Transcript for S4 Episode 2 - "Bleeders and Dealers"

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Coleman. And this is season four episode two. Bleeders and dealers. In this episode, we'll explore the prelude to the war in Afghanistan, from the ancient empires to British colonialism right up to the eve of the Soviet invasion in 1979.

As the Afghan Revolution goes to pot in the late 1970s, an anti-communist alliance will descend on the country. An axis made up of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United States. What comes next is a 40 years war in Afghanistan.

For at least 10,000 years, the place we now call Afghanistan, lay at the center of the greatest empires in Asia. With Persia to the West, China to the East, Central Asian kingdoms to its north, and India to the south, Afghanistan naturally became a hub of exploration across roads for great powers and a choke point of trade and commerce. The country has always been divided by the massive Hindu Kush mountain range. In the south, Ritesakh made Rashid, lived the Pashto speaking Pashtoon tribes, intermingled with other ethnic groups. To the north, lived the Persian and Turkic speaking peoples, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Azaras, Turkmen and others. Ever since it became a part of the Silk Road which connected China to Rome, everyone from Persian kings to Alexander the Great wanted a piece of Afghanistan.

If one were to nominate a founder of modern Afghanistan, the honor would probably go to Ahmed Shah, Durani. A pastoon general, Darani was elected king in 1747, in Kandahar to the southwest. He pieced together an afghan empire in the mid-1700s, right as the surrounding mogul, south of it, and Uzbek empires were coming apart. The afghan empire spanned from northeastern Iran west to Kashmir, from modern Central Asia, southward to the Arabian Sea. Things came on glued after Durani's death in 1772. And with that, the Afghan Empire fell apart.

Coke is fucking dead as dead. Hair went. It's coming back. Think fucking away.

Among other unsavory businesses, drug profits fueled the expansion of the British Empire. The British had the monopoly on exports to China where opium would play a disastrous role in that fading empire. By 1818, the British completed their conquest of Western India, writes historian Alfred McCoy, author of the classic book, The Politics of Heroin. According to McCoy, Poppy production in Western India and Afghanistan doubled the amount of opium reaching the China coast in just one year. Down the line, we'll see a similar effect when the Americans take over in 2001. This one is a little more expensive. This is 500 grams.

But when you shoot it, you will know where that extra money went.

The very next year, around 21,000 British and Indian troops invaded Afghanistan. Their mission was to replace the more independent-minded King Dost Muhammad with the client, British-friendly Shah-Shujah. It was, per journalist Philip Bonoski, in fact, a secret war, launched by and for the East India Company, without the knowledge of British Parliament. Once the war was in progress, of course, propaganda was needed. For this, right, spray-thwight, the British government forged incriminating documents to make it seem like Russia was about to take over.

The second British Afghan war came in 1878, after a Russian diplomatic mission arrived in Kabul, The British were outraged at the Afghan's decision to even talk to the Empire's rival and demanded their own permanent diplomatic and military presence. When the Afghans rejected this ultimatum, 35,000 British troops invaded the country. The victorious British, again realized they couldn't sustain Afghanistan as a part of their Indian Empire. And a few months after the Second Wars conclusion, the Afghans and the British signed treaty. It gave the British territory east of the Hindu Kush, which they would later incorporate into Pakistan. Britain's ambassador was once again given the power of a king. The Empire remained responsible for Afghanistan's foreign policy for eight decades.

a 1500 mile long border separating Afghanistan from British India and therefore in the future separating Afghanistan from Pakistan. This would be known as the Durand Line after Foreign Secretary Mortimer Durand.

An interesting aside. The United States, it turns out, was not the first western power to ever try and jumpstart Holy War in Afghanistan. For years, the British had taken advantage of and sometimes even jumpstarted, religious revolts in order to sabotage or outright dispose of an uncooperative Afghan government. Then, during World War I, Germany made plans for a quote Muslim uprising that would encompass Russian Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, Burma and in the end, India. But at a certain point, the Germans were losing badly enough that the Afghans decided to pass on any cooperation with the Kaiser and the Ottomans.

But much to Britain's disgust, King Aminala had also opened direct talks with Russia's new Bolshevik regime. In fact, Afghanistan was the first government in the world to open talks with the new USSR. The Soviets and Afghans agreed on financial support, a telegraph line between Moscow and Kabul, and a supply of Soviet military specialists, weapons, and aircraft. There was also an overlooked precursor to Soviet moves later that century, which turned out very differently.

So now with a friendly Russia to his north, King Aminola embarked on a major program of reform.

