The Afghanistan conflict began in 1978 and has coincided with several notable operations by the United States (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Operation Cyclone, began in 1979 during the Jimmy Carter's presidency; it financed and later supplied weapons to the anti-Soviet Union mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan. This continued throughout the nearly ten-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and under Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan.
Operation Cyclone primarily supported militant Islamist groups that were favored by Pakistani president Zia-ul-Haq's government, at the expense of other groups fighting the Soviet-aligned Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).Bergen, Peter (2001). Holy War Inc. Free Press. p. 68. To help the Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), CIA funding disproportionately benefited Muslim Brotherhood-inspired mujahideen commanders like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani; the CIA also developed a limited relationship with the more moderate Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud beginning in 1984. Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive CIA operations ever undertaken. The Reagan administration rejected compromise with reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in favor of a total mujahideen victory. Funding continued until 1992 as the mujahideen battled the PDPA during the 1989–1992 civil war.Crile, p 519 & elsewhere
After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the CIA's objective was to topple Mohammad Najibullah's government, which was formed under Soviet occupation. By 1990, the ISI and Hekmatyar were working to eliminate Massoud and their other rivals, in advance of the anticipated fall of the Afghan capital, Kabul. The ISI and CIA jointly formulated a plan to capture Jalalabad and Kabul during 1989–1990. Najibullah's government collapsed in 1992, following the Soviet Union's dissolution and the end of U.S. aid to the mujahideen, leaving Afghanistan a failed state in the grip of a multifaceted and destructive civil war. While some U.S. officials initially welcomed the emerging Taliban militia as it sought to restore order to Afghanistan, by the late 1990s, the U.S. became increasingly concerned about Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban, as the Taliban and its ally al-Qaeda became a more direct threat to the U.S..
In response to the September 11 attacks, CIA personnel coordinated closely with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance during the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. During the invasion, which was largely planned by the CIA, Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders escaped to Pakistan. Throughout the war in Afghanistan (2001–2021), CIA-backed Afghan paramilitaries participated in numerous war crimes, most notably the Dasht-i-Leili massacre in 2001.
1979: Origins of the Afghanistan conflict
Intelligence analysis The CIA National Foreign Assessment Center completed work on a report entitled "Afghanistan: Ethnic Divergence and Dissidence" in May 1979, although it was not formally published until March 1980. It is not known if the information was readily available to policymakers at the time of the December 1979 invasion.
According to this report, Pashtun tribal insurgency began in 1978, with the installation of a pro-Soviet government. The Pashtuns are devout Muslims and communist atheism is not in line with their strong Islamic beliefs. Furthermore, the historic preeminence of Pashtun politicians in Afghan politics since the 18th century served as a divisive issue that strengthened the resistance of the tribal groups. Ethnic solidarity among the Pashtun is strong compared to the Tajiks, who are the second largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.
Soviet invasion and U.S. response
Afghan communists under the leadership of Nur Muhammad Taraki seized power from Mohammed Daoud Khan in the Saur Revolution on 27 April 1978. The Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) had previously invested in exporting communist ideology to Afghanistan and trained many of the army officers involved in Daoud's overthrow. Daoud had himself ousted King Mohammad Zahir Shah, ending more than two centuries of rule by the Afghan monarchy, five years earlier in the 1973 Afghan coup d'état. The newly formed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA)—which was divided between Taraki's extremist Khalq faction and the more moderate Parcham—signed a treaty of friendship with the U.S.S.R. in December 1978. Hundreds of Soviet advisors arrived in Afghanistan. Taraki's efforts to improve education and redistribute land were accompanied by mass executions (including of many conservative religious leaders) and political repression without precedent in Afghan history, igniting a revolt by mujahideen rebels.
The rebellion began to take shape with the March 1979 uprising in the western Afghan city of Herat, which has a relatively large Shi'ite population and deep ties to Iran (then in the throes of the Iranian Revolution); Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini's rhetoric along with the defection of Captain Ismail Khan from the DRA's armed forces inspired countless Afghans—Sunnis and Shi'ites alike—to violently resist secular change. The DRA's mass killing of up to 20,000 residents of Herat, followed by the Kerala massacre, failed to deter additional mutinies in Jalalabad and then across Afghanistan: By 1980, desertion had reduced the size of the Afghan army by considerably more than half.
After a general uprising in April 1979, Taraki was deposed by Khalq rival Hafizullah Amin in September. Amin was considered a "brutal psychopath" by foreign observers; even the Soviets were alarmed by the brutality of the Afghan communists, and suspected Amin of being an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), although that was not the case. In reality, the CIA (which was blindsided by the 1978 coup) had little interest in or understanding of Afghanistan's internal politics at the time; its limited intelligence-gathering efforts in the country focused overwhelmingly on the Soviet presence, particularly with regard to Soviet military technology, and it was unwilling to expend considerable resources on recruiting Afghan communists. In December, citing concerns that Amin's government was losing control of the country, the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan, assassinated Amin in a surprise attack, installed Parcham leader Babrak Karmal as the new Afghan leader, and oversaw a purge of Amin's supporters.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter expressed surprised at the invasion, as the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community during 1978 and 1979—reiterated as late as 29 September 1979—was that "Moscow would not intervene in force even if it appeared likely that the Khalq government was about to collapse." Indeed, Carter's diary entries from November 1979 until the Soviet invasion in late December contain only two short references to Afghanistan, and are instead preoccupied with the ongoing hostage crisis in Iran. However, while CIA analysts misjudged the likelihood of an invasion, the CIA carefully tracked Soviet military activities in and near Afghanistan, allowing it to accurately predict the Christmas Eve invasion on 22 December. In the West, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was considered a threat to global security and the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf. Moreover, the failure to accurately predict Soviet intentions caused American officials to reappraise the Soviet threat to both Iran and Pakistan, although it is now known that those fears were overblown. For example, U.S. intelligence closely followed Soviet exercises for an invasion of Iran throughout 1980, while an earlier warning from Carter's national security adviser (NSA) Zbigniew Brzezinski that "if the Soviets came to dominate Afghanistan, they could promote a separate Baluchistan ... [thus] dismembering Pakistan and Iran" took on new urgency. These concerns were a major factor in the unrequited efforts of both the Carter and Reagan administrations to improve relations with Iran, and resulted in massive aid to Pakistan's President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. President Zia's ties with the U.S. had been strained during Carter's presidency due to Pakistan's nuclear program and the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in April 1979, but Carter told Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance as early as January 1979 that it was vital to "repair our relationships with Pakistan" in light of unrest in Iran. One initiative Carter authorized to achieve this goal was a collaboration between the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI); through the ISI, the CIA began providing $695,000 worth of non-lethal assistance (e.g., "cash, medical equipment, and radio transmitters") to the mujahideen on 3 July 1979—several months prior to the Soviet invasion. The modest scope of this early collaboration was likely influenced by the understanding, later recounted by senior CIA official Robert Gates, "that a substantial U.S. covert aid program" might have "raise[d] the stakes" thereby causing "the Soviets to intervene more directly and vigorously than otherwise intended." When asked whether he expected that the revelations in his memoir (combined with an apocryphal quote attributed to Brzezinski) would inspire "a mind-bending number of conspiracy theories which adamantly—and wrongly—accuse the Carter Administration of luring the Soviets into Afghanistan," Gates replied: "No, because there was no basis in fact for an allegation the administration tried to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan militarily." See Gates, email communication with John Bernell White, Jr., 15 October 2011, as cited in cf. A 2020 review of declassified U.S. documents by Conor Tobin in the journal Diplomatic History found that "The small-scale covert program that developed in response to the increasing Soviet influence was part of a contingency plan if the Soviets did intervene militarily, as Washington would be in a better position to make it difficult for them to consolidate their position, but not designed to induce an intervention."
Although Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Stansfield Turner and the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) were contemplating what Gates described as "several enhancement options"—up to and including the direct provision of arms from the U.S. to the mujahideen through the ISI—by October 1979, and an unnamed Brzezinski aide acknowledged in conversation with Selig S. Harrison that the U.S.'s nominally "non-lethal" assistance to the mujahideen included facilitating arms shipments by third-parties, Steve Coll, Harrison, Bruce Riedel, and the head of the DO's Near East–South Asia Division at the time—Charles Cogan—all state that no U.S.-supplied arms intended for the mujahideen reached Pakistan until January 1980, after Carter amended his presidential finding to include lethal provisions in late December 1979. Tobin reiterates that "no weapons were directly supplied before January 1980" but mentions that the United States National Security Council (NSC) agreed to explore additional ways to facilitate arms shipments to the mujahideen on 17 December—an idea rendered moot by the Soviet invasion one week later. Finally, on 28 December Carter signed a presidential finding explicitly allowing the CIA to transfer "lethal military equipment either directly or through third countries to the Afghan opponents of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan," and to arrange "selective training, conducted outside of Afghanistan, in the use of such equipment either directly or via third country intermediation."
Coll describes Carter's December 1979 presidential finding: