![]() Carter ordered the mending of US relations with Zia, which had frayed with the execution of former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in April 1979. While proselytising about “human rights,” the Carter White House had no compunction in collaborating with the Pakistani dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq, which was heavily involved in fostering Islamist rebels inside Afghanistan, and the autocratic Saudi monarchy, which saw the funding of an Afghan holy war as a means of countering the impact of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Brzezinski also wrote to Carter to explain that “in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” ![]() Carter had signed a directive in July 1979 to provide assistance secretly to opponents of the pro-Soviet government. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski candidly acknowledged that it was a lie that CIA aid to the mujahadeen only began in 1980. It is less well-known that the US war in Afghanistan began prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979 and was a critical factor in destabilising the country in order to precipitate the intervention. It is well-known that under Carter, then Reagan, the CIA funded, trained and armed mujahadeen militia in a dirty “secret war” in Afghanistan. He approved the establishment of a Nationalities Working Group, including officials from Carter’s National Security Council, the CIA, the Pentagon and State Department, to encourage Islamist unrest inside the Soviet Union.īrzezinski viewed the emergence of armed opposition by Islamic fundamentalist groups inside Afghanistan to the Soviet-backed regime of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in Kabul as an opportunity to press ahead with his strategic agenda. Spearheaded by Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the White House latched onto Afghanistan, where a Soviet-aligned government had taken power in March 1978, as a means of dragging the Soviet Union into a Vietnam-like quagmire.īrzezinski, a hardened anti-communist and Cold War strategist, was one of a layer of right-wing ideologues in the US security and intelligence apparatus who regarded Islamist fundamentalism as a political force that could be turned against the Soviet Union-in particular in the Soviet Central Asian Republics and the Caucasus. The Olympic boycott was bound up with a far broader US agenda of weakening and fracturing the former Soviet Union, as the Biden administration is seeking to do today to China.Ībundant evidence is now in the public domain to demonstrate that the Carter administration shifted from the previous policy of containment of the Soviet Union to one aimed at the USSR’s fragmentation. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)Ĭoncern for the Afghan people had nothing do with the boycott of the Moscow games. A man walks past the Olympic rings on the exterior of the National Stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest, which will be a venue for the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics, in Beijing.
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