On July 3, 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed a directive authorizing the secret funding and support for the Afghan Mujahedeen, the purpose of which was to escalate an internal war against the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The directive, whose principal author was President Carter’s national security puppeteer Zbigniew Brzezinski, came to be known as Operation Cyclone, and its implementation resulted in Soviet intervention into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979.
Far from being an unintended consequence of the Carter administration’s funding program, the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan (it is imprecise to characterize it as an invasion) was Brzezinski’s proclaimed intention. Indeed, Brzezinski would later boast of how Operation Cyclone drew the Soviets into their own Vietnam-like quagmire, and how the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of the war’s economic drain and the demoralization of its people. When asked if Cyclone was ultimately counterintuitive in that it also empowered Islamic extremists, Brzezinski responded wryly, “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 [sic]?”
Conventional histories to the contrary, the implosion of the Soviet Union brought no end to the Cold War. Inasmuch as the two global superpowers are now in every sense capitalist—each regarding the other as an impediment to its own imperial geostrategy—we are living in a far more dangerous world than that which existed between 1945 and 1991. In the early 1990s, as Eastern Europe began to reconfigure itself into new territorial boundaries and political alliances (a cartographer’s worst nightmare, as one Western journalist described it), calls came from influential Westerners for Russia’s encirclement, destabilization, and eventual division into many smaller entities, lest it ever re-emerge as a political and military check against U.S. and Western hegemony.
In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski writes quite approvingly of the rapacious and extractive character of U.S. foreign policy, and thus, of the “need” to absorb former Soviet allies into the Western sphere. Further, Brzezinski writes that the absorption of Ukraine, in particular, into the Western orbit would effectively doom Russia’s rebirth as a global political power. Similarly, according to former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his recently published memoirs, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Defense Secretary (later Vice-President) Dick Cheney called for the eventual dismantlement of all of Russia in order that it could never again threaten the U.S.’s global predominance.
Since 1991, Western strategy has proceeded, relatively, according to plan. Presently, all of the former Warsaw Pact Nations, and three former Soviet Republics—Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia—are now members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Moreover, two former Yugoslav Republics—Croatia and Slovenia—are also NATO members. Yugoslavia, as readers might recall, was thrown into a brutal civil war in the early 1990s as a result of a U.S. foreign appropriations law (101–513, 1991) that brought forth ethnic enmities that had been kept in check for 45 years. Later in the 1990s, the fragmentary remnants of Yugoslavia were subjected to a torrent of NATO vandalism for their failure to privatize their economies as the rest of Europe had done by then.
As this is written in March of 2014, events in Ukraine bear eerie similarity to those in Afghanistan in 1979. Having failed to conscript Ukraine into the Western realm in 2004–2005, the U.S. and NATO now appear to have divested Ukraine of its political and economic sovereignty via the recent neo-Nazi coup d’état. Like Operation Cyclone, which saw the ascendancy of a host of benighted clerical regimes in Afghanistan, the fascist mobs now in power in Ukraine have succeeded with the assistance of Western covert action. Once again, the U.S. has used covert means to elicit an overt Russian response, thereby making Russia appear to be an unprovoked and unilateral aggressor. In this instance, U.S. intelligence has been aided and abetted by the intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, and Poland and perhaps others. Additionally, the U.S.’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS)—a Serbian NGO with significant U.S. sponsorship—have contributed munificently to Ukraine’s political meltdown.
While there are pointed similarities between Cyclone in 1979 and today’s events in Ukraine, the latter are, needless to say, far more dangerous. In 1979, the U.S. successfully inveigled Soviet intervention into a nation in which there was no ethnic Russian population, no historical territorial claim by the Soviets, and no threat to the Soviet Union’s territorial integrity. By contrast, the U.S. and its Western allies have fomented a coup in a country that was actually once a part of Russia; they have helped to engender a fascist social order that is, among other things, militantly Russophobic; they have maintained a continuing policy of encirclement by acquiring former Russo-Soviet allies into the Western alliance; and of course in doing so, they have brought the world closer to an omnicidal global conflagration.
In a move so reckless as to cause alarm even to the most notorious of war criminals, Henry Kissinger, the U.S. has commissioned the deployment of some of at least one naval vessel to the Black Sea, and tactical military aircraft to the Baltic region, while demanding Russia remove its troops from the Crimean Peninsula. At this point the current crisis has long surpassed the gravity of the events of 1979, as it has escalated to the point that neither side appears willing to acquiesce to the wishes or demands of the other. A belligerent and intransigent Western foreign policy directed against an intensely nationalistic people is not likely to be resolved at the executive or ministerial levels of government. Instead, one can only hope that the working classes of all the nations involved will take action. They (We) must, if there is to be any hope of defusing this potentially cataclysmic crisis.
When ethnic and religious strife are attributed to external clandestine skullduggery such as what we are witnessing in Ukraine, it is not uncommon to hear such dismissive refrains as “conspiracy theory” and/or “they’ve been fighting for centuries.” To be sure, not each and every instance of civil unrest in one or another country is the result of foreign covert action. However, those who would argue that the events of today are merely the latest installments in the historic discomfiture between Russia and Ukraine should be reminded that Western intelligence personnel have a thorough knowledge of history and know precisely how to re-ignite ethnic and sectarian antagonisms that may have gone dormant. The CIA, for example, would not create some improbable ethnic or partisan conflict out of a vacuum, in order to destabilize a targeted government. It would exploit an existing one.
Still, a complete excavation of history could serve the purpose of achieving peace just as effectively. To any observer of world events from World War II forward, the political discord between the U.S and Russia (or the Soviet Union) is self-evident. However, it is not an original historical circumstance. Unknown to most Americans is the reality that if not for Russia, the United States may not exist as we know it. During the American Civil War, the Russian Navy, in a show of solidarity with the Union States, arrived in New York and San Francisco to discourage a threatened intervention by Britain and France on the side of the Confederacy. Czar Alexander II made it painfully clear the British and French that their navies would be sunk if they made any attempt to aid the Confederacy militarily.
A peace movement consisting of the working class, as called for in a previous paragraph, could derive some of its guiding philosophy from the historical reality of the American and Russian partnership. The United States and Russia are nations of great people, and neither can permit their respective governments to carry the world in which we live into the abyss of nuclear holocaust.
The consequences of Operation Cyclone and the attendant war in Afghanistan were horrendous, with a combined loss of life numbered at 1.3 million. The prospect of further escalation and direct U.S. involvement—both distinct possibilities—are such that no decent human being would want to begin to contemplate. The world is perilously close to such an eventuality. All that has changed since 1979 are the names and some of the national identities of the players. The reality of mutually assured destruction is still with us. This insanity must be stopped.
Joseph Diaferia has taught college-level political science and history at various institutions in New York and New Jersey since 1996. In 2012, Professor Diaferia was the Green Party’s Nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s 16th Congressional District. He can be reached at: ProfJPDiaferia@gmail.com.
Good coverage
Thank you, Douglas.
J.