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Facts
or Fictions?
To a greater extent
than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan's
unfinished
24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign intelligence
agencies : The Soviet Union's KGB, America's CIA, Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia's General
Intelligence Department and Iran's multiple clandestine services.
They primed various Afghan factions
with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces,
financed propaganda and
manipulated political conventions. When spies help construct
a civil war, one seed they
sow is confusion. Afghans today have little basis to trust
their own recent history;
too much remains hidden.
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country has become a hot bed of interlocking conspiracies,
both real and imagined, a maze of fractured mirrors designed
by war makers who embraced deception as a winning weapon.
Afghanistan's successful reconstruction as even a semi-normal
country, then, must eventually include some reclamation
by Afghans of the truth about their recent past. The KGB
was present at the creation of this clandestine architecture.
But there has been too little evidence to allow even an
intelligent guess about how the Soviet secret services
operated as the
Afghan war developed after the Soviet invasion in 1979.
Now a section of the shroud hasbeen lifted. In a 178 |
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-page
paper released this month, former Soviet archivist Vasili Mitrokhin
extensively quotes KGB cables and files to describe violent
guerrilla deception campaigns, assassinations, sabotage and
bribery carried out by the KGB in Afghanistan between 1978 and
1983. In the context of current events, Mitrokhin's disclosures
read like a catalogue of the Afghan war's original covert sins.
Among other things, they forecast and explain many of the sins
that followed.
The Soviet military's occupation of Afghanistan occurred in
plain view. Unseen were large-scale, adjunct operations mounted
by the Soviet secret services. They worked, Mitrokhin writes,
out of a large Kabul-based KGB "Residency" and through
numerous ad-hoc training, sabotage and small-unit paramilitary
missions, some organized directly from Moscow. Most strikingly,
according to Mitrokhin's paper, the KGB ran scores of secret
"false flag" military operations inside Afghanistan
during the 1980s. In these, Soviet-trained Afghan guerrilla
units posed as CIA-supported, anti-Soviet Mujahideen rebels
to create confusion and flush out genuine rebels for counter
attacking. The KGB attached "particular importance"
to this programme, Mitrokhin writes: As of January 1983, there
were 86 armed, KGB-trained "false bands," as they
were called, operating throughout Afghanistan. They "provoked
clashes between different (genuine rebel) groups and when necessary
pretended to abandon their armed opposition," falsely surrendering
to the Kabul government. In a relatively small country riven
by ethnic and tribal suspicions, a successful programme of this
kind could have created widespread confusion.
In addition, KGB "Cascade" units, consisting of about
150 men, were given "broad powers" to operate around
Afghanistan, according to Mitrokhin. They engaged in sabotage,
recruited agents, coopted Afghan tribes through bribery, and
attempted to disrupt the operations of the CIA-backed Mujahideen.
By Mitrokhin's account, the KGB Residency in Kabul spent much
of the Soviet war complaining about how lazy, factionalized,
and unreliable its Afghan communist clients had become.
The clandestine structure of the Cold War-era Afghan war anticipated
the character of the fractured, deception-laden civil war that
raged there during the 1990s. After Moscow and Washington withdrew,
regional intelligence agencies - in most cases trained, inspired
and funded by the CIA or the KGB during the 1980s _ intervened
directly. They often used the same covert methods pioneered
by their mentor agencies.
Pakistan's still-obscured role in aiding the rise of the Taliban
between 1994 and 1996, and Uzbekistan's clandestine support
for ethnic Uzbek warlords reigning in Mazar-e-Sharif are two
examples among many.
In addition, after his expulsion from Sudan in 1996, Osama bin
Laden introduced his stateless terrorist network to Afghanistan
- a secret brotherhood that operated as a conspiracy within
the Taliban's Pakistani-supported conspiracy.
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A
consequence of this history for Afghans is evident from the
recent events. When political violence occurs, it is very difficult
for anyone to express confidence about its origins. A government
minister was killed on Feb 14 by a cold, hungry, angry mob at
the Kabul airport. The country's interim government, eschewing
the obvious, made arrests and announced that the minister had
been assassinated in a covert plot, perhaps with international
dimensions. Now it has backed away. Which is true? Sadly, either
seems plausible. |
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