Overthrow Series

 

Afghanistan and Pakistan – Pre 911

Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006, Excerpts

 

For centuries, the name “Afghanistan” has conjured up images of isolation and remoteness. It is a forbidding place, locked in the Asian landmass, cut off from the world by towering mountain ranges and governed more by tribal tradition than by law. Its hostility to invaders is legendary, epitomized by the fate of a British-led column that comprised more than 16,000 soldiers and camp followers when it was forced to flee Kabul in 1842, and was reduced to just a single man by the tie it reached the British garrison at Jalabad, ninety miles away.

 

During the nineteenth century, Russia and Britain jousted for influence over Afghanistan in a high-stakes rivalry that became know as the Great Game. Rivalries like this usually break out when a poor country has a resource that rich countries covet. Afghanistan has no oil, no mineral wealth, and little fertile land, but it does have one asset that has always attracted outsiders: location. It lies astride routes to India, Iran, Central Asia, and China that have been strategic prizes for centuries.

 

True to its independent tradition, Afghanistan remained neutral in both World War I and World War II. In the postwar years, its leaders sought with considerable success to remain outside the Cold War confrontation.

 

Soviet Invasion

 

On Christmas Eve, 1979, thousands of Soviet troops marched over pontoon bridges across the Amu Darya River into Afghanistan, and others landed at the airport in Kabul. Tanks followed in the morning. A squad of KGB commandos stormed Amin’s palace, killed him, and placed a new strongman in power. Afghanistan was no longer simply ruled by a pro-Soviet regime; it was under Soviet military occupation.

 

This upheaval came while the region was still recovering from the shock of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which radically reshaped the strategic map of the Middle East and Central Asia. Americans considered the revolution a serious geopolitical setback and feared that the Soviets would take advantage of it, perhaps by using Afghanistan as a base for a thrust toward Persian Gulf oil fields. For the Soviets, it revived the old fear that Muslims in their Central Asian provinces might embrace fundamentalism and use it as a banner for separatist rebellion.

 

Afghans Revolt Against Soviets

 

Militants sought out and hacked to death scores of Soviet men, women, and children and jubilantly paraded some of their mangled bodies through the streets on pikes. The government, with Soviet help, took the city back after a ferocious bombing campaign in which twenty thousand people were killed.

 

Rebellions against pro-Soviet regimes did not break out every day, and when one began in Afghanistan, CIA analysts suggested that the agency give it covert support. The longer this rebellion lasted, they reasoned, the weaker the Soviets would become and the more resources they would have to divert to Afghanistan. The U.S. saw the chance to score a victory by bleeding the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This was the beginning of what would become by far the largest and most expensive operations in CIA history.

 

In the early 1980s, Reagan and several of his closest advisors believed that with enough money and weaponry, Afghan guerrillas could actually defeat the Red Army and turn their country into the “the Russians’ Vietnam.”

 

Pakistan

 

Pakistan, whose border with Afghanistan twists for more than one thousand miles, is the logical sanctuary for Afghan rebels. So if the CIA wished to send clandestine aid to the rebels, it would have to strike a deal with Pakistan. Soon after Reagan took office in 1981, he struck a deal with Pakistan under which the United States embraced it as a strategic ally and turned a blind eye to General Zia’s sins.

 

Two years earlier, Pakistan’s democratic order had been upset when General Zia al-Huq seized power in a military coup and proceeded with the hanging of the prime minister he overthrew, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Zia fervently dedicated himself to two goals: building a nuclear bomb and imposing what he called a “genuine Islamic order” in Pakistan.

 

So the man the CIA needed most for its Afghan project was a military dictator who had ordered the execution of his predecessor, was promoting a reactionary form of Islam within his own country, and ran a network of agents around the world trying to buy outlawed nuclear material and technology.

 

The CIA would deliver no weapons directly to Afghan rebels but send them instead to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, or ISI. The ISI channeled American aid to those warlords who were most responsive to Pakistani influence. It particularly favored those who shared Zia’s commitment to fundamentalist Islam.

 

Saudi Money

 

To pay for this campaign, they recruited an unlikely partner: Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were already deeply involved in Pakistan. They had sent Zia large sums of money to open religious schools catering to both impoverished Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. To ensure that these schools taught only the puritanical Wahhabi form of Islam and that students were not exposed to such corrupting subjects as history or science, they also sent hundreds of mullahs, Koran readers, and religious teachers.

