Blasts from the past

The weaponry the Taliban could turn on us may be our own, the relics of a $7 billion Cold War campaign.

By Ken Silverstein

Sept. 22, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- In January of 1980, just weeks after the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in support of a puppet government, U.S. intelligence agencies were quietly working with international arms brokers to set up a weapons pipeline to back rebels fighting the government in Kabul.

One top-secret memo sent to the CIA from a team of London-based dealers at the time proposed a worldwide hunt for arms, and the establishment of a "Rear Base Area" outside Afghanistan from where they would be ferried to the insurgents as needed.

"The Sponsor's role must be held in complete confidence and utmost security must be exercised in all aspects of the proposed operation," reads the six-page memo, heretofore unpublished. And this memo marked the start of what would become the biggest covert operation in American history: the arming of the mujahedin guerrillas that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.

Between 1979 and 1991, the United States and a few foreign collaborators spent some $7 billion on the Afghan program, much of it to buy arms. The money also helped train 80,000 fighters, including radicals from the Middle East who came to join the jihad against the Soviet Union.

Now, as the U.S. prepares for war, American troops may face one-time allies armed in part with weapons sent to them by the U.S. government, as they have in the past in places such as Somalia, Panama and Iraq. How dangerous are these weapons that may be turned around to face us? Military and intelligence experts say it's difficult to tell, and much will depend on what sort of military operation the government undertakes. But particular weapons -- such as U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles -- that made it impossible for the Soviets to dislodge Afghan fighters from their mountainous retreats could prove just as threatening now.

The covert arming of the mujahedin began under President Jimmy Carter, who argued that Russian control of Afghanistan threatened the Arabian Sea, the oil lifeline of the West. U.S. Army Intelligence took the lead role, as the CIA was still reeling from revelations about its involvement in the coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, its attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and its illegal spying on U.S. citizens. In response, Carter's CIA director, Stansfield Turner, had fired 800 agents, thereby leaving the agency badly uninformed about the international arms market.

Under Army auspices, arms dealers linked to the U.S. bought the mujahedin land mines, grenades, machine guns and thousands of Russian-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), the latter of which were acquired from Poland by bribing military officials who oversaw defense stocks.

By 1982, the year after Ronald Reagan took office, the CIA had already taken over the program from the Army. Though Reagan called the rebels "freedom fighters," few within the government had any illusions about the forces that the United States was backing. The mujahedin fighters espoused a radical brand of Islam -- some commanders were known to have thrown acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil -- and committed horrific human rights violations in their war against the Red Army. (Of course, neither were the Russians zealous adherents to the Geneva Convention. They razed entire villages, burned crops and liberally targeted civilians.)

In the Machiavellian world of national security, though, little thought was given to the morality of our allies. "No one expected we were going to be great buddies with the muj," says a former CIA officer involved in procuring weapons for the rebels. "They were the best means to an end, which was to bleed the Soviet Union."

One former Army officer turned arms dealer who helped supply the rebels is equally forthright. "We didn't care about Afghanistan itself -- it was just a bunch of rocks up there in the desert," says John Miley. "Arming the mujahedin was an opportunity to give the Russians a black eye, and their victory hastened the downfall of the Soviet Union. No one could have foreseen that the Taliban would end up running the place."

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