Welcome back to SNAFUBAR. This week's episode marks the second of three episodes focusing on Afghanistan from a historical and cultural perspective, both as a region and later, as a country. In today's episode, we'll look at Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the later American invasion in 2001. This series is also the first of our "Close Look" groupings where we delve deep into one subject matter over the course of multiple episodes.
SNAFUBAR is hosted by Sara Hart, who teaches Religious Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt, and Jeff Crane who is an Environmental Historian and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East
Bergen, The Longest War, 2011.
Carter, “Energy and the National Goals - A Crisis of Confidence”
Carter, “January 4th Address to the Nation”
Britannica, Executive Order 11905
Bhutta, “Children of war: the real casualties of the Afghan conflict”
History.com, “Domino Theory”
Reagan, “Proclamation 4908 - Afghanistan Day”
Truman, “A Report of the National Security Council - NSC 68”
U.S. Senate, “S. Res. 400 Establishing a New Seclect Committee: Church Committee”
U.S. Dept of Justice, “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978”
Young, “40 years ago, Church Committee investigated Americans spying on Americans”
Research and writing for the show is done by Liam Salcuni and Roman Sotomayor
SNAFUBAR is produced by Abigail Smithson and brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.
TRANSCRIPT:[Music]
>>Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): You are about to embark upon the great crusade.
>>JFK (Archival Audio): The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.
>>Douglas MacArthur (Archival Audio): Only the dead have seen the end of war.
>>Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): We will accept nothing less than full victory.
[Music]
>>Sarah Hart: You're listening to SNAFUBAR, at Cal Poly Humboldt.
>>Jeff Crane: Hello everyone, and welcome back to the SNAFUBAR. This is a show where we look at stories of military history, with a focus on particular moments of U.S. military blunders. We add quite a bit of context along the way to help make these stories accessible to a wide range of audiences. It's a show about America, and it's a show about war.
>>Sarah Hart: And it's really not hard to find topics to cover, is it now?
>>Jeff Crane: It's really not. The histories we look at here make clear that the U.S. is a warful nation. War is everywhere on the nation's timeline. America is not really in practice. that peaceful nation that we believe is regularly compelled against its will to go to war.
>>Sarah Hart: We do like to see ourselves as peaceful and benevolent. And that's not new. In very different ways and in very different situations American presidents from Washington to Trump have tried, at least in speeches, in their words and what they say, if not in what they do, they’ve tried to present America as a nation committed to peace. Words, not actions. In Trump's case and others.
>>Jeff Crane: We've got Washington famously resigning his commission and warning against foreign entanglements. And, of course, Woodrow Wilson taking the nation into World War One, after campaigning hard in 1916 on having kept the nation out of war.
>>Sarah Hart: Right, he kept us out of a war that was on all kinds of campaign buttons, like banners and whatnot.
>>Jeff Crane: It was huge. For Americans at that time, were feeling pretty isolationist. They didn't want a war in Europe. And he said he wouldn't bring us in war. And then, of course he did. And it's part of a long-standing trend. We can't say enough how peaceful we are as we're regularly mobilizing for and demobilizing from conflicts.
Kennedy outlined his “strategy of peace” in June 1963, and that was a passionate speech. It was also a thoughtful and compelling speech.
>>Sarah Hart: "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war.” That's Kennedy in that speech.
>>Jeff Crane: And so, a few months after that speech, in June ‘63, the CIA coordinated the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. This is a president we had supported trying to contain the expansion of communism in North Vietnam. And this further escalated the U.S. involvement in that country. So its proclamations of peace with one hand and war planning on the other. America is not a nation inclined at peace, despite what our leaders might tell us. Here in the SNAFUBAR, we look at the warful realities, and we try to put them in a context that can help us to understand our present conflicts and the kinds of choices we have before us as a nation and as individuals and communities living within this nation. I'm Jeff Crane, I'm the dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences here at Cal Poly Humboldt, and I am a peacetime veteran who served during the era we’ll be discussing today
>>Sarah Hart: A peacetime veteran. Why do you emphasize that, Jeff?
>>Jeff Crane: Well, you know, largely because being a combat veteran is so different. I certainly value the service I provided, and it is so much more than almost all pro-war politicians do, but it is a significantly different and less traumatic experience than that of combat veterans. And when you say veteran these days, people often assume combat, given that we are regularly at war now since 2003. I mean, jeez, that's 23 years of ongoing wars. So, you know, maybe we can't use the phrase 30 Years War, but we're coming up on 30 years, aren't we?
>>Sarah Hart: That one’s taken.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, that one’s taken.
>>Sarah Hart: Well, I think we are. Yeah, and thanks for that clarification that I think that's a good distinction for us here. And as for the name that we're going to give to these decades of war, we'll leave that to future historians, probably. Um, and we're going to look at the era from a different angle than peace. This is not peace time in the SNAFUBAR. The peaceful part is not the storyline that we're following here today. I mean, even calling it peacetime, it's a little odd considering the storyline that we're following today.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, well, I mean, if the nation's almost always at war, what's peacetime.
>>Sarah Hart: Right? So if you're a peacetime veteran and a dean, we'll leave it there for now. Listeners, I'm Sarah Hart, I am the chair of the Department of Applied Humanities, also here at Cal Poly Humboldt. And I am the daughter of a wartime veteran. So, Jeff, what are we going to talk about today?
>>Jeff Crane: Well, it's all fun and games in the SNAFUBAR. Today, we're continuing our series on Afghanistan. This is the second of three episodes, and we're calling it “The Path of Jihad.” And the last episode called “America's Great Game,” we focused on the history of Afghanistan as a people and place prior to its modern borders and the United States involvement historically. We introduced the great game, that 19th century colonial debacle where Britain battled it out with Russia over control of Afghanistan, and we looked at how late 20th century America picked up where the British left off, battling the Russians for control that once and future colonial game board Afghanistan. So, in today's episode, we will continue to examine Afghanistan and the role the United States played in the conflict and instability of Afghanistan in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And then what happened then, between the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the American invasion in 2001. And as I go into the script here, Sarah, it occurs to me that not everyone knows what Soviet Union and Russia is.
>>Sarah Hart: Ohhh!
>>Jeff Crane: And maybe you can explain that, but since we're using that a little interchangeably.
