That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the
effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap… The day that the
Soviets officially crossed the border I wrote to President Carter: We now
have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam war." So
said Zbigniew Brzezinski in a media interview in 1998.
A decade later we can look back upon the tactic Brzezinski
was boasting about also as a trap Washington was laying for itself. The US
was working to give its own Afghan war to itself. It is a weird sort of
war in which it killed allied troops over a week ago and is struggling to
cope with the aftermath.
The former national security adviser, who assisted
President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, was alluding to the plan to aid
and arm insurgents in Afghanistan months before the Soviet intervention,
with Carter authorising covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
operations in the region in July 1978. Code named Operation Cyclone, the
CIA programme for 1979 to 1989 was funded to the tune of $20 million to
$30 million per year from 1980 to 1986 and $630 million per year
thereafter.
No secrecy has shrouded either the post-9/11
Pentagon-Washington plans in the border areas of both Pakistan and
Afghanistan or the budget running into billions of dollars for the
purpose. The only difference is that long after the departure of the
Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and indeed the Soviet Union from the world
scene, an occupation army of the US and its NATO allies is caught in a
trap. And the trap seems shut tighter than ever before.
The imbroglio found a strange and striking illustration in
the incident of June 10 when a US air strike killed 11 soldiers at a
Pakistani checkpoint in the Mohmand tribal region of Pakistan, bordering
Afghanistan’s Kunar province. The coalition forces in the area had been
fighting Taliban insurgents whom the Pakistani army, of a largely tribal
composition, could or, according to many, would not stop from crossing the
border. The episode provided more than an inkling of the wars within the
Afghan war, of which the tribal people on both sides of the border were
witnesses and victims.
The incident has led to strong verbal protests from
Pakistan to Washington. The Pakistani army, in a statement approved by its
chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has called the attack on the post
"unprovoked and cowardly". Former army chief and ambassador to the US,
Jehangir Karamat, has said, "This is the first time the United States has
deliberately targeted cooperating Pakistani forces" and noted the absence
of any "statement by the US that this was ‘friendly fire’ and that the
intention was not to target Pakistani forces".
Unofficially, sources in the Pakistani army have talked of
a number of similar attacks on Pakistani territory in the past, attributed
then to "faulty intelligence". It is claimed that as a partner in the
US-led "war on terror" the army has even owned up to some such strikes to
avoid embarrassing its allies. The counterclaim from the coalition forces
is that the strikes have been made in "self-defence" and in order to
prevent Taliban incursions from the Pakistani side.
The trap consists, above all, in two-way border incursions
by the two "anti-terror" allies of the US, which threaten an escalation of
hostilities. On June 15, Afghan President Hamid Karzai claimed the right
to attack his Taliban tormentors on Pakistani territory. This invited a
declaration by Pakistan’s foreign affairs minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi,
of a resolve to "defend Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty". Neither of
them mentioned this but the most notable point about it all is that this
has become a war in which Washington is paying for both sides.
Not everyone might find this a delightful irony but many
could see it in the making down the past three decades. Towards the end of
the 1980s the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, is said to have told
the then US president, George HW Bush, "You are creating a Frankenstein,"
referring to the funding and fattening of the Taliban force. Even earlier,
this was obvious to foreign observers in Afghanistan. I was in Kabul as a
journalist from 1981 to 1983 and can vouch that few then saw the tribal
warriors and warlords under US tutelage as fervent devotees of democracy,
the cause they were supposed to serve under the CIA. The Taliban
established an outrageously oppressive regime in Kabul in 1996. But it was
not until the late 1990s that Washington began to worry about the
fundamentalism of the force, funded also by Saudi Arabia. Apprehensions on
this score however did not unduly affect the conduct of the "anti-terror"
war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of Descent
into Chaos, pointed this out when asked in a recent interview why
Pakistan was backing Taliban insurgency and creating instability in
Afghanistan against Islamabad’s own "best interests". Rashid replied: "I
think the real issue was that the US refused to recognise this issue. The
US agenda for Afghanistan and Pakistan was that General Musharraf should
be involved in catching as many al-Qaeda – that is the Arab component of
the al-Qaeda leaders – as possible. They were not interested in [dealing
with] the Taliban… and there was no real pressure on the Pakistanis to end
their support for the Taliban."
The policy has defeated its own purpose. The post-Musharraf
government of Pakistan is holding parleys with top Taliban commander
Baitullah Mehsud, accused earlier of masterminding Benazir’s
assassination. And on May 26, in a rare media interview, Mehsud rejected
reports that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and other leaders were hiding
in his region. "…Osama bin Laden is dead and the Afghan Taliban leader,
Mullah Omar, is not in our territory," he declared.
Indications are that the wars within the Afghan war will
continue. Brzezinski, it turns out, had set a trap for George W. Bush and
possibly his successors too.
