direct intervention was needed, launching a plan codenamed “Baikal-79” to take control of the country in December 1979, the main component of this plan was an operation called “Storm-333” where the KGB and Soviet Armed Forces troops stormed the Presidential Palace and assassinated Amin, shortly after the Soviets began a full scale occupation of Afghanistan.

With Amin’s short reign over a new leader was needed, the Soviets replacement was a moderate Parchamite, Babrak Karmal. Karmal offered an amnesty to dissidents jailed under Taraki and Amin, slowed down the party’s moves to reform Afghan society and emphasised and ideology dubbed “National Democracy” instead of Communism in an attempt to make peace with the growing Afghan resistance, but they failed to be convinced, the result was the Soviet-Afghan War.

1.2 The Mujahideen and its backers

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Carter’s response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to authorise the supply of lethal military aid to the Mujahideen, and training for the Mujahideen on the use of these supplies, the CIA responded with an operation known as “Operation Cyclone”, a program to arm and fund the Afghan militants with the help of partners like MI6.

Carter left office soon after, having lost the US Presidential elections to Ronald Reagan, but Reagan supported the Cyclone mission, in fact he wanted to go further than Carter in opposing the Soviet Union.

Carter had promoted the ideas of “détente”⁵ and “containment”, essentially relaxing tensions between the 2 superpowers and preventing Soviet influence from expanding further, Reagan’s idea on the other hand was a focus on “rollback”, going on the offensive against Soviet influence and publicly owning it as a battle between good and evil⁶, the newly Sovietised Afghanistan was one of the key targets he singled out for this approach.

The Cyclone program aimed to encourage support from Pakistan and China and propagandise other Islamic countries into supporting the rebels:

And it was President Reagan in partnership with the Congress, led by Democrats, who said you know what, sounds like a good idea! Let’s deal with the ISI and the Pakistani military and let’s go recruit these Mujahadeen!

• Hillary Clinton

China was a Communist country like the Soviet Union, but it followed its own unique brand of Communism, competing with the Soviets for leadership of the global Communist movement, in their attempts to weaken the Soviets the Chinese often sided with the US in Cold War conflicts, even when that meant backing Anti Communist groups.

As for the ISI, that was the Pakistani intelligence service, and they held great sway over the operation.

You see, rebels weren’t a united force, they were split between countless militias of different ideologies; To help explain this I’d like to introduce an infographic I call the “Terror Family Tree”, here we have the Mujahadeen as a whole, and we can split them into their component parts.

The Mujahadeen can basically be split into 3 groups

• The Tehran Eight, a group of organisations from Islam’s minority Shi’ite sect, supported by Iran

• The non aligned militants, less prominent factions of varying ideologies⁷

• And the third, biggest group, the Peshawar Seven, a group of Sunni organisations picked out by the ISI

The Peshawar Seven received the bulk of U.S. government funding, and became the dominant forces of the Mujahideen.

We were locked in this struggle with the Soviet Union: They invaded Afghanistan and we did not want to see them control Central Asia and we… Went to work!

Much of the Seven’s membership held extremist, ultra-conservative ideals, and most of the Mujahideen’s foreign allies were dictatorships, with Pakistan being under military rule, China being a one party state, Saudi Arabia being an absolute monarchy and Iran being more of a theocracy than a democracy, but that didn’t stop President Reagan from characterising the conflict as a struggle for freedom; Proclaiming in a 1985 address:

Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God’s children. Look to where peace and prosperity flourish today. It is in homes that freedom built. Victories against poverty are greatest and peace most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press, free speech, and freedom to worship, vote, and create wealth.

Our mission is to nourish and defend freedom and democracy, and to communicate these ideals everywhere we can.

We must stand by all our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives – on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua – to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.

As the old slogan goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Of the Peshawar Seven’s fronts three stand out; To start with we have the two branches of Hezb-e Islami or “Party of Islam”, these branches were split between the H-I-G or “Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin”, “Gulbuddin’s Party of Islam”, in English, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and H-I-K, “Hezb-e Islami Khalis”, led by Mohammad Yunus Khalis. 

Charlie Wilson, the main politician behind Operation Cyclone, stated that Hekmatyar was “the most radical of the radicals” and “didn’t like us much”, but “he didn’t hate us as much as he hated the Soviets” and at the time, that was what mattered, so he got his dollar paychecks.

Khalis’ group on the other hand stands out because of one of its commanders in particular, Mawlawi Haqaani, a CIA asset and extremist militant⁸.

Haqqani attracted funding from wealthy donors in prosperous Arab nations, he organised for bands of fighters known as the so-called “Afghan Arabs”, foreign volunteers obsessed with martyrdom and holy war, to join the fight. 

