CIA activities in Afghanistan
The Najibullah government finally collapsed in April 1992, several months after the December 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of U.S. aid to the mujahideen, leaving Afghanistan a failed state in the grip of a multifaceted civil war marked by horrific atrocities and the destruction of Kabul in mass-casualty rocket attacks.
[11] Taraki's efforts to improve education and redistribute land were accompanied by mass executions (including of many conservative religious leaders) and political repression without precedent in Afghan history, igniting a revolt by mujahideen rebels.
The DRA's mass killing of up to 20,000 residents of Herat, followed by the Kerala massacre, failed to deter additional mutinies in Jalalabad and then across Afghanistan: By 1980, desertion had reduced the size of the Afghan army by considerably more than half.
[8][10] U.S. President Jimmy Carter expressed surprised at the invasion, as the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community during 1978 and 1979—reiterated as late as September 29, 1979—was that "Moscow would not intervene in force even if it appeared likely that the Khalq government was about to collapse."
[3][13] These concerns were a major factor in the unrequited efforts of both the Carter and Reagan administrations to improve relations with Iran, and resulted in massive aid to Pakistan's President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
The modest scope of this early collaboration was likely influenced by the understanding, later recounted by senior CIA official Robert Gates, "that a substantial U.S. covert aid program" might have "raise[d] the stakes" thereby causing "the Soviets to intervene more directly and vigorously than otherwise intended.
[21][22][23][24] Tobin reiterates that "no weapons were directly supplied before January 1980" but mentions that the United States National Security Council (NSC) agreed to explore additional ways to facilitate arms shipments to the mujahideen on December 17—an idea rendered moot by the Soviet invasion one week later.
[29] Coll writes that Haqqani and his brothers, who were given hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct cash payments by their CIA case officer, "did more than any other commander network in Afghanistan to nurture and support Arab volunteer fighters, seeding Al Qaeda's birth.
The resulting NSDD–166 reportedly included a highly classified supplement signed by NSA Robert McFarlane that detailed expanded forms of U.S. assistance to the mujahideen, such as the provision of satellite intelligence, "burst communication" devices, advanced weapons systems, and additional training to the Afghan rebels through the ISI.
Because President Reagan never signed a presidential finding to authorize this risky expansion of the CIA's mandate in Afghanistan, which would have entailed notifying certain members of the U.S. Congress, Coll observes: "If Casey spoke the words Yousaf attributed to him, he was almost certainly breaking American law.
"[40] In late September 1986, roughly two months after Bearden replaced Piekney as Islamabad station chief, the CIA began delivering U.S.-made state of the art FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the mujahideen.
CIA officers were aware that the Stingers could easily be used by terrorists to shoot down civilian aircraft and were reticent to abandon the last vestiges of plausible deniability by introducing U.S.-origin weaponry into Afghanistan, but their objections were overruled by Reagan administration hardliners, including by senior State Department official Morton I. Abramowitz.
The possibility that the Stingers might be diverted for purposes not intended by U.S. policymakers provided an additional impetus for the CIA to expand the number of unilateral agents on its Afghan payroll (including both Massoud and Abdul Haq until Bearden ended direct subsidies to Haq after the latter criticized the ISI's role in the conflict), which was a comparatively minor expense when juxtaposed with the unprecedented congressionally-allocated $1.1 billion budget that it had to work with for its Afghan operations in fiscal 1986 ($470 million) and fiscal 1987 ($630 million).
Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as the reformist leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 and was determined to extricate his country from Afghanistan as quickly as possible, openly calling the war a "bleeding wound" in widely reported 1986 remarks.
With the end of the Soviet occupation, policy disagreements between the State Department—including its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and McWilliams's ambassadorial-level successor as special envoy to Afghanistan Peter Tomsen—and the CIA regarding the future of the Afghan conflict became more pronounced, as illustrated by the CIA's apparent acquiescence in a mass rocket attack on Kabul planned by ISI Director Asad Durrani and Hekmatyar for October 1990 (which was cancelled only after a last-minute intervention by Oakley and Tomsen) and a remark by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Robert M. Kimmitt to the effect that the U.S. saw nothing objectionable in Najubullah participating in Afghan elections as part of a peaceful settlement.
