Robert Parry: The Lie Behind the Afghan War

In Official Washington, there is one fact about the Afghan War that nearly everyone "knows". In February 1989, after the Soviet Army left Afghanistan, the United States walked away from the war-torn country, creating a vacuum that led to the rise of the Taliban and its readiness to host al-Qaeda's anti-American terrorists. It is a point made by senior administration officials, including incoming Ambassador Ryan Crocker and departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who once summed up the conventional wisdom by saying: "We will not repeat the mistakes of 1989, when we abandoned the country, only to see it descend into civil war and into Taliban hands." Gates was there at the time, as President George H W Bush's deputy national security adviser, so he should know! If there is any doubt about about this key historical "lesson" regarding Afghanistan, you simply need to watch the Tom Hanks movie: "Charlie Wilson's War", in which you see Hanks as Rep. Wilson pleading for additional aid to Afghanistan, and getting rebuffed by "feckless" members of a congressional committee. Unfortunately, there is not a word of truth in that movie. There was no immediate cutoff of funds for the Afghan mujahedeen in 1989. Indeed, hundreds of millions of dollars in covert CIA funding continued to flow to the rebels for several years as the US government sought a clear-cut victory over the left-behind communist leader Najibullah, who was holed up in Kabul. With the departure of the Soviets in February 1989, the war was anything but morally unambiguous. By 1990, the Afghan "freedom fighters" had suddenly gone back to form, reemerging as nothing more than feuding warlords, obsessed with settling generations-old scores! The difference was that they were now armed with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of weapons and explosives of every conceivable type. The justification for the huge CIA operation had been to halt Soviet aggression, not to take sides in a tribal war.