But by the late 1920s, this momentum kicked into reverse. The King's plans for the emancipation of women, a minimum age for marriage, and compulsory education for all, angered religious conservatives, and provoked a brief rebellion. Here, as the Germans had planned to do in World War I, and as the Americans would do in the Cold War, the British secretly allied with religious conservatives inside of Afghanistan, fanning the flames of revolt against an uncooperative leader. Mobs burned down the royal palace in Jalalabad and marched on Kabul. By the end of the 20s, Aminallah had fled into exile in Italy.

After World War II, in which Afghanistan got what it could from various powers, American Afghan relations got off to a rough start. By 1946, the U.S. initiated the Helmand River Valley Project, an attempt to install modern irrigation system in southern Afghanistan. The project was an exercise in corruption. The powerful Morrison Nudsen Company sucked Afghanistan's harder and dollar reserves into an agricultural disaster that resulted in repeated floods and useless crops. And then came Britain's final bloody act.

Britain's partition of India in the creation of the new state of Pakistan resulted in widespread violence in the region, with millions upon millions ethnically cleansed, forcibly relocated, and at least one million estimated to have died.

All over the globe where the retreating British Empire left a vacuum, Americans soon appeared. So began the long-standing and fruitful relationship between the United States and the Pakistani government. Says one Afghan minister, the Americans were impressed by the English-speaking British-trained, pro-Western Pakistani officials, who, together with Britain, quickly convinced Washington of the value of Pakistan as a bulwark.

In the 1950s, we meet a supremely important Afghan leader, Prime Minister Muhammad Dowd. Sporting western suits in a cubal dome, Dowd was the real strong man while his cousin, the king, was still growing up. His desire, he told reporters, was to, quote, light my American cigarette with a Russian match. Over the next 10 years, Dowd's government continued the tradition of King Aminola, modern-state craft, public works, and national independence.

Because however small its proletariat, Afghanistan was beginning to experience the typical class conflict that came with modern life. Truck drivers, fruit workers, workers at textile mills, cement plants, oil fields, mining operations, all were staging strikes and organizing across the country. By the mid-1960s, Taurarchy's small but hardcore communist party had finally hatched. Throughout this whole period, Afghanistan's new neighbor Pakistan became increasingly hostile. Pakistani elites viewed Afghanistan as their raggedy neighbor to the west and a strategic threat. And so Afghanistan turned once again to the USSR for help. Barter and trade agreements, infrastructure, oil and gas exploration, and permission for the free import of goods from Soviet territory.

What the Americans lacked in diplomacy, they made up foreign spycraft. As part of the larger Cold War, the United States launched programs designed to make inroads with the next generation of third world leaders. The goal was to secretly cultivate influence and undermine nationalist, progressive, prosoviet, or just secular forces abroad. One key pipeline for this kind of thing was the Asia Foundation, through which, as according to Fitzgerald and Gould, the CIA began furthering the course set by British intelligence a century before. By aiding religious extremists intent on subverting the modernization efforts of the Afghan government.

quote, Amine's teacher training school operated largely on funds from a Columbia University aid project, which legendary Afghan expert Lewis to pre-record, operated as a front for the CIA. Amine was selected for the Columbia program at the same time that future national security advisor, Zbigno Brzinski, was teaching at the University. The idea that the future leader of Red Afghanistan would ever have anything to do with American clandestine operations seems a little conspiratorial. And really was there ever any precedent of the American government's siding with the most violent and extremist communists in a given country, just to destabilize a rival? Well, as it turns out there was, Specifically, thanks to the efforts of National Security Advisor Zibigno Brzinski. It happened in Cambodia. According to journalist in Cambodia expert Elizabeth Becker, Brazinski himself boasted about how he wrangled the Chinese into supporting the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, led by the infamous Paul Pot. Well into the 1980s, the United States itself would support the Khmer Rouge against Cambodia's neighbor and America's old wartime enemy, the Vietnamese communists. And so some, in the Communist world where left to wonder, was the Afghan radical Hafizella Amin Afghanistan's answer to Paul Pot. Deep in the pages of a memoir by a Soviet general, we found a very interesting passage. Years later, during a meeting of the Afghan Communists in 1977, Hafizella Amin reportedly admitted his CIA connections to his comrades. Friend of the show, Marissa Shepherd, translated the text, based on an internal Afghan communist party transcript, and long kept secret by the Soviet government. It reads as follows.

Was Huff Isala Amine a CIA asset? a communist manipulating the Americans, or perhaps just a free agent who used whatever and whomever he could to advance his own position inside his country. Whatever way you slice it, Huffie's Ella Amine was viewed with suspicion by comrades in Moscow and Kabul, and he would play a key role in the coming chaos.