 

Saudi Arabia was intimately tied to the United States because of its role as a vital oil supplier. In 1984, taking advantage of this friendship, President Reagan asked the Saudi royal family for help in Afghanistan. The Saudis saw at once that granting this request would be a way to strengthen their friend Zia in Pakistan, promote groups with Afghanistan that were submissive to Pakistan and its fundamentalist agenda, and at the same time ingratiate themselves to Washington. They agreed to match all American aid to Afghan rebels on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

 

Despite the huge amounts of money the United States sent to Afghan guerrillas, it never played or even sought to play a role in deciding who received its gifts. That was left to Pakistan, which had objectives far different than Washington’s. The Pakistanis chose to support seven Afghan factions, all of them in varying degrees fundamentalist and anti-Western.

 

U.S. Trains Jihadiis

 

One of the most far-reaching decisions the ISI made as it built the Afghan rebel army was to recruit militants from other Muslim countries. Many who volunteered were radicals who believed they could do something holy by coming to Afghanistan and joining a jihad against the infidel Soviet occupier. At CIA-sponsored camps inside Pakistan, they were trained in modern techniques of sabotage, ambush, and assault, and in the use of weapons from sniper rifles to time-delayed bomb detonators.

 

The Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden was among those who thrived in this milieu. Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, when he was still in his mid-twenties, and served for several months as a guerrilla fighter. After a time he persuaded the ISI to give him a more important assignment. He took up the job of receiving foreign militants who arrived in Afghanistan and channeling them to training camps. It was an ideal post for someone eager to meet jihadis from around the world.

 

They recruited radical Afghan refugees for the thousands of religious schools in Pakistan, organized them into military units, and trained and armed their leaders. Because each of these recruits had been a talib, or religious student, they called tier movement the Taliban. By the time it began capturing territory in Afghanistan, at the end of 1994, it had twenty thousand troops under arms and impressive amounts of weaponry. The Saudi government sent it millions of dollars, and whenever it needed more fighters, Pakistan recruited them from its Saudi sponsored religious schools.

 

Soviet Downfall

 

Slowly and inevitably, given its enormous resources, the insurgency grew stronger. For the Soviets, this adventure had been an unmitigated disaster. It cost them the lives of fifteen thousand soldiers. They also lost incalculable amounts of international prestige and strategic power. Within a few years, the Soviet Union collapsed. The defeat it suffered in Afghanistan played a role in speeding its demise. This outcome produced a giddy round of congratulations in Washington. It took only a short time for American leaders to begin losing interest in Afghanistan.

 

General Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988 and so did not live to see the victory, but Pakistan emerged from the war with greatly increased power. It had become a partner of the United States and the effective master of Afghanistan. Perhaps most important, it gained a decade of invaluable time to work on its nuclear program without having to worry about complaints from the United States.

 

Osama Bin Laden

 

Help from Pakistan and the United State would probably have been enough to lead the Taliban to power, but it had another powerful patron. Early in 1996, Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan after several years in Sudan, bringing his Al Qaeda terror group with him. He recognized the Taliban as a movement perfectly in line with his own beliefs and gave it $3 million to fuel its push to final victory. The Taliban regime embraced bin Laden, and allowed him to establish camps in Afghanistan where militants from around the world could be trained in terror tactics.

 

Taliban Rule

 

Immediately after seizing Kabul, Taliban militants went on a rampage. They considered all visual imagery blasphemous, so they smashed televisions, destroyed cameras, and ripped photos from walls. To prevent people from listening to music, they destroyed all radios and stereo equipment. They banned alcohol and tobacco, forbade dancing, and even outlawed kite flying. Most chilling, they withdrew every conceivable right from women, decreeing that they must not work or study outside their homes and that whenever they appeared in public, they had to be covered with a burka more forbidding than anyone in the modern world had ever seen.

 

By the time the Taliban took power, Afghanistan had been at war for nearly twenty years. Many Afghans welcomed the Taliban despite their excesses, hoping that they would finally bring a measure of peace to the country. This they did. It was a peace of the graveyard, to be sure, enforced by amputations, floggings, and public executions, but for a time, Afghans thought that the Taliban might lead them toward a better future.

