U.S. Was in Afghanistan 6 Months Before USSR; Provoked Soviet Invasion

        Following the admissions, below, by the former CIA director, and by
Pres. Carter's National Security Adviser, that the Soviet invasion was a
response to U.S. provocation in Afghanistan itself, I offer and explain
my view, developed back then, that it was a reply to Washington's much
more serious effort at that time to dominate the world militarily.
                                        William Mandel
`
> 
> Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski
> Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*
> 
> Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs
> ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid
> the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention.
> In this period you were the national security adviser to President
> Carter.  You therefore played a role in this affair.  Is that correct?
> 
> Brzezinski:  Yes.  According to the official version of history, CIA aid
> to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet
> army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979.  But the reality, secretly
> guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979
> that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the
> opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.  And that very day, I wrote
> a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion
> this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
> 
> Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action.  But
> perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to
> provoke it?
> 
> B: It isn't quite that.  We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but
> we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
> 
> Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they
> intended to fight against a secret
> involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe
> them.  However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything
> today?
> 
> B: Regret what?  That secret operation was an excellent idea.  It had
> the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me
> to regret it?
     (End of excerpt from Brzezinski interview.)

        From my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER:
        "1500 worried students looked up at me from a green field at the
University of California Davis campus in the middle of the Central
Valley farmlands. This demonstration, early in 1980, was the largest by
students anywhere in this country since the 1960s. I had been invited to
speak by a law student who listened to my broadcasts.
        "'You are being asked to register for military service allegedly
because of Soviet action in Central Asia,' I said. Moscow had just sent
its troops into Afghanistan. 'Strange that India, the largest country in
the path of what we have been told is Soviet expansionism...has taken no
similar step, nor any other comparable to the long list of military,
political, economic, and cultural measures [against the USSR] instituted
by Candidate Carter.' President Carter was running for re-election.
        "I had opposed the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and that of
Czechoslovakia in 1968, and took a plague-on-both-your-houses stand
against the 1969 border war between the USSR and China. My view of the
Soviet entry into Afghanistan at the end of 1979 was different. I
believed it was a response to the entry of U.S. aircraft carriers into
the Persian Gulf which had just occurred for the first time ever.
Ostensibly they had been placed there because revolutionary Iran, having
just overthrown the Shah," installed by a CIA coup many years earlier,
"had taken the American Embassy staff hostage. To the Soviets, those
carriers represented a potential for lightning nuclear attack by their
aircraft upon what Winston Churchill had long since called its 'soft
underbelly.'"
        "Moscow, I believed, now felt itself surrounded by short-range U.S.
nuclear capability. The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance had only just
succumbed to the American demand for stationing U.S. Pershing and cruise
missiles in Europe, after years-long resistance by peoples, parliaments,
and even former NATO officers, and despite one Soviet compromise after
another. Moscow responded two weeks later, in my view, by entering
Afghanistan in an attempt to show that no American action could
effectively change the world balance of power.
        "In addition to these factors, I was very impressed by the top American
expert on Afghanistan, who at that point was with the Carnegie
Foundation for International Peace. He write that it was the Shah of
Iran, in power until very recently, who had stimulated the slaughter of
Marxist officers by the government of neighboring Afghanistan. This had
caused survivors to engage in a revolt they knew they could not win and
to call upon Moscow for aid."
   
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My book was written for the general reader. But if you teach in the
social sciences, consider SAYING NO TO POWER (Creative Arts, Berkeley,
1999), for course use.  It was written as a social history of the U.S.
for the past three-quarters of a century through the eyes of a
participant observer in most progressive social movements (I'm 84), and
of the USSR from the
standpoint of a Sovietologist (five earlier books) knowing that country
longer than any other in the profession.  Therefore it is also a history
of the Cold War.  Positive reviews in The Black Scholar, American
Studies in Scandinavia, San Francisco Chronicle, forthcoming in Tikkun,
etc.  Chapters are up at http://www.billmandel.net
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