In his role as a patron of the various militant groups, Haqqani provided aid to a Saudi financier aiming to build his own force in the Afghan conflict, his name? Osama Bin Laden.

Bin Laden was one of the heads of the so-called “Maktab al-Khidamat” or “Afghan Services Bureau”, which established front organisations worldwide in order to recruit more fighters to the rebel cause; These fighters were known for their belief in the puritan ideology of Wahhabism, their line of thinking and the ASB organisation provided the building blocks for what we now know as the terror group Al Qaeda.

That’s great, let’s get some to come from Saudi Arabia and other places, importing their Wahabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union!

• Hillary Clinton

The third front of importance was a group called the “Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan” or “Ittehad-e Islami”, led by Wahabi extremist Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Sayyaf was another patron of Bin Laden and the Arab Afghan volunteers, acting as a kind of mentor figure with the backing of Saudi Arabia.

It’s important to note that this crossover between the Cold War’s Western Bloc and the Islamic world’s radicals wasn’t all just a freak accident of the circumstances, the CIA didn’t just tolerate extremist ideology, they actively spread it, with education textbooks being produced that promoted extremist propaganda, featuring titles such as “The Alphabet of Jihad Literacy”; Although they were labelled under the names of the “Islamic Union of Afghan Mujahideen” - the formal name of the Peshawar Seven, and the “Education Center for Afghanistan”, they were actually published by the University of Nebraska-Omaha in a collaboration with the US government agency USAID, which spent 50 million dollars on the project%20in%20Afghanistan.).

Here are some translated examples of the texts, I’ve modified the letters because of course, English letters and words are quite different to the Afghan languages of Pashto and Dari, but this will give you an idea of the ideas that were being promoted:

R is for Rifle - Javad obtains rifles for the Mujahidin…

R is for Religion - Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of the religion of Islam…

J is for Jihad - Jihad is an obligation. My [uncle] went to the jihad. Our brother gave water to the Mujahidin…

G is for Gun - My uncle has a gun, he does jihad with the gun…

G is for Good News - The Mujahidin missiles rain down like dew on the Russians. My brother gave me good news that the Russians in our country taste defeat…

S is for Shakir - Shakir conducts jihad with the sword. God becomes happy with the defeat of the Russians…

O is for Oppression - Oppression is forbidden. The Russians are oppressors. We perform jihad against the oppressors…

K is for Kabul - Kabul is the capital of our dear country, no one can invade our country. Only Muslim Afghans can rule over this country…

For Maths, problems were issued like this:

One group of mujahideen attacks a group of 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack, 20 Russians were killed. How many Russians fled?

The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet travels at 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3200 meters from the mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take to strike the Russian in the forehead?

One writer, Dana Burde, quoted a Pakistani journalist as saying:

“Imagine you learnt the alphabet and numbers with images of Kalashnikovs and tanks instead of apples and oranges. During the mid to late 1980s, a USAID funded project printed millions of textbooks in Peshawar. The funds came from Saudi Arabia and the books were distributed amongst children in Afghanistan and in new Madrassas across Pakistan.”⁹

Burde herself stated in an interview that as part of the Afghan war effort: “the alphabet of jihad literacy tried to solidify the links between violence and religious obligation.”

Jihad is a term often misunderstood in the West, its literal meaning is “struggle”, which in Islamic terms can mean striving to live according to God in any way, whether in peacetime or war, but in the Western world Jihad has become synonymous with “holy war”, with reporters often referring to “Jihadism” or “Jihadist” to refer to “militants” or “militancy with a fundamentalist ideology”, in the story of these textbooks we can see that this is a connotation that was very deliberately fostered, with jihad being taught as a religious obligation to fight and kill the invading foreign unbelievers.

An article by researcher Niko Malhotra quotes Mujahedeen representatives presenting their ideology as a strong ideological counterweight to Communism, arguing that: “the current struggle of the Afghans the holy Jehad … routed from a strong faith and belief in Islam, peace and freedom is a fierce blow to the Russian communism which is the enemy of freedom-loving people everywhere.”

Malhotra writes that in turn: “American officials were clearly aware of the troubling violent depictions and content of these textbooks but did not object because the radical messaging was aligned with American objectives to weaken Soviet control and influence in the region.”, and that “The alignment of the Islamist jihadist ideology of the mujahideen parties with the American anti-Soviet agenda provided the conditions for the unquestioned development and widespread distribution of these problematic textbooks among the Afghan population.”.

1.3 The Winds of Change

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In terms of the military aid to the Mujahideen, supplies had begun in a modest form, with the rebels being supplied with old British Lee-Enfield bolt action rifles, but under the Reagan doctrine aid escalated dramatically across the first half of the 1980s, with rocket and grenade launchers being supplied, mines, Surface to Air Missiles and heavy machine guns, then Anti-Aircraft guns.

