Reagan's Legacy in Afghanistan Debated

[Rebel 7]

Reagan's Legacy in Afghanistan Debated

Tue Jun 8, 2004 05:43 PM ET

By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent

WASHINGTON (*******) - Ronald Reagan's support for mujaheddin fighters helped oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in 1989, a defeat that ultimately contributed to the communist superpower's own collapse.

But should Reagan, who died last Saturday at 93, carry some of the blame for the rise of extremists headed by Osama bin Laden and the current instability in Afghanistan? Like so much about America's 40th president, that is a matter of debate.

Richard Clarke, former anti-terrorism adviser to President Bush, wrote in a new book that acquiescing to the involvement of an "army of Arabs," including bin Laden, in Afghanistan in the 1980s was one of four Reagan administration "mistakes" that affect the United States today.

Milton Beardon, who ran the CIA's covert aid program in Afghanistan during the Soviet period, thinks that argument is misleading. "The whole concept of the Arabs and the (Afghan) war has been overblown," he said.

If mistakes occurred, it was the price of forcing Moscow to withdraw from Afghanistan, said Beardon, adding: "There is always an unintended consequence of war."

Reagan was so committed to confronting the "evil empire" that he forged an aggressive policy of backing anti-communist insurgents in proxy wars worldwide.

According to Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," Afghanistan was Reagan's best opportunity to drain the Soviets because they were ill-equipped for such a major deployment.

STINGERS AND MORE

At first Reagan did not offer much financial aid to the Afghan resistance, but later he provided them with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and boosted funding from $35 million in 1982 to $600 million in 1987, Clarke wrote.

"The idea of trying to hit at what was perceived as the vulnerable underbelly of the Soviet Union had wide support among experts and in retrospect, it definitely contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union," said Kenneth Katzman of the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service.

Some say bin Laden financed and recruited fundamentalists to fight alongside Afghan tribal leaders, but Beardon said most of the money went for orphanages and homes for widows. Bin Laden was in one important battle in 1987, but his military role was also minor.

While Afghanistan did become a magnet for "Arab bad boys," Islamic extremists were already active before they arrived, Beardon said. Also, Reagan's administration did not give weapons to Arab "volunteers" but focused on Afghan factions, experts said.

Nevertheless, Clarke said, when Washington engaged Saudi Arabia and other Arab states in the anti-Soviet fight, "America sought (or acquiesced in) the importation into Afghanistan and Pakistan of an army of 'Arabs' without considering who they were or what would happen to them after the Soviets left."

Nobody predicted these tacit U.S. allies would later turn so threatening toward America. "I think it would have been very difficult to forsee," said Katzman.

Critics complain the United States should have given its funding to moderate Afghan tribal groups and accuse Washington of being beholden to Pakistan's intelligence service, which channeled U.S. aid to the most extreme Afghan factions.

More broadly, experts fault Reagan's successor, father of the current president, and President Bill Clinton, for "walking away" from Afghanistan and Pakistan after the Soviet departure, allowing extremists to find havens there.

[Vance]

Hmm. Interesting.

[2RHPZ]

Here are two articles on this topic. By the way, I just want to say that we can´t judge his steps now because at this time it was important to fight The Evil ... and he did that good, damn good!

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Reagan's Osama Connection
How he turned a jihadist into a terrorist kingpin.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, June 10, 2004

Earlier this week, I cited recently declassified documents to show that Ronald
Reagan did indeed play a major role in ending the Cold War. Now it's time to
note that a similar set of documents shows that Reagan also played a major role
in bringing on the terrorist war that followed?specifically, in abetting the
rise of Osama Bin Laden.

Once again, the story concerns the fascinating relationship between Reagan and
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev took the helm as the reform-minded general-secretary of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985. Within months, he had decided privately
to pull Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. One of his predecessors, Yuri
Andropov, had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and the move was proving a disaster.
Tens of thousands of Soviet troops had died; military morale was crumbling;
popular protest?unheard of, till then, in Communist Russia?was rising. Part of
the Soviet failure in Afghanistan was due to the fact that the Reagan
administration was feeding billions of dollars in arms to Afghanistan's Islamic
resistance. