LewRockwell.com has posted this amazing commentary from 1980 by Murray Rothbard analyzing our involvement in Afghanistastan. A sample:
But just as we have been whipping ourselves up to nuking Muslims and to declaring war against “fanatical” Islam per se, we are ready to turn on a dime and sing the praises of no-longer fanatical Muslims who are willing to fight Russian tanks with their bare hands: the heroic freedom fighters of Afghanistan. All of a sudden President Carter has gone bananas: declaring himself shocked and stunned by the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, mobilizing the United Nations in stunned horror, levying embargoes (my how this peanut salesman loves embargoes!), and threatening the Olympics so dear to sports fans around the globe.
The whole column is priceless, but for those of us outraged at Republican support for Obama’s non-war homicides, this portion will produce a special degree of horrified fascination:
The conservatives, the Pentagon, the Social Democrats, the neo-conservatives, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority—all the worst scoundrels in American life—have been yearning to smash detente, and to accelerate an already swollen arms budget and heat up the Cold War. And now Carter has done it—to such an extent that such conservative organs as Human Events are even finding Carter foreign policy to be better in some respects than that of its hero Reagan.
One portion of Rothbard’s commentary needs some correction, but only because Rothbard did not have access to the secret machinations of the Carter Administration:
The reason for the latest Soviet invasion is simple but ironic in our world of corn-fed slogans. For the problem with Hafizullah Amin, the prime minister before the Soviet incursion, was that he was too Commie for the Russians. As a fanatical left-Communist, Amin carried out a brutal program of nationalizing the peasantry and torturing opponents, a policy of collectivism and repression that fanned the flames of guerrilla war against him. Seeing Afghanistan about to slip under to the West once again, the Soviets felt impelled to go in to depose Amin and replace him with an Afghan Communist, Babrak Karmal, who is much more moderate a Communist and therefore a faithful follower of the Soviet line. There are undoubtedly countless conservatives and Social Democrats who still find it impossible to conceive of Soviet tools who are more moderate than other Communists, but it is high time they caught up with several decades of worldwide experience.
As far as Rothbard knew, the guerrilla war against Amin had a completely domestic explanation. However, it turns out that, as bad as Amin was, he did not entirely cause the instability. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, admitted that the US government was secretly supporting the “no longer fanatical Muslims” before 1980 in order to force the Soviets to intervene.
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.
For a few more points of context, you might read my post from March 2, 2013: “Is Islam a World Threat Without Western Money and Government Aid?”<>