In 1985, Reagan decided that “all means available” should be used to support the insurgents, with Chinese Multiple Rocket Launcher systems being provided, and famously in 1986, the Stinger missile system, which was used to shoot down Soviet helicopters in large numbers.

Thanks to the foreign aid organised by the U.S. and its partners from the Cyclone program the Afghan war became progressively costly for the Soviets, who were facing a declining economy and felt there was no end in sight, Afghanistan was steadily becoming the Soviet version of the Vietnam War.

In contrast with Ronald Reagan’s combative tone, the Soviet Union went in a more moderate, reformist direction, Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, proclaiming the ideals of openness and restructuring, the Soviets ensured the DRA would match their tempo by pushing Babrak Karmal to be more compromising with the Mujahideen, as a result he announced a policy of “National Reconciliation”. 

The Soviets then went further by dropping their support for Karmal, who resigned and was replaced by a more diplomatic leader, Mohammad Najibullah, under Najibullah’s watch the one party system was removed, the country was renamed as the “Republic of Afghanistan”, Islam was made the official religion] and the door for dialogue with the rebels was left open. Najibullah’s goal was a coalition, resolving the war through communication with rebel forces, and he announced a ceasefire to try and arrange the reconciliation process.

However, the ceasefire only lasted for 6 months, the insurgency renewed and worsened as the Soviets began to withdraw from the conflict, in 1988 a multi-party election was held where the government won all of the seats due to a boycott from the rebellion, but left some seats empty in the hopes that rebel fighters would pursue a political solution and join the parliament, they didn’t.

Although Gorbachev’s reformism in the Soviet Union encouraged Reagan to improve relations between the US and USSR, with the 2 countries coming to terms on reducing their nuclear weapons stockpiles, the Reagan Doctrine continued internationally and so did US aid to the Mujahideen.

In 1989 the Soviet forces completed their withdrawal and replaced their boots on the ground with aid packages of guns and cash, to the surprise of many the government forces were able to hold their own against expectations that they would be finished off without the support of the Soviet Army, leading to Pakistani predictions that their Jihad would “never recover”.

Thanks to these successes Gorbachev and Najibullah decided to pin their hopes on the negotiation of a peace deal with the rebels foreign backers, proposing that they freeze arms sales to the rebels in exchange for a similar freeze of sales to the government by the Soviets.

A further positive sign appeared when in early 1990 the Afghan government defeated a coup attempt organised by the country’s defence minister Shahnawaz Tanai, who defected and tried to take over the government with the aid of Hekmatyar, fleeing to Pakistan when the attempt was stopped by armed loyalists, as part of the peace process the US also dropped their condition that Najibullah had to go for a deal to happen.)

But at the same time the US continued offering up hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the rebels), all while ignoring their own predictions that a collapse of the Afghan government would lead to a government that was against (or at best didn’t care about) the interests of the US, this continuation of Operation Cyclone was contrasted by the Soviet efforts, which faced a very different fate.

Throughout 1991 Gorbachev and his allies had been working on a “New Union Treaty” that would preserve the Soviet Union by decentralising and democratising the country, the Treaty had popular support in most of the USSR’s republics and was ready to be signed in August 1991, but only the day before the signing ceremony hardliners in the Soviet government and the KGB launched a coup against Gorbachev. Gorbachev was imprisoned in his dacha in Crimea, and the President of the Russian Republic Boris Yeltsin organised the resistance to the coup.

The coup collapsed but the participation of senior Communist Party and Soviet government members in the attempt had destroyed the credibility of the reform process, the new treaty was torpedoed and Boris was calling the shots; He organised the dissolution of the Union into 15 new countries and as head of the newly established Russian Federation cut all aid to Afghanistan.

With Soviet support drying up and support from the US and Pakistan still washing in, the Afghan government’s soldiers started to lose their momentum and faced defections; While the government was losing control of more and more areas Najibullah continued his appeals for peace and a coalition with the rebel militants, warning that Afghanistan in extremist hands would be a centre of instability, when it became clear his calls were falling on deaf ears he appealed to the UN for help in 1992 and attempted to flee, hoping for safe passage to India as city after city fell to different bands of rebel fighters.

Shortly after the DRA collapsed and Afghanistan came under new management, with Najibullah forced to seek refuge in a UN compound, effectively kept as a prisoner in his own capital. 

Following the takeover 6 factions of the Peshawar Seven signed the Peshawar Accords, a deal to form a new government, the “Islamic State of Afghanistan”, and distribute its power structures to the different militias, but without the DRA or the Soviets to act as a common enemy the rest of the former rebel forces all split off from each other, a new civil war began almost immediately, if we go back to our family tree, we can see how this developed.

