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UK discussed plans to help mujahideen weeks after Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
Cabinet documents released after 30 years …
(The Guardian) – Within three weeks of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was negotiating how to channel covert military aid towards the “Islamic resistance” that was fighting the Russians.
Details of how swiftly clandestine weapons routes were opened up to aid the mujahideen emerge from secret cabinet documents released to the National Archives today under the 30-year rule.
The files show how extensive military and diplomatic efforts – co-ordinated with western allies – were made to defeat the USSR and the lengths to which Thatcher went to discourage participation in the 1980 Olympics.
Shortly after KGB special forces seized control of Kabul on 27 December 1979, the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, expressed the view: “The Russians are resorting to the big lie by saying that they intervened at the invitation of Afghan authorities … we should take every opportunity to make them uncomfortable and bring home to them the consequences of their actions.”
In mid-January Armstrong sent a “secret, personal” note to the prime minister on a meeting in Paris between senior US, French, German and British officials.
“There was some discussion of support for Afghan resistance to the invading Soviet troops,” he explained. “For obvious reasons, I am circulating it separately from the record for the rest of the discussion.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US national security adviser, recommended providing Afghan fighters in “forward positions” just inside the Pakistan border with “surface to air missiles to defend themselves against air attack”.
The French proposed channelling military aid via the Iraqis. The aim of the west, they said, should be to keep the Islamic world “aroused about the Soviet invasion that would be served by encouraging a continuing guerrilla resistance”.
Armstrong said intervention “would make more difficult the process of Soviet pacification of Afghanistan and [ensure] that process takes much longer than it would otherwise do; and the existence of a guerrilla movement in Afghanistan would be a focus of Islamic resistance which we should be wanting to continue to stimulate”.
There were further “secret four powers talks” in London. On 1 February Carrington informed Thatcher that one of the main ideas being pursued was “support for patriots inside Afghanistan through the covert supply of arms and training. French officials favour this. The Chinese are also interested; and the US are active in this respect. Muslim money is already flowing and may be sufficient.”
The West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, described the US position as “thoroughly dangerous” and a “clear and present danger of a third world war”.
The west’s arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan has been seen as one of the contributing factors in the rise of al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden was a prominent Saudi financier of the mujahideen.
On July 3, 1979, U.S. President Carter signed a presidential order authorizing funding for anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan. Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989.
The program relied heavily on using the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as an intermediary for funds distribution, passing of weapons, military training and financial support to Afghan resistance groups. Along with funding from similar programs from Britain’s MI6 and SAS, Saudi Arabia, and the People’s Republic of China, the ISI armed and trained over 100,000 insurgents between 1978 and 1992. They encouraged the volunteers from the Arab states to join the Afghan resistance in its struggle against the Soviet troops based in Afghanistan.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