 

U.S., Unocal, and the Taliban

 

Despite all this, The United States maintained good relations with the Taliban. An American oil company, Unocal, wanted to build a $2 billion pipeline to carry natural gas from the rich fields of Turkmenistan to booming Pakistan, and perhaps on the India. The pipeline would have to run across Afghanistan, and for that reason Unocal was eager to see a government in Kabul – any kind of government – that could pacify the country.

 

The most prominent American pushing for friendship with the Taliban was Robin Raphel, an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. Her interest was unabashedly commercial, corporate deal-making. During a visit to Kabul in 196, she said she hoped to “facilitate U.S. business interest,” and warned that if the United States did not deal with the Taliban on the pipeline project, “economic opportunities here will be missed.”

 

Taliban Turns on U.S.

 

On August 7, 1998, terror squads acting at his direction blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. Two weeks later, President Clinton ordered the bombing of a camp in Afghanistan where bin Laden was thought to be living. More than sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles hit the camp, but although about two dozen militants were killed, the terror leader was not among them.

 

Overthrow Series

 

Protecting American Interests

Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, Excerpts 2006

 

Since 1823, U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere had been shaped by the Monroe Doctrine, a unilateral declaration that the United States would not tolerate any attempt by European powers to influence the course of events in the Americas. In 1898 the United States definitively embraced what Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called “the large policy.” Henry Cabot Lodge was among several members of Congress who urged the annexation of Canada. Historians have given it various names: expansionism, imperialism, neocolonialism. Whatever it is called, it represents the will of Americans to extend their global reach.

 

For more than a century, Americans have believed they deserve access to markets and resources in other countries. When they are denied that access, they take what they want by force, deposing governments that stand in their way. Great powers have done this since time immemorial. What distinguishes Americans from citizens of past empires is their eagerness to persuade themselves that they are acting out of humanitarian motives.

 

American leaders have realized that they can easily win popular support for their overseas adventures if they present them as motivated by benevolence, self-sacrificing charity, and a noble desire to liberate the oppressed. In their view, American power is intrinsically benign because the political and economic system it seeks to impose on other countries will make them richer, freer, and happier – and, as a consequence, create a more peaceful world.

 

Each country whose government the United States overthrew had something Americans wanted – in most cases, either a valuable natural resource, a large consumer market, or a strategic location that would allow access to resources and markets elsewhere. Powerful businesses played just as great a role in pushing the United States to intervene abroad during the Cold War as they did during the first burst of American imperialism.

 

Americans overthrew governments only when economic interests coincided with ideological ones. In Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the American ideology was that of Christian improvement and “manifest destiny.” Decades later, in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile, it was anti-Communism. During both eras, Americans came to believe it was their right, and even their historical obligation, to lead the forces of good against those of iniquity.

 

American presidents justified the first “regime change” operations by insisting that they wanted only to liberate oppressed peoples, but in fact all these interventions were carried out mainly for economic reasons. The United States annexed Hawaii and the Philippines because they were ideal stepping-stones to the East Asia trade; took Puerto Rico to protect trade routes and establish a naval base; and deposed the presidents of Nicaragua and Honduras because they refused to allow American companies to operate freely in their countries. In none of these places was Washington prepared for either the challenges of rule or the anger of nationalists.

 

Most “regime change” operations fit within the larger category of resource wars. When the United Sates intervenes abroad to gain strategic advantage, depose governments it considers oppressive, or spread its political and religious system, it is also acting in its commercial self-interest. The search for markets, and for access to natural resources, is as central to American history as it has been to the history of every great power in every age.

 

 

International Corporate Emergence

 

Huge forces reshaped the world during the twentieth century. One of the most profound was the emergence of multinational corporations, businesses based in one country that made much of their profit overseas. These corporations and the people who ran them accumulated great wealth and political influence. Civic movements, trade unions, and political parties arose to counterbalance them, but in the United States, these were never able even to approach the power that corporations wielded.

 

Corporations identified themselves in the public mind with the ideals of free enterprise, hard work, and individual achievement. They also maneuvered their friends and supporters into important positions in Washington. They have become the vanguard of American power, and defying them has become tantamount to defying the United States. When Americans depose a foreign leader who dares such defiance, they not only assert their rights in one country but also send a clear message to others.

 

Having marshaled so much public and political support, American corporations found it relatively easy to call upon the military or the Central Intelligence Agency to defend their privileges in countries where they ran into trouble.