Paper (short) - A Consideration of Operations Driving Policy in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s

The United States’ involvement in Afghanistan escalated after the USSR’s invasion in 1979. At that time, the original concept governing covert action in Afghanistan was to ‘bleed’ the USSR, thereby causing preoccupation and diverting resources from the USSR’s actions in Europe. However, during the 1980s, the operation escalated from a simple preoccupation for the USSR to a military snafu that would eventually kill or wound thousands of Soviet soldiers and beggar the Soviet Union before the eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. It is important to note that the United States’ initial covert policy towards Afghanistan did not involve a rollback of the Soviet army from Afghanistan, but rather a holding operation. However, as operators began to involve themselves in policy decisions in Afghanistan, the goals of the operation changed to pushing the Soviet forces out of Afghanistan, using progressively more and more overt means. The way in which operators effectively altered policy towards Afghanistan had two main sources: circumvention of the chain of command and over-reliance on regional allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Generally, principles dictate that the chain of command in covert operations is fixed, with operators acting on orders given by their superiors, who in turn receive directives from policymakers. However, in the case of Afghanistan, policymakers established direct contact with operators in the field, thereby creating a bridge through which operators in Afghanistan could leap the boundaries of their mission and decide policy in their own right. In a sense, the contact from the policymakers had an anomalous root, in that Congressman Charles Wilson of Texas had unilaterally expressed interest in the actions of the mujahideen fighting against the USSR. Wilson’s interest eventually led him to meetings with mujahideen leaders, as well as field operatives. Congressman Wilson then used his influence as a member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee of the United States House Appropriations Committee to secure funding for the ideas of CIA agents who wished to push harder against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. In particular, the funding arranged by Congressman Wilson allowed the CIA to covertly supply anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan with a weapons mix including AK-47 rifles, Dashika machine guns, heavier 14.5 millimeter machine guns, and long range mortars.
A second way in which operations began to drive policy was through the feedback loop established when Pakistan’s government, a partner of the CIA in the field, began to lobby the United States for more funding for its cross-border efforts in Afghanistan. In particular, Pakistan’s erstwhile prime minister, Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq, and the Pakistani intelligence chief, General Akhtar Abdul Rahman had close relationships with US policymakers. As a result of the relationship between the CIA and Pakistan, Afghani fighters who might have proven both useful and safe allies to the United States did not gain US support. Chief among those who remained in the cold was Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik, whose forces had long denied the Soviets control over the Panjshir valley in northeastern Afghanistan. While the relationship between the United States and Pakistan originally helped to preserve a strong layer of plausible deniability for the CIA, reliance on Pakistan left the United States without a strong independent intelligence network in the Af-Pak region, which would eventually produce consequences long after the Soviets had gone.
Initially however, the CIA considered Operation Cyclone, the anti-Soviet operation in Afghanistan, to be a signal victory. After such a victory, policymakers had little interest in continuing with large amounts of expenditure in the Af-Pak region, so the CIA’s resource budgets in the region largely came to an end, and operatives were withdrawn or abandoned. The withdrawal of US resources from Afghanistan subsequently left US policymakers blind regarding the country. Instead of investing more time and effort to shore up the inadequacy, they chose to ignore Afghanistan for much of the following decade. During the 1990s, Afghanistan remained turbulent, but the problems largely did not spill over into other countries. However, after the leaders of the terrorist unit Al-Qaeda relocated to Afghanistan from the Sudan, the area proved to be an effective hiding place from which to stage terrorist attacks, chief among which were the airplane attacks on September 11th, 2001.