They Sow the Cyclone – We Reap the Blowback, by Dan Sanchez

A blowback by blowback account of the US’s involvement in the Middle East since the first excursion into Afghanistan in 1979. From Dan Sanchez at antiwar.com:

“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” — Hosea 8:7

It may be surprising to hear, but it is a plain historical fact that modern international jihad originated as an instrument of US foreign policy. The “great menace of our era” was built up by the CIA to wage a proxy war against the Soviets.

A 1973 coup in Afghanistan installed a new secular government that, while not fully communist, was Soviet-leaning. That was a capital offense from the perspective of America’s Cold War national security state, at the time headed by Henry Kissinger.

Conveniently for Kissinger, the dirt poor country was sandwiched between two US client states: Pakistan to the east and Iran (then still ruled by the CIA-installed Shah) to the west. Immediately after the coup, the CIA and the clandestine security agencies of Pakistan (ISI) and Iran (SAVAK) began regime change operations in Afghanistan, orchestrating and sponsoring Islamic fundamentalist insurrections and coup attempts.

Due to these efforts, as well as the government’s own oppressiveness, a widespread rebellion broke out in Afghanistan in 1978. In July 1979, US President Jimmy Carter, on the advice of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, officially authorized aid to the puritanical Mujahideen rebels, to be delivered through the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone.” This was on top of the unofficial aid that the CIA had already been funneling to Afghan Islamist insurgents for years through Pakistan and Iran.

In a 1998 interview, Brzezinski openly admitted that he and Carter thus “knowingly increased the probability” that the Soviets would militarily intervene. And indeed Russia did invade in December 1979, beginning the decade-long Soviet-Afghan War. In the same 1998 interview, Brzezinski boasted:

“The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”

Shortly thereafter, the highest cleric of Saudi Arabia (another US client) endorsed a fatwa proclaiming jihad against the atheist Soviets in Afghanistan as an obligation for all Muslims throughout the world. It should be noted that the Saudis have a narrow definition of a true “Muslim,” as they follow Wahhabism, one of the most extreme and intolerant strands of Islam, highly similar to ISIS’s own. Throughout the 1980s, Saudi Arabia also provided the Afghan Jihad with hundreds of millions of petrodollars in aid and tens of thousands of madrassa-indoctrinated volunteer fighters.

To continue reading: They Sow the Cyclone—We Reap the Blowback