Hekmatyar and his H-I-G movement, who had received piles of cash from Operation Cyclone, became the key leaders against the new Afghan State, with Hekmatyar trying to take power for himself.

A third element was the factions outside of the former Peshawar Seven, by this point the remnants of the Tehran Eight, had formed their own coalition called the “Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami”, the “Islamic Unity Party”, and remnants from the DRA government, had formed a group called “Junbish-i-Milli Islami”, the “National Islamic Movement”, these forces swapped sides as it suited them.

The huge network of militias the CIA had fostered suddenly collapsed into warlordism, and since they had served their purpose in helping to bleed the Soviets dry no one in the West really cared, Operation Cyclone took its place in the Guinness Book of Records as the most expensive covert action to date and that was that, despite the lofty declarations from Reagan about fighting for freedom, no elections were held following the collapse of the DRA. Afghanistan was mostly forgotten about by the Western world, and left to rot.

1.4 From Freedom Fighters to Terrorists

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With both Russia and the US deserting Afghanistan and the country’s leftover factions endlessly squabbling, Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda comrades decided to go on holiday to Sudan, on the surface this was to carry out peaceful economic projects, but on the side the group was still organising for militancy, with volunteers popping up in conflict zones such as Bosnia and Somalia, other affiliates attempted attacks on the West, launching a failed bombing attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 1993.

Meanwhile, in 1994, a third bloc appeared in Afghanistan, the Taliban.

Led by a former commander from the Peshawar Seven¹⁰, Mohammad Omar, the Taliban was initially formed from students of Madrassas, religious schools, Omar and the Talibs were furious with how their country had collapsed into warlordism and crime, and decided to do something about it.

They organised across the country and pushed forward with a wave of support by stamping out corruption and bringing a calm and security that others could not offer to the war ravaged streets of Afghanistan, at the cost of puritanical rule.

Pakistan’s ISI, the CIA’s old partner in Afghanistan, gave the Taliban their support as they swept through the country, eliminating the other competing factions and warlords. In September 1996 the group captured Kabul, raided the UN compound and came for Najibullah, who was kidnapped and executed.

In the aftermath only around 20% of the country was ruled by the remains of the other Mujahedeen groups, who banded together as a front called the “United Islamic National Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan”, “Northern Alliance” for short.

The other 80% all belonged to the Taliban, who consolidated power and declared Afghanistan to be an “Islamic Emirate”; At this point Bin Laden and Al Qaeda became key supporters of the new government, having returned to Afghanistan in May 1996 after being kicked out of Sudan by the Sudanese government, Haqqani, the former US asset, also aligned with this growing new order, while Hekmatyar fled into exile and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Bin Laden’s old patron, chose to join the Northern Alliance and reject Taliban rule.

As the Taliban entrenched themselves various extremist militant groups from across the world then began pouring into Afghanistan, such as the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” from China and the “Organisation of Monotheism and Jihad” from Jordan.

Bin Laden and his network used their position as “guests” of Mullah Omar to steadily expand their influence across Afghanistan and into other conflict zones, and in 1998 Bin Laden escalated his campaigns against the West, with Al Qaeda affiliates launching attacks on 2 US embassy buildings in Africa, one in Kenya and the other in Tanzania, landing Bin Laden a spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted list; Later, in the year 2000, Al Qaeda bombed a US Navy ship in the Middle Eastern country of Yemen, the USS Cole and, of course, in 2001 they took another shot at the World Trade Center.

_{Creator: E.T. Smith Licence: CC-BY 2.0 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:911_North_of_the_towers.jpg}

2. Reap what you Sow

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2.1 America Strikes Back

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9/11. Former members of a CIA backed front had orchestrated the most deadly attack on the American people since the Japanese Empire with Pearl Harbour, having caused a death toll reaching into the thousands, the response was strong.

People raged at the loss of so many loved ones, families demanded justice and answers, the Afghan militia network the U.S. government helped to create had now become an enemy, they made a big mess, and now they needed to clean it up.

Only 3 days after the attacks, September 14th, a law was proposed in the U.S. Congress known as the “Authorization for Use of Military Force” or “AUMF”, it was passed the same day, 4 days later George Bush signed it into law.

Only a page long, the law stated “That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons”.

Although on paper this was more moderate than a declaration of war in practice it was even more broad, with no explanation of what level of force was “necessary and appropriate”, no specific naming of an enemy, no definition of where the conflict zone was and no details of what the end of the campaign looked like, the law was so vague it could be interpreted to mean whatever the government wanted it to mean.

It was essentially a blank check to launch a global war with any methods: Assassination, invasion, detention without trial or charge and warrantless wiretapping, with no accountability to other branches of the state or the people, centuries of effort building legal norms and safeguards were erased in a single paragraph.

