The December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was a watershed event, one that definitively ended “détente” between the global superpowers, the United States and the USSR, and inaugurated a new and more intense phase of tension. The invasion was a clearcut violation of international law and was widely condemned. At the time, it appeared that the Soviet invasion was completely unprovoked, either by the Afghans themselves or by the United States.
In the nearly half century that that has elapsed since the invasion, a large amount of new information has emerged that casts doubt on the benign image of the US government, as a bystander in the Afghan calamity, and suggests that US officials deliberately provoked the invasion; and then, after the invasion occurred, some US officials actively welcomed its occurrence.
A reexamination of the 1979 Afghan case seems especially relevant today, given the obvious parallels to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the US response to the invasion of Afghanistan offers a model of what US officials should seek to achieve in Ukraine. The similarities between the two historical cases are indeed striking: Above all, the 1979 Afghan invasion was widely viewed at the time as being an unprovoked act of aggression, very much the way that the Ukraine invasion is being viewed now. We will see that such claims are contradicted by the historical record. It was US provocation that triggered both conflicts.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was widely presented as a major threat to Western security, but this was largely a propaganda invention. If one surveys the record of declassified documents from 1945 all the way to the late 1970s, one finds little US interest in Afghanistan, which was regarded as a strategic backwater, due to its exceptionally rugged geography and lack of access to the sea. The overarching US perspective was succinctly stated by a 1973 article in the Wall Street Journal, which was entitled: “Do the Russians Covet Afghanistan? If So, it is Hard to Figure Why.” The article went on to characterize Afghanistan as “a vast expanse of desert waste.” From the US National Security Council, a 1974 document stated: “Afghanistan is of no major importance to us.”
Columbia University Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski published extensively on international relations over several decades. None of Brzezinski’s academic writings made any significant mention of Afghanistan, which was viewed as a very minor piece in the global chess game of the Cold War. Brzezinski’s later implication that Afghanistan was strategically vital to Western security is not corroborated by his own scholarship.
Afghanistan did hold strategic importance to the USSR, however, since the two countries shared an extended border. Accordingly, the Soviets established a large-scale program of economic aid to the country. In addition, the Soviet Union became the country’s main supplier of weaponry, while Afghan officers were trained at Soviet academies. The Afghan government, for its part adopted a policy of official neutrality in the Cold War, though one that was tilted somewhat in favor of the Soviets. In Afghanistan’s domestic politics, however, the Soviets did not seek influence.
A 1967 academic study concluded: “Soviet aid to Afghanistan has been immensely successful… Even American officials are hard pressed to find major flaws.” A small communist party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan had very limited popular appeal and no realistic prospects for gaining power (or so it seemed at the time). Overall, Afghanistan’s status in the early phase of the Cold War suited both superpowers.
The country’s stability was gradually undermined during the 1970s. The key triggering event was an effort by the Nixon administration to make up for its weakness in the Vietnam War by seeking to challenge Afghanistan’s neutral status. In 1973, the CIA collaborated with Iranian and Pakistani intelligence to provoke an Islamist rebellion against the Afghan government, as a means of intimidating the government into downgrading its relationship with the USSR. This intervention led to a series of “tit for tat” interventions by both superpowers that destabilized the country entirely.
By 1979, Afghanistan was engulfed in a full-scale civil war, between an unpopular communist government under the PDPA and a series of Islamist guerrilla forces, collectively known as the Mujahiddin. Declassified Soviet documents, released after the end of the Cold War, show that the USSR was backing their Afghan communist proteges with military support and training. However, the new documents also show that the Soviets initially had no interest in sending their own army into the fight against the Mujahiddin. The Afghan communists repeatedly requested that the Soviets send in their own forces to fight, but the USSR kept refusing those requests.
In public, US analysts repeatedly stated that the Soviets were laying the groundwork for further aggression, aimed at occupying the oil-rich Persian Gulf region or a warm water port on the Indian Ocean coastline. Afghanistan was to become a staging area for these further attacks, it was claimed. The documents from ex-Soviet archives offer no support for these views. On the contrary, Soviet officials showed considerable caution and restraint through the first half of 1979, resisting calls for augmented intervention. Declassified US government documents, from diplomats based in Afghanistan during the 1978-1979 period, similarly show that Soviet and East bloc officials were actively trying to settle Afghanistan’s civil war through political means, by establishing a more broadly based government in Kabul, without requiring an external invasion. Discussions at the Politburo in March 1979, revealed in a declassified document, show a high-level consensus against invasion.
Soviet attitudes began to harden later in 1979, gradually turning in favor of invasion. A key factor influencing the Soviets’ change of heart was an aggressive US policy, directed by President Jimmy Carter and his hardline national security advisor, Brzezinski. On Brzezinski’s advice, the president signed a July 3 “finding,” authorizing the CIA to furnish aid to the Mujahiddin fighters, directly intervening in the conflict for the first time.
Though the amount of US aid was small, only several hundred thousand dollars, and was supposedly “nonlethal” in character, it was sufficient to arouse Soviet paranoia. The US intervention coincided with Soviet fears that the PDPA might switch sides in the Cold War, moving away from Soviet influence and into the Western orbit. At the end of December 1979, the Soviet military installed a new puppet government in Afghanistan and invaded the country, occupying it with Soviet troops for almost a decade.
The American supply of aid to the Mujahiddin very likely triggered the USSR’s decision to invade. This latter point was revealed by Brzezinski himself in a 1998 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. The information in this interview is so startling that I present an extended translation. Note that the italics have been added to emphasize vital points.
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention [emphasis added throughout].
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan, nobody believed them. However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
In the above statements, Brzezinski frankly admitted that US officials had deceived the American public: They denied that they were intervening in Afghanistan, prior to the 1979 invasion, even though the US was in fact intervening.