Meanwhile, the Afghan Communist Party was at war with itself. The faction known as Kalk, or people, locked horns, with the faction known as Parchum, or Flag. While the Soviets were more suspicious of the radical Kalkies, like Hafizella Amin, they weren't holding out much hope for either side.

Two of Rabani's Afghan recruits in particular would go on to become marquee names in the war against the Soviet Union. Gobhaddin Hekmet Yar, an Akmed Shah Masud. Both Hechmet Yars and Masood's followers were known to be violently misogynist, throwing acid in the faces of women who did not wear the veil.

To top things off, by spring 1972, over 80,000 Afghans were estimated to have died amid drought and famine conditions. And so, in 1973, Dowd made his comeback.

In the summer of 75, writes the diplomat, Grathway, Hechmet Yarr and others backed by Pakistan, launched a series of failed uprisings. The leaders were executed, imprisoned, or fled to Pakistan, where they were taken under the wing of the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI. A few years later, these guys would not be put down so easily.

cables refer to this as a Chinese Iranian Pakistani Saudi axis. But to understand its origins, we must check in on some rumblings over in the United States.

Sounds like conspiracy theory babble, right? Well, here is a direct quote from Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turkey years later at an address at Georgetown.

This outsourcing of CIA dirty work was part of a larger phenomenon taking place under the new director of the CIA George H.W. Bush. It began on Halloween 1975.

The intelligence agencies of America, Saudi Arabia, and the Shah of Iran went to work finding new channels, new banks, to funnel money. Investigative journalists Joseph Trento writes, with the official blessing of George H.W. Bush, the head of Saudi intelligence transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the bank of commerce and credit international, or BCCI, into a worldwide money laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history. BCCI's founder was, in fact, also a close friend and advisor to Pakistan's new military dictator, General Zia, who would soon be America's greatest ally in a certain anti-Soviet jihad.

George H. W. Bush, while running the CIA, enlisted as an asset, the US representative of a major BCCI investor, as well as the wealthy, Saudi BCCI linked Bin Laden family, about which more later. supported by the dark money flowing through banks like BCCI, agents of the Safari Club moved into Afghanistan, to undermine both Dowd and the secular, socialistic left. According to false profits, BCCI handled transfers of funds through its Pakistani branches and acted as a collection agency for war material, and even for the Majahadine's pack animals. The Shah of Iran's dreaded secret police, Savak, funneled quote American communications gear, money, and weapons to the numerous right wing Afghan extremists, right Fitzgerald and gold. Soon after, the Saudis got in on the action. Quote as oil profits skyrocketed, emissaries from these newly affluent Arab fundamentalist groups arrived on the Afghan scene, with bulging bank rolls.

pushed to the right by his new friends, as well as his increasing paranoia. Dowd tried to both accommodate the Islamists and crackdown on the Communists. The murder of one leading Afghan Communist led to tens of thousands of sympathizers pouring into the streets protesting Dowd as the Prime Minister cracked down even further. Hafizullah Amin and his hardcore faction of the Afghan Communist Party They decided to make their own move.

The Americans, once again, publicly charged the USSR with engineering a coup. But according to the former British diplomat Bratwate, reliable evidence that the Russians were behind the coup is lacking. For one thing, if the Soviets were behind the coup, they almost certainly would have picked their favorites from the gradualist-partium faction. Instead, it was the dubious, Hafizilla Amin's faction that took power. The writer, poet, and one-time U.S. embassy employee, Taraki, was made president.

The party issued its official program a month after the revolution, eradication of illiteracy, equality for women, and end to ethnic discrimination, a larger role for the state and the national economy. and the abolition of feudal and pre-futal relationships. The Afghan communists had declared war on the power of landowners and mullas. It soon, they would realize just how real that power was.

A hurting young man speaking out. Just the other day, so it stopped to take a listen. What he had, He spoke straight and simple, by the hand I was impressed. He said, once and for all, why not the best? He said his name. That's the way it ought to be right now Once for all why not the best

Now, the Afghans were not the only ones with rival factions in their government. As Sig Harrison puts it, ever since Carter's election, there was a major split between, quote, the Bleeders and the Dealers. The Bleeders were hawks who wanted to abandon Daitont and go for the Soviets' jugular. The Dealers, while fine with meddling a little bit, ultimately favored negotiation and preservation of Daitont. In the end, the anti-Soviet bleeders would prevail, led by Carter's Maccurial and Ruthless National Security Advisor, Spignew, Brzinski.

Against Presinsky and the bleeders stood the dealers, chiefly represented by the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and the ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolf Dubbs. Dubbs saw the radical Hafizalla Amine as quote a fierce nationalist first, an alloyal communist second. According to Sigherison, Amine had even bragged that the Soviets needed him more than he needed them. Dubs saw an opportunity to get a mean to flip on the Soviets.