With these newfound powers in tow, the US government quickly decided they needed to get their hands on Bin Laden and they gave the Taliban an ultimatum; hand him over or face war.

The Islamic Emirate, which had only been recognised by 4 countries, was quickly overthrown by a US led coalition involving European partners, their NATO alliance, and other international partners, but while Al Qaeda’s training camps were quickly destroyed Bin Laden escaped into hiding, reportedly with the aid of a returning Hekmatyar, and the group’s attacks continued.

Now, what happened next is genuinely baffling. After losing most of their territory in Afghanistan the Taliban’s leadership held a secret meeting where Mullah Omar asked its remaining commanders what they wanted to do, they decided to surrender and bring an end to the war, handing power to a new US-backed government that was being formed from the Northern Alliance, who established their new state, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Mullah Omar accepted the decision to back down, and the new government offered the Taliban fighters amnesty in exchange for their surrender, handing the Coalition victory on a silver platter. ¹¹

So how did the US officials respond to these developments? They immediately shot themselves in the foot of course, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, called up the new Afghan leadership and demanded that they take back their amnesty towards the Taliban, causing the war to restart and prompting the Taliban to return to hostilities. ¹²

They quickly re-organised themselves as an insurgency, some fighters later splintered off and became the Tehrik-I-Taliban, setting up shop in Pakistan’s tribal areas and battling the Pakistani Army, while the rest remained inside Afghanistan, fighting to re-establish their rule, Hekmatyar ended up on a state department watchlist, being designated a “Global Terrorist”, for his aid to the insurgency.

2.2 The Pitfalls

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Amidst this rebellion, the coalition and their new local partners in the Afghan government began trying to stabilise and remodel Afghanistan, much like the Soviets had alongside the DRA decades before, but the coalition faced the same kind of pitfalls the Soviets had; Alienation of the population, misconduct carried out by the security forces and foreign support for the rebels.

In terms of alienation, after the takeover the new coalition backed leaders of Afghanistan quickly went to work undoing the Taliban’s system and trying to form a Westernised style of governance, trying to form a kind of liberal, Presidential, representative system, working to promote rights for women and focusing on education; Essentially the same kind of statebuilding project once undertaken by the Democratic Republic and the Soviets was now being carried out by the Islamic Republic and the US, but this caused the exact same kind of backlash as well, the Afghan leadership and its foreign backers were looking to a foreign model as an ideal and building structures around it:

One report from SIGAR - The US government’s “Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction” - Summarised the culture clash like this:

Effectively rebuilding Afghanistan required a detailed understanding of the country’s social, economic, and political dynamics. However, U.S. officials were consistently operating in the dark, often because of the difficulty of collecting the necessary information.

The U.S. government also clumsily forced Western technocratic models onto Afghan economic institutions; trained security forces in advanced weapon systems they could not understand, much less maintain; imposed formal rule of law on a country that addressed 80 to 90 percent of its disputes through informal means; and often struggled to understand or mitigate the cultural and social barriers to supporting women and girls.

Without this background knowledge, U.S. officials often empowered powerbrokers who preyed on the population or diverted U.S. assistance away from its intended recipients to enrich and empower themselves and their allies. Lack of knowledge at the local level meant projects intended to mitigate conflict often exacerbated it, and even inadvertently funded insurgents. _{https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-21-46-LL.pdf, Pages 12 and 13}

Another SIGAR report characterised the US government as deliberately ignoring the background on Afghan customs, believing that their role was to “usher in an orderly revolution that would replace existing Afghan social systems with western or “modern” systems”.¹³

And again just as with the Soviets and the DRA, the alienation caused by their statebuilding project was further intensified by the violence and rampant abuse used to maintain it.

Much as the purges by leaders like Hafizullah Amin had put off any chance of Afghans embracing the DRA during the Soviet-Afghan war, similar misconduct by the new Afghan government’s “National Security and Defence Forces”, which included both the military and police forces, had essentially the same effects in the Afghan War of the 2000s.

This was best showcased in a documentary released by VICE News in 2013, presented by reporter Ben Anderson, sarcastically titled “This Is What Winning Looks Like”, the documentary showcased 1 and a half hours of the situation on the ground, behind the glossy narrative the coalition governments were presenting at the time.

I can’t recommend watching the full thing enough to anyone interested in this subject, because there are too many examples of the corruption going on in Afghanistan to go over without bloating this project’s runtime, but here are the highlights that are most illustrative.

While embedded with the Afghan troops during operations against the Taliban, Anderson noted that the Afghan Army was more or less a glorified rebrand of the Northern Alliance.