Despite being offered the role of prime minister, Hekmatyar (heavily backed by the ISI) bombarded Kabul with rockets, inflicting mass casualties in a flailing bid to impose his personal rule on Afghanistan.
Massoud retreated to his native Panjshir Valley, forming the United Front (also known as the "Northern Alliance"), which was backed by India, Iran, and Russia as a bulwark against the further expansion of the Taliban's militant Sunni fundamentalism into Central Asia.
The Clinton administration drew up multiple Presidential Decision Directives (PDD) within its Counter-terrorism Support Group (CSG) that placed the CIA in charge of various programs, including PDD-62:[63] [64] On August 7, 1998 truck bombs were detonated at the U.S. embassies in two different East African capital cities: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.
Al-Qaeda's portrayal within the realm of Western media would go on to become relatively notorious in response to the 1998 bombings; bin Laden was subsequently placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s most wanted fugitives list.
In February, the Memoranda of Notification, a provision signed by the president that oversaw covert action in Afghanistan, "authorized the CIA to work with the Afghan Northern Alliance... against [bin Laden].
To avoid implicating himself and his Taliban hosts, Bin Laden over the past two years has allowed cells in his network ... to plan attacks more independently of the central leadership and has tried to gain support for his agenda outside the group.
Mohammed Fahim (who succeeded Massoud following the latter's assassination), Atta Muhammad Nur, Dostum, Khan, and Sayyaf all played important roles in the invasion, which was overseen by the CTC's Henry A. Crumpton.
"[77] Hamid Karzai was inaugurated as the new President of Afghanistan on December 22, at which point the war's casualties included just 13 soldiers or CIA officers in the U.S.-led military campaign, along with at least 1,500 to 2,375 Afghan civilians who died primarily from United States Air Force or Navy bombing raids.
[78] The seemingly successful military campaign in Afghanistan, officially dubbed "Operation Enduring Freedom," was met with bipartisan praise in the U.S., with American media hailing it as "a harbinger of a new kind of war," per Coll.
"[81] Additionally, bin Laden and hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters escaped into Pakistan as a result of a decision by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, United States Central Command commander Tommy Franks, and ultimately President Bush to rely on the CIA-backed Afghan militias of Hazrat Ali and Zahir Qadeer (whose father, Haji Abdul Qadeer, welcomed bin Laden's arrival in Jalalabad in 1996)—along with large-scale B-52 bombardment—instead of sending in U.S. army rangers or marines during the December 2001 Battle of Tora Bora.
Franks and Rumsfeld were apparently motivated by fear that a substantial American presence near Tora Bora could incite a rebellion by local Pashtuns, despite the latter's lack of organizational capability at the time and the fierce dissent voiced by many CIA analysts including Charles E. Allen (who warned Franks that "the back door [to Pakistan] was open") and Gary Berntsen (who briefly served as the chief of the CIA station informally operating out of the Ariana Hotel in Kabul and who called for army rangers to "kill this baby in the crib").
The NDS inherited workplace culture and personnel from the Soviet-era KHAD, itself commonly described as the Afghan equivalent of the KGB, but Schroen preferred to use SAVAK as a model for the new intelligence agency.
[85] In mid-2006, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center hired University of Massachusetts Dartmouth academic Brian Glyn Williams to conduct a study, including field work in Afghanistan and a final research paper (published in 2007), examining the dramatic increase in suicide attacks by Afghan insurgents beginning that year.
[90] "Green-on-blue" or "insider attacks," in which Afghan soldiers or police officers turned their weapons on American or European counterparts, became a major concern in 2010 and peaked in 2012—when they accounted for nearly 25% of ISAF casualties—before declining during 2013-2014 as international forces withdrew from the conflict.
The United States justified the drone strike on the grounds that Zawahiri's presence in Afghanistan violated the Doha Agreement, in which the Taliban pledged to not allow any global terrorist groups safehaven in the country as they had done before.