Ahmed Rashid calls the Communists' reforms unrealistic. Rodrick Brathwaid finds the party out of touch with the realities of their own country, and Rodger Anwar sees the revolutionaries as, quote, Marxist intellectuals in a hurry, whose program failed due to, quote, lack of experience, rampant inefficiency, and limited resources. By 1979, Rod dissatisfaction percolated into political protest with heavy religious overtones. and warrites agricultural production was severely hit by the unrest in the countryside in reaction to these reforms. The Mullahs, quote, used these shortages to unleash highly poisonous propaganda against the government, all the while the party leaders were making preparations to liquidate each other. The party was cutting off its nose despite its face and warrites. It did not have the wisdom or the vision to identify its real friends and enemies.

For the Soviets, Communist victory in Afghanistan was, in fact, a growing nightmare, almost from the beginning, right, spray-thwaid. When the party began to enforce its failing program with terror against the rural population, Moscow protested the violence. The party leaders replied that what had worked for Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union would work in Afghanistan, too. Whatever Moscow's misgivings, Huffizella Amine and his buddies were now the government next door, and a new Soviet Afghan treaty was drawn up. Under one of the treaty's articles, Afghanistan could call on Soviet military assistance in its hour of need, right, spray-thwate. Exactly one year later, Amine was to invoke this article, only himself to become the first victim of the invited Red Army.

The next fire bolt came a month later in February, with the death of American ambassador to Afghanistan, eight-off dubs. Dubs had been the man trying to court Huff Isala Amine, rather than joined as big new Brazinski's Jihad.

On Valentine's Day, Dubs was kidnapped, portedly by a communist splinter group. He was taken to the Kabul Hotel. Specifically, the exposed second floor, room 117. A government rescue team burst into save him, but that triggered a firefight, and the ambassador was left dead on the floor. Everyone watching could see it was a massive clusterfuck, except it's Big New Brisbane ski, who saw it as a massive opportunity.

But things weren't looking so good from the Soviets vantage point either. They, like the Americans, had little idea what was coming in Iran. But they had more than a hunch it might look like the kind of Islamic fanaticism that they were beginning to encounter over their own border in Afghanistan. In fact, they were seeing a bit of that right at this moment in the northwest province of Herod. in March, right, spray-thwaid. Locals in an outlying village protested their daughters being sent to school by rising up, killing local communist officials, and then the girls for good measure, and marching on the main city. Chanting religious slogans armed with ragged guns and knives, the locals sacked and torched banks, post-offices, newspaper offices, and government buildings, and looted the bizarres. They tore down red flags and the portraits of communist leaders. They beat people not wearing traditional Muslim clothes. Party officials, including the governor of the area himself, were hunted down and killed. So were some of the Soviet advisors.

Now let's step inside the Soviet Presidium. Who are the leaders trying to solve the puzzle in Afghanistan? The main decision makers were, Andre Grimico, top diplomat, whose sour demeanor earned him the nickname Grim Grom. Alexi Kasigen, the soft-spoken premier. Demetri Ustenoff, the stubborn defense minister, and Yuri and Drupoff, the ruthless and hyper-intelligent ed of the KGB.

The brain trust took all this to general secretary of the party, Leonid Brezhnev. Not known as a man of deep introspection, Brezhnev II apparently knew a turkey when he saw it. When briefed on the Afghans' request for troops, he ruled it out.

Then, Brezhnev himself told Tarky in a meeting, the Afghan government must broaden its political base and stop shooting people. He emphasized yet again that in the present circumstances, the Soviets would send no troops.

At the same time, troops on the frontier of the USSR were increasingly getting into clashes with rebel groups from Afghanistan. Soviet military intelligence began to organize a special Muslim battalion from the Soviet Muslim populations in Central Asia, just in case.

May. Massive uprisings sweep six provinces in Afghanistan.

July. Soviet paratroopers fly to Bogram Airport.

August, a commando battalion mutinies at Bala Hissar, an ancient fortress on the outskirts of Kabul. Another government infantry division, quote, suffered heavy losses. The Afghan governments request for troops, quote, continued and multiplied throughout the month. Asked by a general if there were any plans to move troops into Afghanistan, Defense Minister Ustanov replied, In no circumstances. On September 1, 1979, the KGB sent a memo which, for the first time, floated the idea of removing Huffizilla Amine. The memo also said the PDPA should let in moderate religious leaders, representatives of national minorities, people who had been unjustly imprisoned should be released. One of the men living in a kind of prison was Amine's supposed boss, President Taraki. A mean had effectively reduced his quote-unquote great leader, Tarekki, to a figurehead, rights and war. He was not even allowed to receive newspaper correspondence or grand interviews, and it seemed like worse was coming.