And this claim is something further supported by SIGAR, who noted that after taking over Afghanistan in 2001, the coalition simply absorbed the Northern Alliance militias into the new National Army, and despite trying to reform the Army over the years it still failed miserably at representing the population: For example, in 2011, a target was for the Northern Tajik ethnic group to comprise 25% of the Army, with 44% of the troops to be from the Southern Pashtun group, roughly matching the country’s wider population¹⁴, but as late as 2018, 41% of the Army was still made up of Tajiks¹⁵, SIGAR’s report on why the Afghan Army had collapsed stated that the reforms “failed to cure the original problem […] which was the underrepresentation of southern Pashtuns [and] the lingering impact of early Northern Alliance influence on the force”, the report also remarked that for many soldiers “the motivation for joining the military was financial security, not any sense of nationalism”.¹⁶

Meaning that the so-called “good guys” that came out of the Mujahadeen revolt, who had formed the new government with Western backing, were a bunch of warlords with mercenary style motives, as a result they were prone to defections, with several hundred coalition soldiers being killed by so-called “green-on-blue attacks” Afghan Army traitors who shot at their own trainers and fled, often to join the Taliban.

Many of those who remained loyal were implicated in all kinds of abuses as well, ranging from executions to sexual abuse, which was found to be “rampant”, despite this the units responsible continued to receive US aid under a loophole in human rights rules, which allowed aid to serious violators of human rights to continue if it was seen as necessary for “national security”; When SIGAR called for that loophole to be closed in a report, essentially cutting off aid to human rights violators in Afghanistan, the US Defence Department said that SIGAR’s report didn’t “reflect an understanding of the challenges faced by US forces” in training the Afghans, seemingly a veiled admission of how bad the problems had gotten, it wasn’t just a few bad apples, but a whole rotten bunch.

As for the other key element of the security forces, the Afghan Police, they were plagued by the same kinds of problems as the Army, as despite their name they were less of a real police force and more of a paramilitary unit. Early in the occupation, from 2001 to 2003, the police had been managed by coalition partner Germany, with the Germans following a community based policing model¹⁷, but after 2003 the US took over with training being managed by the US Department of Defence; SIGAR noted that this training “reflected a military mindset”, with the police’s priority being counterinsurgency rather than actual policing, SIGAR quoted one ex- US ambassador as saying “We never focused on crime prevention” and “We never collected crime statistics on any regular basis.”¹⁸, and noted that the Northern bias in the Army also existed in the police force, essentially making them two sides of the same coin¹⁹.

And as a counterinsurgency tool, the Afghan Police left a lot to be desired…

For his documentary Anderson interviewed a Major in the US Marines called Bill Steuber, who was acting as an advisor to the Afghan Police, Steuber recounted the violence perpetrated by the officials he was supposed to be working with, but also instances of rampant corruption as well, some examples being officers randomly disappearing out of nowhere, ammunition being stolen and sold off in local markets, and officials claiming fuel money for vehicles that were obviously completely unusable.

When Steuber tried to remedy any of these problems, he ran up against a brick wall, at one point he managed to get a police chief to agree to act against commanders keeping boys as servants on their bases, then the chief cancelled the operation to arrest them and nothing was done. When Anderson encouraged the US Ambassador to speak to Steuber about the problems during a visit, the Ambassador refused, instead attending a briefing giving a glowing view of coalition efforts with promises that the situation was improving, and then popping off in his helicopter.

Years later, on a podcast, Anderson revealed that Steuber had lost his job for speaking out about what was really happening in Afghanistan.

Another disastrous problem that plagued both the military and the police was the phenomenon of “Ghost Soldiers”, where commanders of units would include the names of people who had abandoned their posts, died, or simply never existed on troop lists as if they were active soldiers, allowing the commanders to pocket the salaries of these non existent soldiers for themselves. At one point the province of Helmand officially had 25,000 soldiers on duty to confront the Taliban, but an Afghan government report later found out that 40% or more of those soldiers never actually existed, forcing the government to plug the gap with unqualified units like border patrol officers, in the one of the worst cases, cited by SIGAR, the number of police defending the city of Kandahar was recorded to be 14,000, but it turned out that only 5% of those police officers actually existed, the real number was 700²⁰. SIGAR noted that in one of their reports in 2016 that “neither the United States nor its Afghan allies know how many Afghan soldiers and police actually exist, how many are in fact available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities”, as was typical of Afghanistan’s problems, nothing was done about this.

Put simply, the coalition policy was more or less to just ignore the insane levels of graft and abuse taking place across the country and throw money at the problem, explaining away any misconduct with just 3 letters, “TIA” - “This is Afghanistan”.

And the coalition wasn’t just overlooking abuses, they were participating in them as well, in camps like the overseas Guantanamo Bay facility and the Afghan Bagram Prison, prisoners were subjected to the use of what were officially known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” also known in plain English as “torture”; Practices included simulated drowning, also known as “waterboarding”, all kinds of threats of violence, sexual abuse, and the weaponisation of religion, with Anti Islamic torture techniques being used to break the will of suspected insurgents.

