If you haven’t read Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, you should. It recounts the CIA’s massive effort to kill Russians during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989). The American people knew little about the CIA’s role in arming the mujahideen. The left was more focused on Central America and apartheid in South Africa. But there was another reason that the American people were largely uninformed: the Soviets barely complained. Why?
Well…it’s fairly simple. If the Russian people realized that the Americans were arming their Afghan foes then there would have been pressure on them to do something about it. And one of the main principles of the Cold War was that U.S. and Soviet forces would never confront each other directly, but only through proxy armies and other covert means. That meant that the Soviets were, by and large, willing to take enormous losses resulting from American assistance without much of a protest.
When you read Charlie Wilson’s War one of the things that will strike you is the zeal and enthusiasm our spooks had for killing Russians. They wanted revenge for Vietnam, and they wanted it badly. I don’t think anyone should be surprised if the Russian military is filled with veteran officers that feel the same way now, and want to pay us back for what we did to them in Afghanistan. If the Russians were arming the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would hardly be a great surprise. And if you go back to the first days of the war in Iraq you’ll see references to Russian military advisers helping Saddam.
Now, China is another story. China actually helped us work with the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War. Some of the knock-off AK-47’s we supplied to the muj were made in Chinese factories (as well as Egyptian). But things may have changed.
There are scarcely any sources less credible than the Washington Times or any columnists more dishonest than Bill Gertz. So, take the following with a pillar of salt.
New intelligence reveals China is covertly supplying large quantities of small arms and weapons to insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban militia in Afghanistan, through Iran.
U.S. government appeals to China to check some of the arms shipments in advance were met with stonewalling by Beijing, which insisted it knew nothing about the shipments and asked for additional intelligence on the transfers. The ploy has been used in the past by China to hide its arms-proliferation activities from the United States, according to U.S. officials with access to the intelligence reports.
Some arms were sent by aircraft directly from Chinese factories to Afghanistan and included large-caliber sniper rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades and components for roadside bombs, as well as other small arms.
The Washington Times reported June 5 that Chinese-made HN-5 anti-aircraft missiles were being used by the Taliban.
According to the officials, the Iranians, in buying the arms, asked Chinese state-run suppliers to expedite the transfers and to remove serial numbers to prevent tracing their origin. China, for its part, offered to transport the weapons in order to prevent the weapons from being interdicted.
The weapons were described as “late-model” arms that have not been seen in the field before and were not left over from Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq.
U.S. Army specialists suspect the weapons were transferred within the past three months.
The Bush administration has been trying to hide or downplay the intelligence reports to protect its pro-business policies toward China, and to continue to claim that China is helping the United States in the war on terrorism. U.S. officials have openly criticized Iran for the arms transfers but so far there has been no mention that China is a main supplier.
Defense officials are upset that Chinese weapons are being used to kill Americans. “Americans are being killed by Chinese-supplied weapons, with the full knowledge and understanding of Beijing where these weapons are going,” one official said.
I am not vouching for Bill Gertz’s assertions here. There is an obvious agenda from the ‘GET IRAN NOW’ caucus, and it appears this article is just part of their black propaganda campaign. What I want to talk about though is the irony that would be involved if this report were true.
In the 1980’s, we used Pakistan as our staging point for arming the mujahideen. In this case, China is using Iran. That makes sense both because we are still allied with Pakistan and because Iran borders Iraq, as well as Afghanistan. The weapons are stripped of identifying markers, hiding their origin. This was the point of our supplying the mujahideen with only (knock-off) Russian weapons made in Egypt and China. It allowed us plausible deniability. The ‘Bush administration has been trying to hide or downplay the intelligence reports to protect its pro-business policies toward China’ just as the Gorbachev administration downplayed the CIA’s role because they didn’t want to risk a major confrontation with the United States. Naturally, this wound up infuriating both Soviet generals (then) and American generals (now) who knew their soldiers were getting killed.
In other words, if you just change the names around (USSR becomes USA, Pakistan becomes Iran, USA becomes China, Afganistan remains Afghanistan, but add in Iraq) this is a total repeat of the ass-whupping we put on the Soviets, only now it is our turn to take a beating.
So, Gertz may be pushing some disinformation, but it is dripping in irony. And if he is right, we should be worried about what happened to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics happening to the United States of America.
