Wars and Empire | Page 8

and to extend its influence towards the Indian Ocean. Two
Saudi Arabian oil companies were also involved.
During the same years, the Taliban received sizable armed support. It
did not come mainly from Pakistan. Financial succor came from Saudi
Arabia. But the most decisive increase in the Taliban's strength came
from Russia: the defections of the Khalq and Khad generals directly
into the Taliban's leadership, vast amounts of Russian weaponry in
several mysteriously "captured" stashes, including a very suspicious
"hijacking" and escape of a Russian jet loaded with weapons that ended
up in the hands of the Taliban's ex-communist leaders. With these new
weapons, the Taliban marched on Herat in 1995, and finally managed
to capture Kabul in 1996.
Najibullah was hanged, but Najibullah's hanging by his former
Taliban-turned prot‚g‚s seems to have camouflaged the actual
developments in the Afghan power struggle.
Russia had an interest to cut the strong ties between Massoud's
mujaheddin and the Tajik opposition that Russia had crushed since it
attacked Tajikistan in 1992 and backed the communists into power
there. The old provocateur Hekmatyar was by then defeated and had
finally given up his fight - after losing his men and arms by Tanai's
defection to the Taliban - and accepted a seat in the government in
compensation. Since Hekmatyar was finished, a new Pashtun force was
needed in those years. Taliban was a rising force that various external
players tried to exploit by infiltration, support and manipulation.
When the Cold War was declared over by the West, it did not stop
elsewhere. After 1989 the West really lost interest in Afghanistan and
until some months before his death Massoud was trying to appeal to it

in vain. The West was uninterested, but others were. Pakistan, of course,
was interested in the goings on in its unstable neighbor. Saudi Arabia
was financing and supporting dangerous Sunni fundamentalist groups,
and later the Taliban. The Saudis also provided them with their own
Saudi fanatics that had become troublesome at home. Iran was
supporting its own agents within Afghan Shia groups. And the Soviet
Union and later Russia continued to provide massive armed support to
the last communist dictator of Afghanistan, Najibullah, and later to the
notorious General Dostum.
The Russian principle was "divide and rule", with the basic idea of
keeping the West out and assuring that the region would not strengthen
so that the Soviet empire could return once it has regained its military
might. Because of this stratagem, Russia has supported the Tajiks of
the Northern Alliance through Tajikistan - only sufficiently to form a
buffer zone against the Taliban, but without being able to gain
substantial victories or to intervene in Tajikistan. Moreover, Russia has
been arming and supporting the Uzbeks under the command of Dostum
and General Malik who later defected to the Taliban's side. This
support has been directed through Uzbekistan and still continues -
ironically, with the West's full blessing. Less known has been the
Russian support directed through Turkmenistan to the Taliban, and to
the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan that is said to threaten Karimov's
rule there.
Q: What was and is the role of the CIA in all this? Was Pakistan's ISI
the CIA's long arm? Was bin Laden a CIA agent?
A: A chronic feature of American intelligence policy seems to be
historical amnesia and inability to see the complex nature of conflicts
and local relationships. This was also manifested during the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. British intelligence and part of the Pakistani
intelligence community clashed with the US already during the Cold
War period, because they wanted to support Ahmad Shah Massoud, the
"Lion of Panjshir". It was Massoud and his mujaheddin who finally,
after getting Stingers from the British, managed to make the war too
expensive for the Soviets, forcing them to retreat in 1989.
Meanwhile, the CIA was incompetent enough to be dependent on the
Pakistani intelligence services that, especially in Zia ul-Haq's period,
favored Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a pompous figure who claimed to have

extensive contacts throughout the Islamic world. He indeed had some
contacts, including with Osama bin Laden, but he was considered to be
a KGB provocateur by Massoud and many others, and was never of any
help in the Afghan independence struggle.
Instead of fighting the Soviet occupants, Hekmatyar preferred to fight
other Afghans, and to conspire with suspicious Arab circles imported
by his contact bin Laden to Peshawar. The Stingers that the CIA had
provided to Hekmatyar, were not used to liberate Afghanistan. Instead,
Hekmatyar sold them to Iran, and they were later used against the
Americans in a well-known incident.
When the Soviet troops moved out, Hekmatyar pursued a bloody
rebellion against the legal Afghan government, devastating the country
along with another rebel general, Dostum. (Though they were not
aligned.) In 1993,