>>Sarah Hart: Oh, the USSR and Russia, the Soviets and Russia. So, when we say Soviets, we are referring to the USSR, the United Soviet Socialist Republics, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It's a group, a group of countries joined together into a unified communist state. When we say Soviet, it's the same as USSR. And when we refer to Russians, which both predate and postdate the USSR, we might slip back and forth. We're referring to the same group.
>>Jeff Crane: The Great Soviet Communist Empire
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. The USSR was kind of a political organization of most of the 20th century. Listeners it’s worth knowing that for now, but okay, so what the question of what happened between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 is a good one. It's like an era. You know, the Cold War, which we've just referred to, that ended The Gulf Wars happened, the internet happened, drive-in movie theaters closed like everywhere. Climate awareness increased, sometimes.
>>Jeff Crane: Starbucks arrived.
>>Sarah Hart: Starbucks arrived. Changing the face of the planet.
>>Jeff Crane: Internet, oh you have internet on here?
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah, domestic terrorism erupted all over the U.S. Like that's worth remembering.
>>Jeff Crane: The Unabomber.
>>Sarah Hart: The Unabomber happened, Planned Parenthood got bombed. There was a lot of domestic terrorism. I mean, this is- Oklahoma City happened.
>>Jeff Crane: Homegrown.
>>Sarah Hart: Homegrown American domestic terrorism was sprouting up with some frequency.
>>Jeff Crane: Largely coming from the right.
>>Sarah Hart: During the 80s and 90s, largely coming from the right, largely white American men.
>>Jeff Crane: Militia movements are growing.
>>Sarah Hart: Militia movements are growing.
>>Jeff Crane: It's a lot. Today though, we're going to stay focused, aren't we?
>>Sarah Hart: We're staying focused. Right on track.
>>Jeff Crane: Pot calling the kettle black over here. We're going to focus on Afghanistan. Establish some context before we get to and into that discussion in more detail, a little more background, understanding the CIA's support of the Mujahideen in the 80s, the relationship with Pakistan, how this contributes to the rise of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and then, of course, later ISIS and ISIL. This is all really crucial. So, you know, buckle in and take a deep breath.
[Musical interlude]
>>Sarah Hart: All right. Welcome back to the SNAFUBAR listeners. I'm Sarah Hart, I'm here with Jeff Crane, and we're just picking up the second chapter in our three chapter story of Afghanistan. And Jeff, I'm getting my bearings here. We left off last time in 1990 with longtime Soviet leader, and at this moment in time, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, who's in a meeting with American Secretary of State James Baker talking about the Afghan people. They had just agreed to let those people boil, as they put it. Remember, folks, that the Russians had just left Afghanistan. And what can we call it? Can we call it disgrace?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, they were badly beat it. It's pretty similar to how we felt when we left Vietnam. It also was one of the reasons that the Soviet Union falls. The morale, the cost of the war and everything really fractured Soviet society. So, Americans like to call it a victory. And it's a victory for Afghanistan, no doubt, disgrace for the Russians, for sure. But Afghanistan has a long and storied history of defeating invaders, right? Like the Soviet Union we also step away and leave them to fend for themselves. So what we need to dig into is this American role in this conflict.
>>Sarah Hart: Right. We'll do a little of that today. And the Soviet invasion in 1979, it generated a massive backlash among Afghan people. Righ? And I mean, people of all classes, tribes, political ideologies, everyone. They rose up in spontaneous street protests and were gunned down by the Soviets in the hundreds. Thousands in Kabul went to their roofs during the call to prayer and denounced the Soviet invasion.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, they did that. And so in that way, the invasion was unifying for the Afghans. In the wake of this, the CIA, particularly station chief Howard Hart-
>>Sarah Hart: No relation.
>>Jeff Crane: Okay, who's posted in Islamabad during the early years of the invasion, saw an amazing opportunity to pursue American interests. Let me say that again, to pursue American interests. It is crucial to understand this. And juxtapose it against any notion you may have of American exceptionalism and of improving the world to foreign policy or expanding democracy. There was none of that. American support in Afghanistan was provided with zero belief in the ability of the Afghan people to win, and with no intention to support them in achieving victory. That simply was not on the table in 1979 or 1980. This cynical realpolitik approach would change over time, but it would really take Afghan successes. So we initially provided them money for weapons and to fight merely to weaken the USSR, not to actually support Afghan desires. So like the British. Right? So this is what we call a proxy war, right?
>>Sarah Hart: Um, that's a pretty hard Dr. Crane. You know, these myths die hard, don't you?
>>Jeff Crane: They do. And my take is one supported by the sources. Right? We're pretty good at checking our sources. So let's take a moment to make a point here. Sarah and I aren't lily livered hothouse plant academics, which isn't really a thing, but this is the way we are portrayed by certain elements of American society. So we understand how the world functions. We understand that foreign policy and covert ops are often cynical, cruel, and driven by geopolitical, economic, and strategic interests. Right. We understand that we live in an empire and that we benefit from it, or we have historically. The two of us have studied and taught in the history of war. I served in PSYOPs in the late 80s. I was in the Army from ‘85 to ‘89, you know, a year of language school and then jump school, and then about two years of doing tactical and strategic psychological operations work. So I'm. I'm a Cold War veteran. My father worked on 86 and 86-Bs on carrier decks during the Vietnam War. Sara’s father was a combat marine in Vietnam, and she's deeply embedded in the Humboldt County veteran community. We get it. Our point and one of the key points of SNAFUBAR is that most Americans don't get it. They don't understand the banality and error prone nature of much of our foreign policy, military actions and covert ops.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah.
>>Jeff Crane: So, we're going to try to keep the cynicism at bay, listeners. We're going to get right into it here. We threw millions, then billions of dollars toward this resistance. In the beginning we gave them limited, outdated munitions. We also attracted some very interesting and unusual allies. In this effort to support the Afghans resisting the Soviet Union, we picked up allies like China, also a communist country. And if you know this era, you know that they were in conflict themselves, but also one of our Cold War enemies. So, in our Manichean approach to communism, an approach that's really stark in its understanding of good versus evil. We found a way to be pragmatic when we needed to, which was to get support from China against the Soviet Union. They provided AK 47s definitely for modern warfare, an improvement on the 303 Lee-Enfield RPGs, rocket propelled grenades. Turkey, West Germany, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UK all provided support to the Mujahideen. As did most importantly, Pakistan, our primary ally in supporting the Mujahideen. All of these were critical allies in this effort. And you know what?
>>Sarah Hart: What?
>>Jeff Crane: To the shock of the CIA analysts and overseers and station chiefs, the Afghans started winning.
>>Sarah Hart: What?
>>Jeff Crane: And started taking control of large sections of Afghanistan, wiping out Soviet armored columns, shooting down those terrifying helicopter gunships with RPGs. Feels like we should have studied that.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. So they're working. Um, the Afghans are working with really limited weaponry. I mean, we have, it sounds like we have quite the team of folks helping them, but it's still limited weaponry, sometimes repurposing it in innovative ways to meet their needs and fighting against a much larger, much more well-trained and well-equipped military.
>>Jeff Crane: Following these wins, Hart, and later William Casey, who will take over the CIA under Reagan, pushed for ever increasing amounts of aid and higher quality weapons. They said, look, we can actually win this. The Afghan people could win this conflict. They could defeat the Soviet Union. And it's worth noting that for these guys, people like Howard Hart and others in the CIA, this is more than abstract theory. It's not simply containment and domino theory. It's personal. Many of them had served in Vietnam. They were still angry the Soviet Union provided surface to air missile systems in North Vietnam. I remember my dad being angry about that. I remember him talking about that. You know, there was a period there where we were losing a lot of planes and helicopters to those surface-to-air missile systems. And they also strongly believed in their role in defeating communism. And here they have this shot. They have this opportunity that really had not appeared before. Saudi Arabia strikes a deal with the Reagan administration to match our aid to the Mujahideen, dollar for dollar, and billions were spent to support what became a global jihadist movement
>>Sarah Hart: Because that global jihadist movement was fighting the Soviets right. They’re fighting against our arch enemy.
>>Jeff Crane: So what we need to understand is in our desire to simply drain the USSR and weaken them, trough a proxy war in Afghanistan. We actually created the cauldron and resources for the first global jihad. And this would lead directly to the rise of first, the Mujahideen, al-Qaida, the Taliban, and then ISIS and ISIL.
>>Sarah Hart: I mean, it's something to think about that we did not support the global jihadist movement because we wanted to support the global jihadist movement or supported a global jihadist movement. We did not think about the global jihadist movement. We thought about fighting the Soviets. So those cascading consequences, those results, like they, they do keep coming. Um, and who could have thought, what can an embedded insurgent force with limited weaponry due to an invading imperial power? Does that apply to the US? Have we seen this?
>>Jeff Crane: I don't know, maybe the American Revolutionary War. Vietnam. And we as a country seem to love insurgent and counterinsurgency, covert operations, proxy nations. And then I want to ask this how often these are actually successful, and then how do we define success? And these are getting to be like really big complicated questions, right.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. They're like they, they toe the line between pragmatic questions and real philosophical questions. They definitely straddle, um, like the tactical and the strategic.
>>Jeff Crane: Since we're talking about history and I feel like I'm historical these days, I did participate in protests against Desert Shield and Desert.
>>Sarah Hart: Wait, wait, wait. But you're a veteran chef. You protested against the war. Uh, I mean, you talk about this, it makes me think I'm just constantly impressed by how internally diverse the American military is, by how not monolithic, how not simple veterans viewpoints are. And I, I think we, we forget that.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, there's a mistake that people make thinking that people in military are automatically conservative, right? There's a range of perspectives. Many people in the military are actually much more cosmopolitan than Americans. They travel a lot and their politics change over time. You know, I was young, I don't think I was really a conservative, but I was definitely an anti-communist, which made me align with the Reagan side of America for a while. Um, I joined the Army to really I mean, it's as silly as it sounds now, to fight communism, right? To serve my country, which just sounds so idealistic and naive. Um, and it was during the Army that I moved left politically. It's where I started listening to NPR, that bastion of communist and socialist rhetoric. Sorry. Um, reading The Nation, which, of course, you know, is pretty left. Um, and I was in from 85 to 89. I got out in 89. Uh, and then right after that operation, just cause otherwise called just cause by people in the military, that was the operation in Panama to grab Noriega, then Desert Shield, Desert Storm. And, um, I was a pretty active protester in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. I was recruited to come back into the military. At one point, I was told I would get orders because I was in the inactive reserves, and I felt like I had to make a choice. Either I had to serve because my team was going to be fighting, and they did. They actually helped clear Kuwait City with the first Marine Division. Um, or I had to protest. I couldn't sit it out. Right. Uh, so I was in one protest in San Francisco, about 300,000 people. Protest in Seattle. Um, I helped lead the occupation of the square at the Federal Building in Seattle. We were there for about four days. And so. And in these protests, there was a lot of sloganeering about wars for oil, and I consider that simplistic. I thought, this is a more complex picture. And it was right. Iraq had invaded a sovereign state in Kuwait. But reflecting back on Carter's Crisis of Confidence speech, again referred to by many people as the Malaise speech, and reflecting back again on the rejection of alternative energy development by Reagan and other Republican presidents, which could have been a way to achieve some sort of energy independence. And reflecting again on our foreign policy actions in the Middle East. And I think maybe in the end it really is about access to oil. Occam's razor baby, right?
>>Sarah Hart: Right. Occam's razor. The simplest answer, given all the available information, is usually the right one. And, you know, I don't I don't know that I really see a way around it, the oil, except the money. Um, which is really the oil. Oil looks green to some people. Um, since Carter, it's been sitting there just in the middle of it all. All the wars and all the war gaming, I think. There's a lot going on with Carter and for the record, I am Team Carter.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah Team Carter.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. Uh, despite it all, despite all the unforeseen consequences of his attempts to make the world more humble, more peaceful, and more just, despite all those unforeseen consequences, I still think his attempts were real. His intentions were good.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. And there's a way in which, you know, he tried to move foreign policy on the basis of human rights. And there's a way that he's portrayed as naive. But I don't know, it's maybe if more people had tried to align with him on that, it could have worked.
>>Sarah Hart: And it didn't work right. Following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter and his foreign policy team adopted a, quote, triple pronged strategy. This is why they called it, triple pronged. Here's the prongs.
>>Jeff Crane: It’s the trident
>>Sarah Hart: It's the trident of diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions against the Soviets, and covert aid to the Mujahideen. This Trident, or triple pronged, um, strategy was all took place under the name Operation Cyclone, which would continue through 1992. In a January 1980 speech, Carter referred to Soviet actions in Afghanistan as, quote, a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people. This is the classic us v. them, atheist communist versus God-fearing American, Cold War dynamic. And the Muslim Mujahideen were on the God-fearing side of things.
>>Jeff Crane: You know, a nice thing about this show is, you know, in researching, writing these scripts, we're all learning a lot of things, even though we're fairly educated. And I had been used to talking about the Reagan administration. I did not know Carter had done this right until we started working on this script. So, um, yeah, but all about language, about atheistic communists and God-fearing Americans. Um, this finds itself in the, its roots in the Manichean rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine, 1947 in the National Security Council document number 68, from 1950. And these are foundational documents of this policy of containment, which justifies and rationalizes proxy wars like this.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. And we, listeners, we will definitely, at some point, get around to doing a whole episode on NSC document 68 um, which really is that containment document. But if you're not already familiar with the term, we've used it a couple times here. Uh, if you're out there listening and Manichean is a new word for you, it is capitalized. It's after a, um, early Christian theologian who ended up being considered a heretic within the church. Um, think dualist, think good and evil. Hard core, clear lines. Well, we want to. We want to, uh, concentrate on is dualist. This is a really firm position of dualism. It is rooted within the Christian tradition, but, um, not considered. Orthodox.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. There's good and evil. The truth and the lie.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. The light in the dark. The stormtroopers in the Rebel Alliance and its
[Jeff hums imperial march]
>>Sarah Hart: And NSC 68, which that's the perfect, um, soundtrack for, is gonna keep rearing its head. So, we Americans, the story is that we're in Afghanistan to defend Afghans, to defend the Mujahideen, and we're defending them against the godless commies who are the bad guys.
>>Jeff Crane: And this is not our language. This is language that's lifted from these documents.
>>Sarah Hart: This is actually the language of the era in the official documents. Right. So so then two and a half weeks later, still in January 1980, President Carter goes on to give the state of the Union address, in which he proclaimed what would come to be known as the Carter Doctrine. And this doctrine has shaped geopolitical realities in ways that, I don't know, could we have even imagined? The Carter Doctrine: the free flow of oil from the Middle East is a matter of American national security.
>>Jeff Crane: Did that come from people’s “discontent” with his “malaise speech”?
>>Sarah Hart: I mean I think it did, sort of, you know. He had to say something new. The American people loved the Crisis of Confidence speech, at first, that’s also known as the malaise speech.
>>Jeff Crane: Are we going to get to the attention span of Americans here?
>>Sarah Hart: I mean are we going to get to our attention span, what are we talking about?
>>Jeff Crane: Sorry, good point. Wait, what did you say? Okay. I’ll shut up.
>>Sarah Hart: Carter gives a speech, and overnight, his approval rating shot up double digits. According to some of the polls. Like most of the polls. When people heard this speech, this Crisis of Confidence speech, they were inspired and it was super inspiring. But he asked Americans there to sacrifice things, to change their behaviors, to limit their energy consumption.
>>Jeff Crane: Wear a sweater.
>>Sarah Hart: Wear a sweater, turn down the thermostat, take carpools, you know, and it, it took a couple months for the response to really be clear. But it, it did end up being clear. We, we’re just really not so into that, it turns out. And since then, yeah, it's really hard not to see American war and American warfare in the region as all about the oil. It's about other things, for sure. Uh, and it is complicated, but it is always about the oil. So we're going to turn to one of our favorites here, Andrew Bacevich. We pick him up in future episodes. We hear from him a lot here. Um, but he wrote that quote, over time, other considerations intruded and complicated the war's conduct, but oil as a prerequisite for freedom was from day one an abiding consideration.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. And the way you understand that, of course, is looking at all the other parts of the world with brutalities and oppressive regimes in which we show no interest whatsoever.
>>Sarah Hart: Right
>>Jeff Crane: Right. It's crucial to remember the 1973-74 oil embargo, uh, when the cost of oil jumped between 300 and 400%. I actually remember that a little bit. Then the inflation oil prices in 78 and 79, when it jumped about 250%. This hit Americans hard, it hit the economy hard. We were so oil dependent back then, a lot more industry, for example. And so the goal was to move us away from that dependance. And Carter tried. We don't want to forget that the Carter administration made significant strides in developing alternative energy. Reagan rolled it back. Carter installed solar panels in the White House and Reagan had them removed. So maybe we need an episode on politics and foreign policy and the fossil fuel industry. We just don't have time for all that, do we?
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah, no, but the image of ripping solar panels off the roof of the White House is one that I think will stick with me.
[Musical interlude]
>>Sarah Hart: Welcome back to the SNAFUBAR listeners. Today we're looking at America and Afghanistan in the late 20th century. Remember that when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, America, together with several other nations, supported the Mujahideen warriors, who were fighting against the Soviets. America initiates Operation Cyclone in 1979, which is a covert CIA operation in support of the Mujahideen.
>>Jeff Crane: That's right. So with Operation Cyclone, President Carter’s support for the CIA really gave them a way to pull the Soviet Union into a quagmire. Our favorite word for wars we can't get out of. Quagmire, the word, was brought into contemporary usage with David Halberstam’s 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire, which was guess.
>>Sarah Hart: Yes,
>>Jeff Crane: Vietnam.
>>Sarah Hart: That's right. We love the words here, folks. Quick etymology. Quagmire means, literally, muddy bog.
>>Jeff Crane: I feel like we've talked about muddy
>>Sarah Hart: or boggy meadow.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah.
>>Sarah Hart: If you listen to our Washington episodes, you'll
>>Jeff Crane: We have a lot to say
>>Sarah Hart: We have a lot to say about Boggy Meadows. Just a little callback to that here. Um, they didn't use the word quagmire back then, in Washington's days, so far as we know, but it totally would have worked. This is the literal meaning of the word, boggy meadow.
>>Jeff Crane: So a muddy bog.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. Muddy bog for sure. It's gotten more metaphorical since then, especially since its use for Vietnam. So now we can use it to describe an unending war in the desert,
>>Sarah Hart: huh?
