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| Ayub Khan and John F. Kennedy. |
During the Soviet-Afghan conflict from 1979 to 1988 between
the capitalist and communist blocs, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab States took
the side of the former because the Soviet Union and the Central Asian states
produced more energy and consumed less. Thus, the Soviet bloc was the net
exporter of energy, whereas the capitalist bloc led by Washington was the net
importer of energy.
It suited the economic interests of the oil-rich Gulf countries
to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the capitalist
bloc. Now the BRICS countries are equally hungry for the Middle East’s energy,
but it’s a recent development. During the Cold War, an alliance with the
industrialized world was predicated upon the economic interests of the Gulf
states, which was given a religious color of purportedly “anticommunist”
Islamist ideology by the Salafist preachers of Saudi Arabia.
All the celebrity terrorists, whose names are now heard in the mainstream media every day, were the spawns of the Soviet-Afghan War: including Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, the Haqqanis, the Taliban, the Hekmatyars etc. But that war wasn’t limited only to Afghanistan. The alliance between the Western powers and their regional client states during the Cold War funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized the Islamic jihadists all over the Islamic World. We hear the names of jihadist groups operating in regions as far afield as the Central Asian States, the North Caucasus and even in Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans.
Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in December 1979, then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was
assassinated on the Valentine’s Day, on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian
revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran.
The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million
Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was
infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan.
Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of
the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamist insurgencies
spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.
According to documents declassified by the White House, CIA
and State Department in January, as
reported [1] by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan
jihadists before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy
Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979,
whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year.
The revelation doesn’t come as a surprise, though, because
more than two decades before the declassification of the State Department
documents, in the 1998
interview [2] to The Counter Punch Magazine, former National Security
Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the
president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in
July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in
December 1979.
Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview. The
interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the
Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?”
Brzezinski replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The
Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the
liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to
Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished
truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was
recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now
dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.
Regardless, that the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six
months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State
Department’s declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that the
nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to
train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was forged years
before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Pakistan joined the American-led, anticommunist SEATO and
CENTO regional alliances in the 1950s and played the role of Washington’s
client state since its inception in 1947 as a former colony of the British
Empire. So much so that when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the
Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance
deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged
the reconnaissance aircraft flew from an American airbase in Peshawar, a city
in northwest Pakistan.
Historically, Pakistan’s military first used the Islamists
of Jamaat-e-Islami as proxies during the Bangladesh war of liberation in the
late 1960s against the Bangladeshi nationalist Mukti Bahini liberation movement
of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman – the father of current prime minister of Bangladesh,
Sheikh Hasina Wajed, and the founder of Bangladesh, which was then a province
of Pakistan and known as East Pakistan before the independence of Bangladesh in
1971.
Jamaat-e-Islami is a far-right Islamist movement in
Pakistan, India and Bangladesh – analogous to the Muslim Brotherhood political
party in Egypt and Turkey – several of whose leaders have recently been imprisoned
and executed by the Bangladeshi nationalist government of Prime Minister Sheikh
Hasina Wajed for committing massacres of Bangladeshi civilians on the orders of
Pakistan’s military during the Bangladesh war of liberation.
Then during the 1970s, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s
government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup
in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.
Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to
Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security
establishment was wary of his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken
his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a
consequence of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.
Pakistan’s support to the Islamists with the Saudi
petro-dollars and Washington’s blessings, however, kindled the fires of
Islamist insurgencies in the entire region comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan,
the Soviet Central Asian States, and even in the Indian-administered Kashmir.
Regarding the Kashmir dispute, there can be no two views
that the right of self-determination of Kashmiris must be respected in
accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions on the right of plebiscite
to the Kashmiri people, and the international community must lend its moral,
political and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri people. But at the same time, the
militarization of any dispute, including Kashmir, must be avoided due to human
suffering that militancy and wars anywhere in the world inevitably entail.
The insurgency in Kashmir erupted in the fateful year 1984
of the Orwellian-fame when the Indian armed forces surreptitiously occupied the
whole of Siachen glacier, including the un-demarcated Pakistani portion, on the
Pakistan-India border in Kashmir.
Now, we must keep the backdrop in mind: those were the
heydays of the Cold War and Pakistan army’s proxies, the Afghan jihadists, were
triumphantly waging a guerrilla warfare during the Soviet-Afghan War in the
1980s, and the morale of Pakistan’s military's top brass was touching the sky.
In addition, Pakistan’s security establishment wanted to
inflict damage to the Indian armed forces to exact revenge for the
dismemberment of Pakistan at the hands of India during the Bangladesh War of
1971, when India provided support to Bangladeshi nationalists and took 90,000
Pakistani soldiers as prisoners of war after Pakistan’s defeat in the
Bangladesh war of liberation.
All the military’s top brass had to do was to divert a
fraction of its Afghan jihadist proxies toward the Indian-administered Kashmir
to kindle the fires of insurgency. Pakistan’s security agencies began sending
jihadists experienced in the Afghan asymmetric warfare across the border to the
Indian-administered Kashmir in the late 1980s; and by the early 1990s, the
Islamist insurgency had engulfed the whole of Jammu and Kashmir region.
Footnotes:
[1] CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded
in 1979:
[2] Brzezinski Interview: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the
Mujahideen:
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