The United States\u2019 decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan closes a 20-year chapter between the two countries. But US intervention in Afghanistan far predates the 21st century, stretching back decades. <\/p>\n
In the weeks and months ahead, there are going to be a lot of questions about what\u2019s next for Afghanistan, including how the US approaches it. But contemplating what happens going forward also means looking at the past, including the ways American involvement has shaped Afghan politics and life for more than 50 years. <\/p>\n
During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union sought to gain footholds in Afghanistan, first through infrastructure investments and then military intervention. Once they withdrew in the late 1980s, the country entered a civil war \u2014 a backdrop to the rise of the Taliban. And while the US took a back seat in Afghanistan during much of the \u201990s, it invaded after the 9\/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and undertook a two-decade project for which the underlying mission would evolve. Now President Joe Biden has finally pulled American troops out of Afghanistan, but the two nations are still intertwined. <\/p>\n
I recently spoke with Ali A. Olomi, a historian of the Middle East and Islam at Penn State Abington, about the long, storied history of US meddling in Afghanistan and how it has shaped the country and people\u2019s lives there. Olomi, who is the host of the podcast Head on History<\/em>, discussed the US\u2019s funding of some factions of the mujahedeen, or Afghan guerrilla fighters, during the 1970s and \u201980s; America\u2019s rolling reasoning for its involvement in Afghanistan post-2001; and whether the US, even without soldiers present, is really gone.<\/p>\n Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.<\/p>\n A lot of people date US intervention in Afghanistan to 2001. But is that the right place to start?<\/p>\n The actuality is that the United States was involved all the way back in the 1950s. Afghanistan was going through a series of modernizing projects, and it attempted to really build into a modern nation-state under two subsequent leaders: first, King Zahir Shah, and then followed by his cousin who overthrew him, President Mohammad Daoud Khan. And it was right in the midst of the Cold War.<\/p>\n Both the Soviet Union and the United States were involved in Afghanistan, namely through infrastructure building. The Soviet Union really built what\u2019s known as the Salang Tunnel, which connected northern Afghanistan to Kabul. The United States was involved in what was known as the Helmand Valley project, which was an irrigation project and agricultural project about building dams in southern Afghanistan. It had been funneling a significant amount of money from the \u201950s and \u201960s on.<\/p>\n There was a lot of money coming from both of these big, great powers in Afghanistan. And that really sets the stage for what eventually becomes a more formal military relationship to the country.<\/p>\n And where does the military relationship start? The 1970s?<\/p>\n Yes. In the \u201970s, the United States is at first quite hesitant to support any type of military expansion.<\/p>\n Daoud Khan starts to ally himself more and more with the Soviet Union. He tries to establish a friendly relationship. He has a very famous phrase that he uses: \u201cI feel happiest when I light my American cigarette with Soviet matches.\u201d That really speaks to his attempt to leverage his really weird, uncomfortable Cold War relationship. But his allying with the Soviet Union makes the United States very, very nervous.<\/p>\n Things get even worse in 1978, when Daoud Khan is formally overthrown in what\u2019s known as the Saur Revolution and a Marxist-Leninist government is established, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Here, the United States starts to slowly funnel money toward some resistance groups. It doesn\u2019t have a unified policy. It\u2019s not like, okay, we need to start a resistance movement to overthrow this communist government. It has a little bit of a muddled approach.<\/p>\n There were some in the [US] government, like former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was very interested in getting involved. There were other military leaders that thought if we get involved, that\u2019s going to force the Soviet Union to get involved. And so they have a bit of a mixed bag approach. But they do start to agitate quite early on in 1978, and in 1979, they are funneling money to Pakistan\u2019s intelligence services, who are then funneling it into the hands of the resistance. That does eventually induce a Soviet invasion.<\/p>\n The US was actually involved a little before the Soviets invaded. Once they got invaded, then the United States throws its full backing. It goes from meddling and funneling and agitating to outright saying, \u201cOkay, we need to support the mujahedeen,\u201d and allying themselves with the anti-communist resistance movement.<\/p>\n In the Cold War, the US backs Afghan reactionaries to fight a Soviet-friendly regime<\/p>\n And just to be clear, what is the mujahedeen?<\/p>\n The mujahedeen is a sort of resistance movement that emerges in response to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The People\u2019s Democratic Republic party is wildly, wildly repressive, which as a result produces a good deal of resistance.<\/p>\n Now, we should note that it\u2019s also a really progressive government. This is a government that expands women\u2019s rights, it extends literacy, it builds agricultural reforms in the economy. But at the same time, they\u2019re also disappearing people. There are people who are like, hey, I can finally find a job, and other people who are like, wait a minute, we have health care. But if you spoke up against the government, there were chances that you\u2019d be thrown in jail, arrested, disappeared. As a result of that repressive component, there were pockets of resistance that have been growing.<\/p>\n The mujahedeen are not a single group. We often talk about the mujahedeen as one group, but [they were] actually four different kinds of groups that roughly align as resisting this new oppressive, repressive government.<\/p>\n The first is the more organized. There is the Islamist faction, led by people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is trained in the sort of jihadist ideology; he\u2019d like to see an Islamic government. He\u2019s a really regressive, retrograde, reactionary figure. In fact, even before the Soviet invasion, he carried out a series of horrific acid attacks against women.<\/p>\n This is a very unsavory character. And he happens to be one of the more organized groups, allied with the more moderate Ahmad Shah Massoud, who\u2019s not carrying out acid attacks. He\u2019s not regressive. He is much more interested in a sort of egalitarian vision of an Islamic republic, one with representative rather than this kind of autocratic rule. And yet despite these ideological differences, these two people ally themselves or at least align in opposition to communist government.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also leftists as part of the mujahedeen; Maoists and leftists who have been disaffected by this government, who felt that they weren\u2019t being heard or being repressed. And the mujahedeen is also made up of the Communist Party\u2019s own military commanders, a group of young military commanders who defect from the government.<\/p>\n Then the fourth and final group are just ordinary people \u2014 people that just pick up arms and fight and resist. They don\u2019t have an ideology. They don\u2019t have any particular vision of what the government is supposed to look like or what the government is supposed to do. They just realize that, wait a minute, this government is oppressive, or they\u2019re changing things in a way that they\u2019re not happy with, and they resist. This movement is a little slower. Once the Soviets invade, this group of ordinary people will grow dramatically, and this is the bulk of the mujahedeen.<\/p>\n We\u2019re talking about a coalition of groups with different aims, different goals that only align when the Soviets are there. Once the Soviets are gone, this group will turn amongst itself and we will see the civil war of the \u201990s.<\/p>\n What was the US\u2019s involvement with those different groups?<\/p>\n The US involvement is uneven. The US isn\u2019t just funding mujahedeen. There\u2019s an oversimplification that happens sometimes in this discourse, partly as a result of the US\u2019s own claims. Brzezinski very proudly pats himself on the back and says, \u201cWe created the mujahedeen.\u201d But he says this after the fact. In reality, when we look at the archives, that\u2019s not true. [The US] exploits the mujahedeen. They definitely use the mujahedeen to their advantage. And they do funnel money through Pakistan\u2019s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). But that money is mostly going into the hands of the more organized groups of the mujahedeen.<\/p>\n Ordinary people aren\u2019t receiving training from the CIA or Pakistan\u2019s ISI. They\u2019re just ordinary people who have guns in their houses, pick up their guns, and fight. But unfortunately, the more organized groups are those reactionary elements. It\u2019s people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is an Islamist who is quite dangerous, who does receive funds, who does receive some form of training.<\/p>\n You even have CIA documents that complain that the Afghans are very hard to train because they operate on a different sense of time, that they won\u2019t organize in the same way that the US military will organize. Anyone who\u2019s familiar with Middle Eastern culture, Central Asian culture, or Indian culture knows that if you go to a wedding that says it starts at 7 pm, it\u2019ll start at 9 pm. There\u2019s a similar experience with the mujahedeen: They tell mujahedeen, hey, we\u2019re going to start at 0800, and they\u2019ll do it on their own time. <\/p>\n But it is to these more reactionary elements that the US allies itself. And, in fact, it makes some really horrific blunders. One of the things that the US ends up doing is that it pressures Egypt to release a group of Islamists that it had arrested. And one of the Islamists that was arrested in Egypt and then is released is Ayman al-Zawahiri, who happens to be the second-in-command of al-Qaeda. <\/p>\n The US inadvertently imports him \u2014 and we don\u2019t have the full picture, so it could very easily have been intentional as an attempt to bolster the mujahedeen by bringing in foreign fighters. But they start to bring in what are known as the Arab Afghans, or the Arab mujahedeen, and these are people from Egypt\u2019s Muslim Brotherhood, these are people from Yemen, people from Saudi Arabia, who then go on to form al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n There is a relationship here in which the US, through funneling money to ISI, Pakistan\u2019s intelligence services, either inadvertently or intentionally ends up funding a group of foreign fighters who ally with the more organized elements of the mujahedeen. The consequence of that will be that once the US and the Soviet Union withdraw their influence, Afghanistan falls into a civil war. And in that civil war, both al-Qaeda will be born and the Taliban.<\/p>\n The unintended consequence of that meddling is chaos. And that chaos will give us al-Qaeda and the Taliban, both of whom have American training manuals, some American funds, and American guns, all that they received funneled through Pakistan\u2019s ISI. And now the CIA says, \u201cOops. We\u2019ve just allowed these groups to take form because we took our eye off of Afghanistan.\u201d<\/p>\n After the Cold War, a civil war brings the Taliban to power<\/p>\n Once the Soviet Union withdraws, and there\u2019s a civil war in Afghanistan, is the US still present during that time? Like, during the \u201990s?<\/p>\n The Soviet Union and the United States both sign an agreement, or at least, they are the guarantors of this agreement known as the Geneva Accords. It\u2019s technically between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the United States agrees that we will no longer fund the mujahedeen, or at least that one group of the mujahedeen, and the Soviet Union agrees that they will withdraw. The Soviet Union does formally withdraw. It leaves no real support for its former allies, the government. And the United States continues to funnel some money, but it mostly turns away.<\/p>\n The result is that within three years, the government collapses and the civil war emerges between these old and mujahedeen factions, who, again, like I mentioned, are completely different with very different visions. It\u2019s in that moment that the United States is not involved, the Soviet Union\u2019s not involved. In fact, the former Soviet Union ambassador will actually blast the United States and the Soviet Union and say, \u201cWe meddled in Afghanistan, and then we stopped paying attention.\u201d<\/p>\n It is hidden in that language of \u201cstopped paying attention\u201d that really speaks to what ends up happening. A power vacuum is created, and into that vacuum will step the civil war. From that civil war will be born the Taliban who emerged as a completely new actor. They\u2019re the second generation that grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan \u2014 Afghans were born in refugee camps, raised in refugee camps. They arrived fresh onto the scene. They intervene into this civil war, are able to exploit it, and therefore establish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996-\u201997.<\/p>\n The US invades after 9\/11, without clear goals. The Taliban wait out the long war.<\/p>\n How long were the Taliban in control? Until 2001?<\/p>\n