>>Jeff Crane: The goal here in Afghanistan was to avoid the Soviets in a fight whose impacts would echo and exceed the impacts that we experienced in Vietnam. Let them have a little bit of our mess. Right?
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah
>>Jeff Crane: CIA steadily increased it’s support of the Mujahideen, or, as Reagan termed them, the, quote unquote, freedom fighters. Reagan used this language in proclaiming March 21, 1982, as Afghanistan Day.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah, and it really was one day. Uh, so I did look into this. We, um, do we, do we still celebrate it? I thought. That was my question. No, it turns out that it's not March 21st every year. It was one day, Reagan's proclamation, Proclamation 4908 said that, quote, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan were defending principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability. He's talking about the Mujahideen. The day was, quote, to commemorate the valor of the Afghan people and to condemn the continuing Soviet invasion of their country. Afghanistan day, he goes on to say, will serve to recall not only these events, but also the principles involved when a people struggles for the freedom to determine it’s own future, the right to be free of foreign influence and the right to practice religion according to the dictates of conscience, end quote. Malicious fighting for freedom. You know, we just we love that trope.
>>Jeff Crane: And you can see the degree to which we just sort of jam that language in to apply to a situation that we don't fully comprehend. Right. It's a. It's powerful language. It's aspirational language. Of course, we believe in freedom for all peoples. But we know. Do we know that that's what the people of Afghanistan were seeking, right?
>>Sarah Hart: Right.
>>Jeff Crane: So, we do love a good militia in America. There's a long tradition of militia or irregular military forces, both historically and also culturally. We can think of Rogers Rangers in the French and Indian War, the Minutemen at the beginning of the American Revolution. The strong desire to primarily use militia in the Revolutionary War, and George Washington, at that time, General Washington and his efforts to push America away from this model toward a greater reliance on regular military. We can even get into the 19th century, the 1800s, and the model that was referred to as the, quote unquote, white Indian, white men, and what was historically referred to as the Frontier, a problematic phrase. Who learned to act and fight like native people. And in that, their effort to further the genocide of those native people. The last of the Mohicans, that novel, and more recently, the movie Wind River, are examples of depictions of quote unquote, white Indians, right? Definitely co-options of Native American culture. And then in the 20th century, we have a fondness in this country for irregular forces like the Green Beret, the Navy Seals. I mean, I feel like everyone today knows the phrase Seal Team Six. Different special forces. Almost a way of creating a militia within the regular military for the use of insurgencies and counter insurgencies.
>>Sarah Hart: And this popularity of militia movements in the late 20th century and into today, it tends to be on the conservative side of the political axis. Um, you know, we think back to the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 by Ammon Bundy and his supporters. I remember that one and all of it, all of them strapped up for combat, felt like making war on the federal government.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, yeah,
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah, it was a frightening image. See all these guys with their, up there with high caliber sniper rifles standing on the bridges and waiting
>>Jeff Crane: Flak vests.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. Waiting for federal troops to show up. And at the same time, you know, I, I can't help myself and I don't want to be dismissive, but it does sort of just look like kids playing war. And it makes me think of a lot of the things that we lean on in our own research. A lot of the books that we like, that we share, one of them, a great author who we've referred to before, we will again, Richard Slotkin. In his book Gunfighter Nation, talked about this obsession with, quote, frontier culture and, quote, frontier violence and the way it's deeply, culturally embedded in our nation and our self-understanding. And some will argue that our efforts in the Afghanistan countryside represent a cultural reproduction of that, quote, frontier experience, a new kind of like, quote, Wild West for Americans like George Bush and others. Um, he sort of manifested that image, I think.
>>Jeff Crane: Oh, he liked to play cowboy for sure.
>>Sarah Hart: Intentionally, in a lot of ways. Yeah. Um, and, and it wasn't something that Americans weren't attracted to. It played well with the electorate.
>>Jeff Crane: Oh, yeah.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. And so, and Tom Engelhardt in his book, The End of American Victory Culture, also a good read, talks about we, how we have a victory culture narrative. It says, you know, essentially that America is the scrappy, good guy who embraces freedom of religion, freedom of speech, always fighting overwhelming forces, we’re the underdog. Right. This has been our narrative deeply embedded in the Revolutionary War and in World War Two. But then when we lose and we're the bad guys, as in Vietnam, when we when we're not, uh, you know, the scrappy underdog, when we are the overwhelming Imperial force and we lose to the scrappy underdog who maybe wasn't freedom loving, um, the communist Vietcong, for instance, that that creates that cultural anxiety. And so we do end up with things like Star Wars and Westerns and, and we see it come out in our foreign policy. And I, I don't know, I this is a long tangent, maybe, but I think that our actions in Afghanistan gave us a way to restore that victory culture narrative. By supporting the Mujahideen, we were back to being the scrappy lovers of freedom, fighting against the overwhelming imperial forces.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, Reagan laid that all on thick in his celebration of the Afghan freedom fighters. But, you know, remember he liked to pose with a cowboy hat. He was always shown riding a horse. When George W Bush was running for president. You know, that whole his ranch, his ranch, his ranch, his ranch. He was always clearing brush at his ranch.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah.
>>Jeff Crane: He bought that ranch after they made the decision to run for president. And nobody knows that. They thought he came from.
>>Sarah Hart: He grew up there?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. Kid grew up in Kennebunkport, Maine, you know. Eating lobster tails. Yeah. So, like you said, Reagan laid it on pretty thick. He was happy to continue the covert CIA support that Carter had begun and increased it dramatically. The problem was that the CIA had already gotten into a lot of trouble via the 1976 Church Committee report, longer titled The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. We will call it the Church Committee report. Or the church report.
>>Sarah Hart: Church report, church committee, church report. Um, led by Idaho Senator Frank Church, this committee investigated the covert ops, and assassination attempts and all the other shenanigans by the CIA in previous decades. The report had a huge impact on American attitudes and understanding. Americans were deeply cynical following the revelations of the Watergate scandal. And this is just two, three years prior to the Church Committee investigations, when the Watergate scandal went down, and the various illegal activities of the Nixon administration, all of that made Americans skeptical. And the Church Committee turned up so much more beyond Nixon. But, you know, so he's like, iceberg
>>Jeff Crane: so much
>>Sarah Hart: So much. Yeah. Nixon, the church report, all of this had a really negative effect on Americans’ attitudes about government. Americans lost a lot of their idealism, their trust in government.
