Afghanistan: During the Cold War

One consequence of the Cold War was that it brought a degree of power balance in Europe – what Sir Winston Churchill called the ‘balance of terror’ – which closed the continent as the major theatre of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. This produced a period known, in John Lewis Gaddis’s words, as ‘the long peace’ in the North. However, this long peace was paralleled by a ‘long war’ in the South. The

long war started with the Korean conflict and perhaps ended with the first Gulf War of 1991 over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Since the Korean War, the Middle East has been an armed conflict-ridden area of the world. After World War II, the Middle East was rapidly transformed into a crucial zone of major power rivalry. The process did not begin with a direct show of force by the Soviets, leaving their subsequent invasion of Afghanistan aside for the moment. It rather commenced with the US strategy of putting a ring of containment around the Soviet Union. One of the major objectives of the policy of containment was to foil any attempt by the USSR to gain a strategic foothold in the Middle East, to secure access to the oil riches of the region and of course from the mid-1950s to prevent the Soviets from causing any serious threat by proxy to the state of Israel as the strategic partner of the United States. The United States adopted a two-pronged strategic approach to achieving

its goal of containment. One was to penetrate a number of key Muslim states; another was to use brute force whenever necessary. As part of the first prong, the United States set out to forge a close alliance with Saudi Arabia. The groundwork for this alliance was laid down in the 1945 meeting between King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, based on the US promise to provide protection for the theocratic rule of the Ibn Saudi family against Abdulaziz’s ruling cousins in Iraq and Jordan, and the Saudi promise to ensure an uninterrupted flow of oil to the West. In a similar vein, the United States also penetrated Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan. It is important to note that in the case of each intervention, the Unites States also germinated the seeds for a blowback As part of the second prong, the United

States intervened in Iran in 1953. In perhaps the most successful covert operation of the Cold War, the CIA toppled the elected reformist government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and reinstalled the pro-Western Shah’s regime to rule Iran from that point onwards at the behest of the United States. This confirmed Iran’s position as an anti-communist state. The US intervention was resented by a great majority of the Iranian people and opposed by many regional states. The blowback came a quarter of a century later in the form of the 1978-79 Revolution, as most of the Iranian people could not regard the Shah’s regime as legitimate and could not support the continued US-Iranian alliance. This was followed by the US intervention in Lebanon in 1958 in support of

the country’s Christian President Camille Chamoun, who wanted an extension of his term of office. In doing so, the US placed itself in opposition to the Nasserite radical Arab rationalism, which Washington saw as a smoke screen for international Communism. In addition, the United States not only backed Israel in the 1967 war, but also intervened in Lebanon again in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of the country. The objective was to bail Israel out of a conflict that it had started but in which it had become bogged down. Although the American intervention was short lived, it contributed substantially to the germination and growth of the Lebanese Hezbollah (Party of God) as an Iranian backed, anti-Israel and anti-US Shi’ite force. Hezbollah grew to become a major challenge to Israel and the United States in the region. The result of all this was a rise in anti-Americanism among the Arabs and Muslims in the region. Beyond this, the United States played a critical role in the Iran-Iraq war of

1980-88, which proved to be the longest, bloodiest and most costly war ever fought in the modern history of the Middle East. The purpose was to promote Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship as an Arab bulwark against Khomeini’s Islamic Iran. The drawback of this was that Saddam Hussein grew so confident that after the war with Iran he could threaten Israel and invade Kuwait. Further, the United States allied itself with radical Islamism in Pakistan and Afghanistan to back a jihad against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The overriding goal was to defeat Soviet Communism, but at the cost of contributing to the eventual generation of radical Islamist forces which have now grown to challenge the United States in an unprecedented fashion. The US has now found it necessary to shift this strategy to fight radical

Islamism in order to eliminate it or marginalize it in world politics within the strategy of the so-called ‘war on terror’. The Soviet Union has gone, but the US’s ‘long war’ of the Cold War era continues in the Middle East and West Asia. In Afghanistan, domestic and foreign policy outlooks were influenced by

the onset of the Cold War in ways that eventually created the conditions for the rise of Communism and radical Islamism in its politics. The US-Soviet Cold War rivalry laid the groundwork for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979, and this may not have materialized had it not been for the US policy of containment of the USSR and the Soviet responses to this.

By the same token, the Muslim extremism that has increasingly come to affect the Muslim world’s relations with the US in recent years may not have emerged without the dynamics of the Cold War, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Preoccupied by the desire to draw the USSR into a long and costly war in

Afghanistan, the US could not see that its support for the Mujahideen in opposition to Soviet forces in Afghanistan could some day prove counter-productive to its global security objectives. Its abandonment of Afghanistan following the Soviet defeat exacerbated the social and political conditions whereby the Taliban could seize power in Kabul, an event which would prove fateful when the Taliban-supported Al Qaeda organization became an extreme Islamist threat to America towards the end of the twentieth century. There is thus an important link between Afghanistan’s role as a theatre of conflict in the Cold War, and the current US posture towards Muslim extremism, which helps to illuminate the long term effects of the Cold War period.