Mujahideen Insurgency — Operation Cyclone and CIA/Pakistan Backing
Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation from 1980 was funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia and run through Pakistan. The Soviet invasion of December 1979 had been intended to stabilise a communist government whose land and literacy reforms had provoked rebellion across the countryside and whose leaders were murdering each other. Some 100,000 Soviet troops held the cities, the airfields and the roads, and could not hold anything else. The resistance was never a single organisation. Seven Sunni parties recognised in Peshawar and eight Shia ones in Iran, with commanders in the field like Massoud in the Panjshir who fought their own war and sometimes each other's. The aid was enormous and indirect. Operation Cyclone became the largest covert programme in CIA history, matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia and distributed entirely by Pakistan's intelligence service, which chose the recipients and favoured the most Islamist parties. The Stinger missiles supplied from 1986 are usually credited with breaking Soviet air superiority, and the more careful assessments make them one factor among several. The Soviet response to a war it could not win was to attack the rural population: village bombing, mined fields, and some five million refugees driven into Pakistan and Iran. Around a million Afghans and 15,000 Soviet soldiers died. The withdrawal was completed in February 1989. The parties then fought each other for Kabul, destroying much of the city, and the Taliban emerged from the wreckage in 1994. The programme's afterlife is the part Washington did not plan. Arab volunteers who came to fight in Afghanistan built the networks that became al-Qaeda, and the Pakistani intelligence service that had chosen the recipients kept its clients for the following thirty years.
- Year: 1980 CE
- Category: Covert