At this point, the Soviets realized that Hafizilla Amine was preparing to knock off Tarky, the president of Afghanistan. KGB Chief Yurian Drupoff started to work on plans to spear it Tarky out of Kabul. Batarki was as good as dead. The commander of the Afghan presidential guard was now loyal to Amine, and he summoned three lowly officers to, against their better judgment, execute the president. The whole business writes Brayth Wade, lasted 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, Hafizullah, I mean himself, was chatting with American charged affair, saying that he hoped for an improvement in relations. He told his foreign minister to push the same message to the U.S. Undersecretary of State. In an interview to the Washington Post and L.A. Times, he said, quote, we want that the U.S. should study the situation in this region and provide us with more assistance. I mean also stepped up public criticism of the Soviets accusing them of trying to assassinate him. In a few days, however, it turned out that the only assassination that had been carried out was that of President Tarky. And drop off, right, spray-thwaid, mortified by his department's failure to keep control of events, was now determined to get rid of our mean. But Soviet influence and Kabul was practically non-existent. And our mean, Victor in the power struggle, was still mishandling the domestic situation in Afghanistan with disastrous brutality.

So by the autumn of 1979, the Afghan government controlled maybe not more than half of the country. The Majahadine were on the move, and Amine was feeding all suspected opponents to the meat grinder. Soviet resolve weakened day by day. Going in might become a disaster, but the increasingly bloody regime of a mean, or a takeover by Islamic warlords didn't look so good either. Rites' brave weight, step by step, with great reluctance, strongly suspecting that it would be a mistake. The Russians slithered toward a military intervention, because they could not think of a better alternative. In October, a unit of KGB special forces secretly surveyed public opinion across Afghanistan. It reported back that, quote, an invasion would be opposed by the entire country.

Braithwaid captures the moment. A shirt that I mean was doing a sadot on them and convinced that the United States would not stand idly by as their massive investment in the Shah dried up. The Soviets, creaking bureaucracy, descended into panic mode.

November, the KGB brings their favorite successor to Hafizella Amin, Babrak Carmal, to Moscow.

December 8th, Brezhnev meets Andropov, Gromiko, and Defense Minister Ustenov to weigh the pros and cons of introducing Soviet forces. No record of this meeting as yet surfaced.

The big new Brazinski would confirm the so-called Afghan trap theory in an interview with a French paper in 1998. The secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap. He added that, on the day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter in essence, we now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War. This was later claimed to be a mistranslation. One historian in particular has gone so far as to call the Afghan trap pure myth. But after speaking with us, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould sent us a video-taped interview they had done with Chuck Cogan, who was once chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the CIA. And Cogan tells a story of running into Brazinski at a funeral, where in person Brazinski very much doubled down on the Afghan trap thesis.

Then there was off the record testimony from Bill Odom. Odom was at the time military advisor to Brzinski and just as anti-Soviet as his boss writes historian Jonathan Haslam of Princeton and Cambridge University. Odom in fact would later go on to head the NSA under Reagan. As autumn told witnesses at a dinner years later, when the news of the Soviet invasion came in, Brazinski shot a clenched fist in the air triumphantly. They have taken the bait, and, quote, having improvidently let the cat out of the bag writes haslam. Autumn froze in place, an asked that it not be repeated anywhere.

Even more striking is the testimony of U.S. negotiator Paul Warnke, who was at the table during the arm's reduction talks with the Soviet Union known as Salt 2. If the dealers, not the bleeders, had been listened to, quote, I don't think there would have been any Afghanistan invasion by the Soviet Union. I remember it was about Thanksgiving of 1979. I was at a party given by some defense contractor, and there was a group of people from the Soviet embassy. I was told that the Politburo had voted on the Afghan issue, something like six times. And five times, those who were against moving into Afghanistan won. But by the sixth time, apparently the hardliners said, look, you're getting nowhere with the United States. You can't even get the salt too treaty ratified, even though we've made all the major concessions. So why should we hold back? And I think that basically was the missed opportunity that we could have in fact reached an overall agreement with the Soviet Union.

Is it a lot of junk that's that's something accurate code. The crucial meeting of the Politburo took place on December 12, 1979.

In planning their invasion, the Soviets had no intentions to stick around. The job was to go in, stabilize the government, and withdraw, and so, by the American calendar, on Christmas Eve 1979, 80,000 Soviet troops headed into Afghanistan. Their target, offizella, a meme,