Coalition Commander Stanley McChrystal stated in a leaked report that “Committed Islamists” were being “indiscriminately mixed with petty criminals and sex offenders” and that they were “using the opportunity to radicalise and indoctrinate them” with “hundreds” being “held without charge or without a defined way ahead.”; One advisor from the then Afghan government remarked that the effect of this was the exact opposite of what the coalition wanted, rather than disrupting terrorism, they were fueling it, saying “ if they are putting someone in jail without any reason and abusing him for two or three years, then when he is released he will do a suicide attack or take up arms and fight, especially against the international troops”.

By radicalising these detainees through repeated torture, then leaving them in a prison filled with Taliban affiliates, the coalition was essentially turning prisons like Bagram into factories of terror.

These abuses enabled the Taliban to sell their insurgency as a just holy war; While the horror of actions like executions, hostage takings and suicide bombings was obviously wrong and seemingly barbaric in the eyes of the West, the Taliban could present a different view to the Afghan people, that it was the barbarism of the coalition and its cronies that justified Taliban attacks as revenge.

When the abuse was combined with the staggering pile of corruption going on in Afghanistan the Taliban were able improve their public image, presenting themselves as a trustworthy alternative to the occupation by comparison; The whole reason the Taliban movement had originally earned public goodwill in the 1990s was through their opposition to the corruption and warlordism that Afghans had become fed up with, and the failure to stamp out these issues in the new coalition backed Afghanistan ensured that this goodwill would continue in many sects of Afghan society.%22).

As for foreign support, one of the most absurd elements of the conflict was that the Pakistani ISI was still supporting the Taliban after the coalition takeover, even hosting the Taliban leadership inside Pakistan itself, and the coalition essentially enabled this behaviour; Pakistan’s government continued to be labelled by the US as a “Major Non-NATO Ally” and was given billions of dollars in aid to fight the Pakistani Taliban²¹, while its intelligence agency was at the same time aiding the Afghan Taliban in its fight against the coalition.

Writer Tim Marshall summed this up as: “The Americans came up with a “Hammer and Anvil” strategy” where they would “hammer the Afghan Taliban against the Pakistani operation on the other side of the border.” but the Pakistani “anvil” instead turned out to be “a sponge that soaked up whatever was thrown at it, including any Afghan Taliban retreating from the American hammer”.²²

Bafflingly, it seemed as if coalition leaders had learned absolutely nothing from the events of Operation Cyclone, they had simply decided to play the same game all over again but place themselves in the losing role.

2.3 The Consequences

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The effect of this was that the coalition completely failed to flush out the Taliban, and the group instead slowly won hearts and minds and minds across Afghanistan, eroding whatever loyalty the Afghan government commanded, so that even as their former Al-Qaeda allies faltered, with Bin Laden being killed in a 2011 operation codenamed “Neptune Spear”, the Taliban could go on as a formidable force; They believed that eventually the coalition powers would get tired of propping up their Afghan proxy government by force just as the Soviets gave up on the DRA, and they were right.

In 2020 Donald Trump’s US government signed the Doha Accord with the Taliban, agreeing on a total withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Trump’s successor Joe Biden decided to follow through with that deal, sealing Afghanistan’s fate: Without the support of the US the coalition presence in Afghanistan was unsustainable, in 2021 the Coalition soldiers left the country and 20 years of occupation were brought to an end.

And as a testament to just how badly the Afghan statebuilding project had failed, while the Soviet backed Afghan government had faced a slow, drawn out death after the loss of its benefactors, the collapse of the Coalition backed government was swift and brutal; The silver lining with the Afghan Communists was that they had taken power on their own, the Soviet occupation that supported them came later, the new Afghan government was only able to take office because of the coalition invasion, it was nothing without its continued occupation; The airstrikes and aid that propped up that government obscured just how weak its foundations were, rotted away by the corruption and warlordism.

While Biden swore that the Afghan government would be able to cling on to power, it was over with before US troops had even finished leaving the country, sparking an all new refugee crisis and burying the idealist dream of Westernised, Liberalised Afghanistan.

And although the Pakistanis had officially denied reports of their support for the Taliban for decades, when the Taliban took over the then Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan celebrated the victory as a sign of Afghans “breaking the chains of slavery”.

The Afghan war came full circle, in the beginning the US used the Mujahedeen to drain the pockets and resolve of the USSR, in the end the Mujahideen put them through a taste of their own medicine; As the golden rule says, treat others how you wish to be treated.

And so there’s a very strong argument which is: Wasn’t a bad investment to end the soviet union, but let’s be careful what we sow because we will harvest!