Brzezinski confirmed the provocation, stating that US aid to the Mujahiddin was expected to “induce a Soviet military intervention.” When pressed on this point by the French journalist – that the US had deliberately provoked the invasion – Brzezinski hedged a little bit (“We didn’t push the Russians to intervene”). Then he immediately contradicted himself and admitted that “we knowingly increased the probability” of an invasion, implying that he did indeed push the Russians to intervene. And he boasted that US officials were “drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” once again suggesting intentional provocation. And after the invasion occurred, Brezinski expressed satisfaction at the prospect of “giving the USSR its Vietnam War,” thus getting even for the US humiliation during the chaotic evacuation from Saigon in 1975. And finally, it is clear that President Carter acceded to Brezinski’s recommendation and personally authorized the intervention.
Brzezinski’s 1998 claims have been corroborated by additional sources. At the time of the invasion, Brzezinski was briefed by his military aide, Lieutenant General William Odom. In response to the briefing, Brzezinski raised his fist in triumph and exclaimed that the Soviets “have taken the bait!” according to General Odom (as later recounted to Cambridge University historian Jonathan Haslam). Brezinski had baited the Soviets into invading, he intentionally provoked them.
And in his own published memoirs, Brzezinski offered only perfunctory regret about the invasion, while expressing pleasure that the Soviet aggression had vindicated his own hardline views and strengthened his position in internal policy debates within the Carter administration. Brzezinski also noted it “represented an opportunity for [Carter] to demonstrate his genuine toughness.” In January 1980, a month after the invasion, Carter’s public approval rating soared to 58 percent, the highest point of his last two years in office. The President was benefiting from the “rally round the flag,” effect, typical of public responses to international crises. From Brzezinski’s perspective, the invasion was not altogether a negative development, since it made him look good, and it made his boss look good as well. The statements in Brzezinski’s memoirs and by General Odom seem perfectly consistent with the 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview, thus providing additional corroboration.
This interview nevertheless elicited harsh public criticism, especially after the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, which were perpetrated by groups that were linked to the anti-Soviet crusade that Brzezinski helped to provoke. In this new atmosphere, after 2001, the Nouvel Observateur statements were an embarrassment (notably his flippant comment regarding “Some agitated Moslems”). In a 2010 interview with the Real News Network – twelve years after the original interview – Brzezinski distanced himself from his earlier statements and implied that he had been misquoted.
Brzezinski’s disavowal of the 1998 interview should be viewed with considerable skepticism. We must recognize a measure of self interest in Brzezinski’s disavowal, given the public criticisms of his past statements, which seemed dismissive of international terrorism. It seems unsurprising that, after the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks, Brzezinski would want to disown such statements, which tarnished his image as a protector of US security.
More recently, historian Conor Tobin has also tried to discredit the Nouvel Observateur interview, noting an inaccuracy in the article title. However, this does not seem very damaging to the interview’s overall credibility, since article titles are typically added at the end of the production process, often to fit into the allotted space for print editions; they are often composed by the copyeditor, not the original author. Among journalists, the title is widely recognized as the least reliable part of an article. No errors have been shown in the body of the interview. It should also be noted that the Tobin critique is flawed, since he fails to mention General Odom’s comments, which substantiate the Nouvel Observateur interview.
Overall, efforts to discredit the claims of US provocation seem unconvincing, and there can be little doubt that the United States did provoke the 1979 invasion. The Carter administration lured the USSR into “the Afghan trap,” as Brzezinski stated.
The Soviet invasion was viewed positively by executives in the weapons manufacturing industry, who saw the invasion as an opportunity to expand the US military budget and justify that expansion to the public. “Very good times are indeed around the corner for defense contractors,” according to a Washington Post reporter, in response to the President’s decision to raise military spending.
With its close ties to the aerospace industry, Air Force Magazine expressed optimism that the invasion would set US foreign policy “on the road to renewed credibility.” The magazine noted an important historical precedent: “North Korea’s invasion of the south in 1950 triggered US rearmament,” with the hopeful implication that the Afghan invasion might trigger another round of rearmament and heightened military spending, to the advantage of weapons manufacturers. The editorial concluded that by invading Afghanistan, “The Soviets, once again, may inadvertently save us from ourselves.”
When looking back at Brzezinski’s actions in 1979, what is most impressive is the extraordinary recklessness that went into his decision to provoke a war. The results of the US provocation have been very negative, with a nine-year Soviet occupation, followed by decades of further war and instability, as well as horrific effects on the Afghan population. Many Afghans initially welcomed US support for the Mujahiddin guerrillas, which became the largest CIA operation of the Cold War; but they eventually tired of this generosity, as they came to realize how much the Agency had used them.
By 1990, the New York Times Magazine ran an article entitled: “Afghans: Now They Blame America.” The instability that was unleashed in Afghanistan also generated turmoil at the global level, after the Cold War, with the 2001 terrorist attacks, Global War on Terror, and Iraq war.
Now, 45 years later, we can see striking similarities between the Afghan case and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Just as in Afghanistan, the 2022 invasion was illegal and deserves condemnation. But we must also recognize that the Ukraine invasion was provoked by NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders, despite earlier promises not to expand NATO.
The evidence for provocation in the Ukraine case is overwhelming, and has even been confirmed by the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who stated in a public address: “President Putin… went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO close to his borders.” Once again, the only real winner from the war has been the US and European military-industrial complex. And in the end, Ukraine will be devastated by these events, just as Afghanistan was devastated. History seems to be repeating itself, as we have learned nothing from past failures.
David N. Gibbs is professor of history at the University of Arizona, as well as affiliated faculty in Africana Studies. He is the author of recently published Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide.