>>Jeff Crane: Um, so let's take an abbreviated field trip through this disturbing bit of history, i.e. covert ops and such, through America's deeply problematic. This being the mildest phrase we could come with, interventions in the sovereignty of other countries in order to protect its own economic and strategic interests, all justified through the Domino theory.
>>Sarah Hart: Domino theory. I feel like we need a drumroll every time we say that. Here it is again. The Domino theory, folks.
>>Jeff Crane: And so let me give you a couple examples here. Um, so the CIA, uh, organized a covert operation, uh, for a coup to overthrow Prime Minister Mosaddegh in Iran and to ensure American and British control of oil in the Persian Gulf. Then the CIA operated and organized the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, who was trying to engage in land reforms and increased rights and pay for workers. This was in order to keep United Fruit in business with their massive, uh, fruit plantations
>>Sarah Hart: Dollar diplomacy folks, Banana Republics. Everyone's heard of those
>>Jeff Crane: So successful operations that, in the long run, create decades of conflict and turmoil and really negative consequences.
>>Sarah Hart: Americans were having a hard time squaring the things that they wanted to say they believed, with the behaviors their government was taking through all these CIA misadventures. They were just everywhere. The Church Committee report was released in 1976. Right. And Carter's running for president at this point. The outcomes of this report did a lot to limit the CIA's range of operations. I mean, they had that effect. And the committee's findings led to really important reforms that were significant. Some of those. Here's some of them. President Ford issued an executive order banning political assassinations. That's Executive Order 11905, folks. Um, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created. Alright. We've heard about that. We hear about that all the time. That was created in 1976 as a permanent committee to provide, quote, vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States, to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Um, that's that's the that created the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, that's Senate Resolution 400. And that's I mean, you wouldn't think you would have to say that out loud, but you did. We created orders it has to be constitutional and legal, right?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. One can dream.
>>Sarah Hart: One can dream. In 1977, the House followed suit and established the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Um, there's a couple more. You know, this wasn't it. Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, otherwise known as FISA, in 1978, requiring intelligence agencies to submit requests for search warrants to a special federal court and obtain court permission before initiating surveillance. Surveillance on American citizens.
>>Jeff Crane: Oh, man.
>>Sarah Hart: Oh, the FISA court. You just want to you want to derail, we’re not going there.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, sorry.
>>Sarah Hart: This is, we pick that up a different day. The FISA court. Um, there's a lot there, folks. So. And also, okay, what's the, we'll give you one more. Congress established a fixed ten-year term for the director of the FBI.
>>Jeff Crane: So good, important regulatory steps that reflect the degree to which the American government was saying CIA had gone too far, for example, and other examples. Right. It's not just that, but.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah, and the CIA really was kind of running wild, behaving badly. Uh, and so limits were put on it. And those limits are mostly good. They're good on paper. This is an incomplete list but when these operations were revealed to Americans, there was a strong backlash against the CIA and legislation passed limiting their ability to operate. Like as soon as they found out all of the dirty business. As soon as a lot of this came to light, Americans were pretty shocked. That's how you got all those reforms. The Church Committee investigations found and demonstrated to the world the degree to which the United States, primarily via the CIA, regularly intervened in and subverted other countries sovereignty and governing, to serve U.S. interests.
>>Jeff Crane: Boy, yeah, nothing new under the sun in all that. And so this legislation really limits and changes the way the CIA can run its operations.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. Huge effects when the, you know, the CIA of the 40s to the 70s had been dominated, and the CIA was new in the 40s, like 47 was the initiation of the CIA. So, um,
>>Jeff Crane: National Security Act
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah, from the beginning of, from, the CIA, in its early days, um, had been dominated by like really elite types, graduates of Ivy League schools, prep schools, members of the upper class. These guys were buttoned up. The new breed of operations in the CIA during the Reagan era, though, were much more working class. These were committed to American righteousness, to the war against communism. These folks were not Ivy League, um, quite as thoroughly. They were more likely to have combat experience. They were wary of direct involvement in Afghanistan. They were limited by post Church Committee limitations. And entering Afghanistan at this time, they were trying to figure out a way to continue this covert work, to do the good work they thought they were doing, in the context of this regulatory limitations, uh, situation that had been put in place by the Church Committee. They need a justification if they're going to go into Afghanistan. It's the early 1980s and they want to support these Mujahideen freedom fighters but there are new limits on what the CIA can do in terms of interfering in other countries. They need a compelling reason. And what convinced them? That old standby, Domino theory.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. So, yeah, Domino theory is the governing theory here. It was named explicitly by Eisenhower in 1954, but it originated earlier in the 1947 Truman Doctrine, and in the 1950s, a National Security Council document number 68. And, of course, is being applied in places like Guatemala and Iran. So, Domino theory provides a nice, simple template, and it's laid across the world, overlaid on the globe. It ignores the complexity of internal dynamics and needs, uh, provides a cover for foreign policy actions that are driven largely by strategic economic interest. One nation turns communists, the theory goes, and all the other ones will too. And it ignores, you know, the tension points between nationalism and socialism and communism and deep colonialism and all that. It's just, you're communist or you're not, right? So, as Eisenhower puts it, quote, you have a row of dominoes set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly, unquote. This is the justification for covert operations in Iran and Guatemala, where the CIA organizes the overthrow of democratically elected governments.
>>Sarah Hart: Yes. And it will be the justification in Afghanistan.
[Musical Interlude]
>>Sarah Hart: Okay, listeners, welcome back to the SNAFUBAR, where we have just talked about the church report and all of the regulatory oversight that it led to, especially in terms of the CIA. America is just getting into Afghanistan. The Carter era is giving way to the Reagan era and the Domino theory, which held that if you allow one communist country to take hold, it will lead to more and more countries turning communist. The Domino theory was the justification for American entry. So, Jeff, where do the Mujahideen fit in?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah Um, well, because the CIA was no longer able to directly manage operations because of the Church Committee triggering legislation preventing it. They could only provide funding and hands off direction and financial support for the Mujahideen. They did this by buying guns and running them through Pakistan, with a strong involvement of Pakistani President Mohammad Zia, um and the ISI, which is the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which is kind of their version of the CIA.