• Hillary Clinton

3. Aftermath

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There are accusations that Bin Laden received US aid during the insurgency against the Soviets:

While these claims are heavily disputed, one aspect of this 40 year conflict that is indisputable is that Bin Laden benefited from the efforts of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone. 

Bin Laden relied on Afghanistan as his sanctuary, it was where his fighter training camps were set up and where he found a home to proselytise for his warped, masochistic brand of Islamic theocracy.

Without decades of fueling the Mujahadeen on the part of Cyclone’s participants there would be no connections, no sanctuaries, no breeding grounds for terror, Bin Laden never would’ve been able to make his foothold with the Afghan Services Bureau and the ASB never would’ve been the petri dish for extremist militancy that eventually led to the forming of Al Qaeda, without the squabbling of the militant factions after the Afghan government fell in the 1990s it’s unlikely that Bin Laden’s hosts, the Taliban, would’ve even existed.

Hundreds of billions of dollars that could’ve gone towards schools and hospitals instead went to guns and bombs in Afghanistan, in the interest of destabilising a country that couldn’t be re-stabilised once the opposition was out of the way, feeding a conflict that has swallowed up lives and countries whole, the only end beneficiaries being the industries of war and the ones who ultimately ended up with the weapons they produced, these guys.

_{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taliban_Humvee_in_Kabul,_August_2021_(cropped).png}

If the US hadn’t used the Mujahideen as a prop to entice the Soviets into war, all this bloodshed could’ve been prevented.

And you shouldn’t just take my word for it, take the US government’s; The memo initially pitching for the rebels to be funded openly stated that they were badly organised, badly funded and incapable of dragging the Soviets into a Vietnam War style conflict on their own, Operation Cyclone turned a low level insurgency into a 4 decade long global conflict.

_{- https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/5696260/Document-8-Georgy-Kornienko-was-the-top-deputy.pdf, Page 2}

I mean let’s remember here, the people we are fighting today, we funded… 20 years ago.

• Hillary Clinton

Even now there are those who would defend this course of actions, viewing it as worthwhile to make deals with the devil and face the hell that would result if it led to the Soviet Union ending up in the dustbin of history for the aftermath.

This ignores the fact that as the Cold War was coming to a close, the USSR, under Gorbachev’s stewardship, was on a path of sovereignty for its member states and freedom for those it used to hold in a strong grip through the Warsaw Pact, and that under his leadership an age of cooperation was being embraced, where East and West no longer saw each other as enemies. 

Can we really say that this state, one that was genuinely enthusiastic about working with the West and seeking peace, to the point of being naïve about it, was one worth destroying at all costs for? Worth plunging the world into 2 decades of war, where terror threats became, on some level, an expected part of daily life?

Because that’s the backblast every country that backed the Afghan Mujahideen had to face in the end, Pakistan still faces the threat of the Tehrik-i-Taliban, China still faces the ETIM, and the other former backers had to face another extremist menace with global influence, the so-called “Islamic State”, but that’s a story for another time, and another video, for now, let’s just reflect on a key lesson from the decades of war in Afghanistan, a lesson simply put by Hillary Clinton: “Let’s be careful what we sow, because we will harvest.”

If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will be turned into a center of terrorism.

• Mohammad Najibullah, former President of Afghanistan

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Footnotes

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The directive adopted at the same time to the embassy requires Soviet diplomats in a conversation with Amin “to emphasize the need to stop the unreasonable wide-ranging repressions, which cannot but harm the cause of the April revolution.”

• https://afghanistan.ru/doc/11522.html

Although the U.S. decided to officially declare the Haqqani Network a terrorist organization only on September 7, 2012, Haqqani’s ties to extremism and al-Qaeda date back to the Soviet intervention and the founding of al-Qaeda. All major leaders in the Haqqani group had already been identified as al-Qaeda and Taliban affiliates and sanctioned by the UN at the request of Washington

• https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB389/

According to some reports, he acted as the deputy commander of the militant formations of the Islamist party Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islami Nabi Mohammadi [9][10], according to others - he was in the detachment of field commander Yunus Khales[2]; there is information that he is among the supporters of the armed group IOA Burhanuddin Rabbani[7].

• https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D1%83%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%B4_%D0%9E%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%80

• https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/evaluations/SIGAR-23-16-IP.pdf, Page 71

The U.S. approach veered away from the traditional community policing model employed by the previous European leads, and leaned heavily towards militarizing the police into a local defense force—an approach that failed to create a force that could enforce justice and the rule of law and instead created a force plagued by issues of capability, leadership, corruption, and the inability to implement justice and the rule of law.

• https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/evaluations/SIGAR-23-16-IP.pdf, Bottom of Page 70

• https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/evaluations/SIGAR-23-16-IP.pdf, Page 69