Coveted in the late 19th century by Russian Tsar and British Viceroy alike, Afghanistan’s impassible fastnesses enabled it to avoid occupation by either colonial power. Two British invasions were repelled—a warning to both London and St Petersburg. Eventually an expanding Tsarist Empire and the British Empire in India accepted Afghanistan, still a pre-feudal confederacy of tribes with its own king, as a buffer state. The British, as the more powerful force, would keep a watchful eye on Kabul. This arrangement suited all three parties at the time. The result was that Afghan society never underwent even a partial imperial modernization, remaining more or less stationary for over a century. When change finally came, the catalysts were external. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the overthrow of the Ottoman Caliphate by Kemal’s new model army in 1919 stirred modernizing ambitions in the young Afghan King Amanullah. Chafing under British tutelage, and surrounded by radical intellectuals who looked to Enlightenment ideals from Europe and the bold example from Petrograd, Amanullah briefly united a small educated elite with the bulk of the tribes, and won a famous military victory against British arms in 1919.
Success in the field gave Amanullah the confidence to launch a Reform Programme, partially inspired by Kemal’s revolution in Turkey. A new Afghan Constitution was proclaimed, promising universal adult franchise. If implemented, it would have made Afghanistan one of the first countries in the world to give all women the right to vote. Simultaneously, emissaries were dispatched to Moscow to seek assistance. Though the Bolshevik leaders were themselves beleaguered by multiple armed interventions from the Entente powers, they treated the Afghan overtures quite seriously. Sultan-Galiev received the messengers from Kabul warmly on behalf of the Comintern, while Trotsky sent a secret letter to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party from his armoured train at the front-line of the civil war. In this remarkable dispatch, he wrote: ‘There is no doubt at all that our Red Army constitutes an incomparably more powerful force in the Asian terrain of world politics than in the European terrain. Here there opens up before us an undoubted possibility not merely of a lengthy wait to see how events develop in Europe, but of conducting activity in the Asian field. The road to India may prove at the given moment to be more readily passable and shorter for us than the road to Soviet Hungary. The sort of army which at the moment can be of no great significance in the European scales can upset the unstable balance of Asian relationships of colonial dependence, give a direct push to an uprising on the part of the oppressed masses and assure the triumph of such a rising in Asia . . . The road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal.’ A hallucinatory document by one of Trotsky’s military specialists proposed the creation of an anti-imperialist cavalry corps of 30–40,000 riders to liberate British India.
Nothing came of such schemes. No doubt the failure of Tukhachevsky’s march into Poland two years later had a sobering effect in Moscow. Amanullah got no more than friendship and advice from the Bolsheviks. The British, understandably nervous, were now determined to overthrow him. New Delhi purchased the services of a couple of leading tribes, fomented religious opposition to the king, and finally toppled him with a military coup in 1929. The Comintern journal Inprecorr commented that Amanullah had only survived for a decade because of ‘Soviet friendship’; more pertinently, the senior Bolshevik Raskolnikov remarked that Amanullah had introduced ‘bourgeois reforms without a bourgeoisie’, whose cost had fallen on peasants whom he had failed to win over with an agrarian reform, allowing Britain to exploit social and tribal divisions in the country.
Fifty years later history repeated itself, with a grimmer outcome. In the early seventies the reigning King Zahir was ousted by his cousin Daud, who declared a republic with the support of the local Communists and financial aid from the USSR. When, in April 1979, the Shah of Iran convinced Daud to turn against the Communist factions in his army and administration, they staged a self-defensive coup. Bitterly divided amongst themselves—inner-party disputes were sometimes settled with revolvers—the Afghan Communists had no social base outside Kabul and a few other cities. Their power rested on control of the Army and Air Force alone. The United States, taking over the historic role of Britain, soon started to undermine the regime by arming the religious opposition to it, using the Pakistani Army as a conduit. Under mounting pressure, the Afghan Communists broke into violent internecine strife. At this juncture, Brezhnev took the plunge that had been beyond the Bolsheviks—dispatching a massive military column to Kabul to salvage the regime.
This was exactly what Carter’s National Security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski had been hoping for. The Russian leaders fell headlong into the trap. The entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan transformed an unpleasant civil war funded by Washington into a jihad enabling the mujaheddin (‘holy warriors’) to appear as the only defenders of Afghan sovereignty against the foreign army of occupation. Brzezinski was soon posing for photographs in a Pathan turban on the Khyber Pass and shouting ‘Allah is on your side’, while Afghan fundamentalists were being feted as freedom-fighters in the White House and Downing Street.
Washington’s role in the Afghan war has never been a secret, but John Cooley’s remarkable book is the first systematic and detailed account of how the United States utilized the intelligence services of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to create, train, finance and arm an international network of Islamic militants to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. As a former Middle-East correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and ABC Television, Cooley gained easy access to retired and serving officials in the states mobilized in this final episode of the Second Cold War. Although he does not always cite his sources, and some of what he says should be viewed with scepticism, his information corroborates much that was widely bruited in Pakistan during the eighties. According to his account, the US drew in other powers to the anti-Soviet jihad. Cooley contends that Chinese help was not restricted to the provision of weapons, but extended to the provision of listening-posts in Xinjiang, and even dispatch of Uighur volunteers whose costs were covered by the CIA. Some form of Chinese assistance was privately always acknowledged by the Generals in Islamabad, though Beijing has never admitted it. Cooley even suggests the PRC has not been immune to the post-Soviet-withdrawal-syndrome: Islamic militants turning on the powers that armed them. However, the country not mentioned by Cooley is Israel, whose role in Afghanistan remains one of the best kept secrets of the war. In 1985 a young Pakistani journalist working for The Muslim, Mansur, accidentally stumbled across a group of Israeli ‘advisers’ at the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel in Peshawar. Aware that the news would be explosive for the Zia dictatorship, he informed his editor, some friends and a visiting WTN correspondent. A few days later the mujaheddin, alerted by the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), captured and killed him.
In the course of his account, Cooley describes a meeting in 1978 in Beirut with Raymond Close, former station chief of the CIA in Saudi Arabia, who clearly charmed him. If he had questioned him more closely, he would have discovered that Close had previously been posted to Pakistan, where his father had been a missionary teacher at the Forman Christian College in Lahore. His son was fluent in Persian, Urdu and Arabic. In nominal retirement, he would have been ideally placed to help orchestrate operations in Afghanistan, and their back-up in Pakistan, where the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) functioned as a channel for CIA funding of clandestine activities, and laundering profits from the heroin trade. Cooley’s argument that the United States and its relays in the region paid a heavy price for victory in Afghanistan is indisputable. In Egypt Sadat was executed by Islamist soldiers as he was taking the salute at a military parade. In Pakistan Zia—not to speak of his fellow-passengers Arnold Raphael, US Ambassador in Islamabad, and General Rahman, of Pakistan’s ISI—died in a mysterious plane crash that few believe was an accident. The five thousand US marines still in Riyadh are not there to threaten Saddam Hussein, but to defend the Saudi Royal Family.