Summary
The year is 1979, and Brezhnev authorizes a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The USSR had been watching developments there uneasily for years. In 1973, Mohammed Daoud Khan ended the Afghan monarchy. Five years later, on April 27–28, 1978, the Marxist PDPA seized power in the Saur Revolution, launching radical reforms and internal purges that fractured Afghan politics. Moscow was unsettled by the PDPA’s sudden rise, but quickly threw its support behind the new regime. The PDPA’s rule proved unstable, dominated by a radical faction that tried to secularize society and overturn centuries of tradition—sparking a conservative Islamic backlash. This had broader implications for the USSR, which contained its own Muslim-majority regions. Moscow was unwilling to stand by and risk a conservative revolution spreading across its southern flank.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the view wasn’t much better. Iran had long been a pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East, but it had just collapsed as Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran to establish an Islamic republic. With Iran’s cooperation against the USSR suddenly gone, Carter’s administration now faced the reality that Afghanistan might open the door for Moscow to expand influence over the Persian Gulf—and, by extension, global oil supplies. Ultimately, Washington decided to provide limited funding to anti-Soviet rebels. The logic was simple: if Moscow was going to try to control Afghanistan, America would do what it could to make that decision costly.
Other key players included Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan and its close ally Saudi Arabia. Both were alarmed by the rise of the pro-Moscow PDPA. Pakistan wanted Afghanistan’s cooperation to counter India to the east, while the Saudis were shaken by Iran’s fallen monarchy and leaned harder into counter-revolutionary politics. Through its intelligence service, the ISI, Pakistan became the main conduit for outside support flowing into Afghanistan. Training, recruiting, and equipping Afghan rebel factions, Pakistan positioned itself as central to the fight against the PDPA and, eventually, Soviet forces.
Ghost Wars picks up here, focusing on the CIA’s involvement in Afghanistan from this point through September 11, 2001. The following decades only grew more complicated.
Moscow’s invasion turned into a disaster, costing billions and yielding nothing but embarrassment—foreshadowing America’s own future involvement. The Soviet withdrawal was hailed in Washington as the CIA’s greatest covert success. But it also marked the beginning of a frustrating cycle that would ultimately lead to one of the agency’s greatest failures.
One downside of democracy is that history takes decades to play out while election cycles come and go in predictable, short intervals. Leaders and agency heads change, but the reality on the ground often doesn’t. Between 1979 and 2001, the U.S. cycled through four presidents and seven CIA directors, each with shifting priorities. Afghanistan’s place in Washington’s strategic thinking rose and fell, until it forced itself onto the American consciousness. Ironically, this was caused not by an Afghan leader, but by a Saudi.
Osama bin Laden came from a wealthy Saudi family with ties to the royal household. With a large bankroll, he became an active funder of Islamic groups and causes, mostly in Pakistan, ranging from charities to small militias. Early on, he was seen as a model citizen devoted to spreading Islam. But over time, he grew more militant. Shortly before the Soviets withdrew, he founded his own group, al-Qaeda. The Afghan conflict drew Arab fighters who saw it as part of a pan-Islamic struggle to rebuild an Islamic empire across the Middle East. Bin Laden gained renown both through his financial support for rebel causes and his own limited participation in the fighting.
After the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan remained consumed by warring factions. In 1994, a new force arose from the south: a conservative Islamist movement backed by Pakistan, which promoted them as the future leaders who could finally bring peace. They called themselves the Taliban.
By 1996, after Bin Laden’s expulsion from Sudan, the Taliban provided him sanctuary. Under their protection, al-Qaeda grew, safely out of reach of increasingly determined CIA efforts to stop it.
The Taliban’s rise further complicated U.S.–Pakistan relations. After Bin Laden was implicated in multiple terrorist attacks against American interests, the CIA pressured Pakistan’s ISI to help capture him. Pakistan, however, played both sides—supporting the Taliban with training, money, and intelligence, while feeding just enough information to Washington to avoid a break.
This cat-and-mouse game continued through the Clinton years, as CIA officers tracking Bin Laden grew more alarmed.
The CIA itself had been founded to ensure nothing like Pearl Harbor ever blindsided the U.S. again. Yet this new threat of terrorism posed a different kind of danger, one the agency’s slow, bureaucratic machinery struggled to counter. With warnings arriving from all directions, it became harder and harder to separate signal from noise. Until it wasn’t…
Thoughts
A fantastic history of events, another one of those books that as soon as I finish, makes me think I need to read a dozen more to understand the surrounding details.
It is amazing how ignorant I am about everything. So much to learn, so little time.