>>Sarah Hart: What do the Mujahideen have to do with all of this? Where do they fit in?
>>Jeff Crane: Pakistan had emerged as a nation from a horrific and bloody border division between India and Pakistan, and was consistently under attack by Indian covert operations and lived in fear of persistent ethnic based independence movements, in particular the Baluchi independence movement still present today. Very much so. They also fear the danger presented by a Soviet Afghanistan state on their western border. Hence, Zia’s and the ISI’s desire to work with the CIA to support and direct the Mujahideen. So, this is, you know, political machinations, right? So, President Zia then sponsors madrassas, Islamic schools along the border with Afghanistan, in particular, in order to create a body of Islamic and Mujahideen adherents and soldiers that would both repel the Soviets but also suppress the Baluchi independence movements. This sponsorship of madrassas, particularly along the Afghanistan border, is one of the fundamental reasons for the rise of extremist Islam as manifested in the Taliban.
>>Sarah Hart: Taliban, which, um, which is plural for students in the Pashto language. Students from the madrassas fed the Mujahideen, who were aligned with Al-Qaeda and other later organizations like ISIS and ISIL. As part of this whole thing, there's a call to arms, a global call to jihad against the Soviets that attracts recruits from around the world to converge on Pakistan, to train in Pakistani supported training camps, and then flow into Afghanistan to join the resistance.
>>Jeff Crane: And we can say something here about the ingenuity of the Mujahideen. I remember reading about these guys when I was in the Army and just being so impressed with their tactics. So, we remember anti-tank weapons and Stinger missiles, right? When the Soviets started sending in the high 24 helicopters, for example, the Mujahideen used rocket propelled grenades to shoot them down. The problem is, they're meant to shoot horizontally, not vertically, like up into the air. Right? Because there's a big back blast. I remember using the light anti-tank weapon in the army, the LAW. And before you shoot, you turn around and say, back blast area clear, so you didn’t burn someone's face off, right. They had that same problem. So, one thing they do is they draw the Soviet helicopters. And these are armored gunships, right?
>>Sarah Hart: They're big. They’re mean.
>>Jeff Crane: They're big and mean with lots of firepower. Uh, they draw these Soviet helicopter gunships into canyons and fired down on them from multiple RPGs. And then, um, the other thing they would do is they would have machine-gun nests on the top of cliffs. And when these, uh, helicopters went into the canyons, they would shoot down on them because there was not armor on top of the helicopters. And I read somewhere else that they would launch these RPGs from the tops of trees. So, then you don’t have the problem of that back blast bouncing back off and burning you, right? So, with limited support and weaponry, and through real ingenuity, the Afghan fighters increase their capacity to inflict maximum damage on the Soviets. Right? In contradiction to what the CIA believed they'd be able to do. By 1984, the Mujahideen had killed roughly 17,000 Soviet soldiers and controlled approximately 62% of the countries, um, of the country. Sorry.
>>Sarah Hart: Wow. That's a lot. Uh, and listeners, this is Operation Cyclone. Supporting it still. We’re still in Operation Cyclone here. And that support would increase under the leadership of William Casey, the new director of the CIA under Reagan.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. So, in the 80s, the Mujahideen are making, uh, serious strides. But the people of Afghanistan are not feeling the wind, right? They're fleeing the country. Millions of civilians are fleeing to neighboring countries, creating a refugee crisis. For those who remain, food is scarce. Survival is a struggle. A quarter of all life born children in Afghanistan die before the age of five.
>>Sarah Hart: So, famine crises, refugee crises, infant mortality, child mortality crises,
>>Jeff Crane: Unstable border areas. Right. Sound familiar? So, yeah, the civilian population is really struggling. And it's in this context that Osama Bin Laden makes a name for himself. Bin Laden is part of the Saudi contingent that went to Afghanistan in the 80s. And we need to think about how is his rise to power and its increasingly anti-US attitude a consequence of our support of the Mujahideen? This is a really important question, if we want to understand the ramifications of our support for the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah, and this is an important question for sure. Asking it and thinking about the possible answers might make us reconsider what we call and consider success.
>>Jeff Crane: You mean like thinking like historians?
>>Sarah Hart: Thinking like historians. Like what counts as success? When you get one thing, you lose another. And we, we don't even comprehend the long-term consequences. Not all of them. We thought of it as a success at the time, but what it cost us and what it cost the people of Afghanistan, that's something that just keeps reverberating. Okay, so let's do some light basic background on Bin Laden. We're going to think about his rise in the context of the CIA supported Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting the USSR. Always a very serious and pious person dedicated to his faith. That's Osama Bin Laden. His family held the contract to maintain and do construction work at Mecca. Bin Laden fasted regularly as part of his faith. Following the Six-Day War in 1967, there was a Muslim awakening movement, rejecting socialist state programs and negotiations with Israel, such as the one done by Egypt's President Anwar Sadat. Well, while there is a whole bunch more to consider here, we're doing light background. We don't have time to do a deep dive on the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Wahhabism. You know, suffice it to say that there was already a growing radicalization of Islam in the region prior to U.S. support of the Mujahideen. So, the U.S. didn't start this. A Muslim awakening movement following 1967 Six-Day War, uh, the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Wahhabism, so much history here, so many actors. Way too much to cover today.
>>Jeff Crane: So, let's just say that Osama Bin Laden is coming from a place of deepening radicalism around the Middle East, and that his experience in Afghanistan is going to further radicalize him. His rise to prominence in power within this context is largely due to the environment America helped to create in Afghanistan as part of its Cold War policies. He migrates there and brings his wealth there. He gains fame for fighting the Soviets. He builds political clout from helping in the fight in Afghanistan. Maybe more importantly, he helps raise money for the Mujahideen and helps bring Arab recruits into the fight. He is near suicidal in some of the fighting against the Soviets, and he's very willing to be a martyr. While the fighting he participated in is not considered strategically important, his role and heroism, the fame he gained, helped raise his stature in the Mujahideen and the global jihadist movement. And he’s building a network. He's fighting, organizing, really building a movement, using everything he learned as part of the CIA, ISI backed Mujahideen fighters standing against the Soviets. Al-Qaeda’s founded in 1988, is a Sunni Muslim based terrorist network which is global and has multiple affiliates. And of course, we're going to know the name really well as they engage in multiple terrorist activities prior to and after. During. prior to, during and after 2001.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. And there are militant groups emerging and thriving throughout the region. In the summer of 1988, the Soviet Union began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. By 1989, the Soviets were completely out of the country. Mujahideen resistance was successful in thwarting a permanent Soviet presence. That's a big deal. Um, but the resistance was not successful in avoiding a power vacuum.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. One other thing to keep in mind as we get to what happens in that power vacuum, is this. It's important to note that initially, Osama Bin Laden was not articulating anti-government, anti-U.S. positions as part of his radicalization. This would develop over the 1980s, and in particular, his targeting of the United States would happen when U.S. troops were based in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Shield 1990 right, and then 1991 Desert Storm. This was in response to the Iraqi invasion occupation of Kuwait. And one huge problem for Osama Bin Laden and others like him were that there were not just American troops in the Muslim holy Land.
>>Sarah Hart: Which is bad enough. That's bad enough.
>>Jeff Crane: Right? Yeah. But for them, the big problem was, many of these American troops were women decked out in combat gear stationed in Saudi Arabia. This was too much for him and many other fundamentalist Muslims.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. America's continued and expanded military presence, including female troops, Osama Bin Laden and those following him are persistently opposed to this and militantly so. And they weren't the only ones. Through the 90s for a solid ten years, different groups vie for power. There is no centralized government or law. Warlords work to establish control over regional centers. Loose allegiances are made based on tribal affiliations largely and for the people of Afghanistan, rape, murder, theft, abuse are largely uncontrolled. The Taliban, a conservative Muslim student militia movement, emerges in this context. They're rooted in those Pakistan madrassas or schools. They're supported by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency or the ISI, and they make rapid strides towards centralized power in a very short time.
>>Jeff Crane: What were you saying earlier about cascading ramifications?
>>Sarah Hart: There’s some cascading ramifications happening.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. So, in this context of political chaos, the Taliban comes out on top. They weren't the only group, but they were, you know, maybe the most unified front. And also the Taliban were purists. They were ideologues. They rejected foreign and later, more specifically, Western influence. This is a huge part of the connective tissue that holds this group together. Their leaders are emirs, function as both Islamic clerics and military enforcers. These emirs claim to be religious conduits to a form of pure Islam, using this as a way to coerce populations to support them and their ascent to power. In reality, the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic laws are violently enforced and imposed upon the Afghan people. And it's just this one interpretation, right? It's. Yeah. Okay. They dramatically roll back women's rights. They beat women. They burned farmland in neighborhoods. They amputated, um, people's limbs and executed them in the town square. They used multiple violent means to assert their control over society.
>>Sarah Hart: Yeah. Um, I mean, there's a lot of evidence, but it is one interpretation. And because we're talking about a religious reality and the faith behind it, we do, uh, we do recognize that there's, there are other approaches to this. And, you know, and one of those can be seen, at the same time as they were doing all of those things, they were also working to eradicate opium cultivation. You know, they cut down on crime. They promised peace. They promised stability.
>>Jeff Crane: Let's just say clearly here, America's gamesmanship in Afghanistan, in an effort to undermine the USSR, creates a straight line to the rise of this form of radical fundamentalist Islam, and everything that rules out from that. Is that basically correct, Doctor Hart?
>>Sarah Hart: That's right. And the images that come to mind when Americans think of Afghanistan. The sort of semi or fully automatic weaponry, the mounted guns, the roadside bombs. This is an imagistic landscape that's born of the Soviet Afghan war era in the 70s and 80s, and the decade immediately following when America pumps arms into the region. This is how insurgent, radicalized Islamist groups took control, with all the guns and bombs and bombs and guns left to boil when the Cold War ended. Aided also by the policies of Pakistan to block the Soviets and suppress Baluchi rebellion.
>>Jeff Crane: And the impact on the people of Afghanistan is just not something that we pay enough attention to, which is always true for some reason. The power of nationalism in this country continues to stun me. Afghanistan is not a game board. No places. This is not some great game. It's decades of suffering. By the late 1990s, ten Afghans a day are dying from landmines left behind by the Cold War, a third of those children. And Operation Cyclone War just didn't have any provisions for preventing children from stepping on landmines. And let's keep in mind that it wasn't just American that bear responsibility here. The Soviets were diabolical in their own tactics and strategies. For example, the Soviets went so far as to develop mines shaped as colorful toys or quote, butterflies in a campaign specifically designed to target children. Children would see these pretty, uh, toys and pick them up and then be maimed or killed. Despite attempts at de-mining, there were still close to 10 to 15 million mines in Afghanistan in 1993. So pretty, seriously fubar. And what does it all come to? Today's story? It comes to this, when we look at the path of global jihad. When we look to the history of that path and its development, we find ourselves looking at ourselves. We find ourselves looking at the CIA. The reforms that came about as a result of the Church Committee report, those were good rules. Those were good regulatory bodies over this agency. What the CIA then did in Afghanistan was find new and different covert ways to support the enemy of our enemy, to support the Mujahideen against the Soviets and in supporting the Mujahideen, America set the stage for a global jihad and for terrorism that would come directly home to us.
>>Sarah Hart: Right. Like you said in the beginning, Jeff, we actually created the cauldron and resources for the first global jihad. This would lead to the rise of the first, first the Mujahideen, then the Taliban, then Al-Qaeda, then ISIS, then ISIL. And that will turn out to be an era marking pivot in American martial myth from fighting communism to fighting terrorism.
>>Jeff Crane: And. It's easy to say, and it's true to say that almost nobody knows any of this, right? So next time, we'll pick up on Osama Bin Laden leading up to 9/11 attacks on American soil. And the decades long American response. We hope to see you there.
>>Sarah Hart: You've been listening to SNAFUBAR, a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.
>>Jeff Crane: And me.
>>Abigail Smithson: Abigail Smithson, producer.
>> Liam Salcuni: Liam Salcuni, writer, researcher.
>> Roman Sotomayor: Roman Sotomayor, writer researcher.
>>Abigail Smithson: You can find more information about SNAFUBAR on khsu.org.
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.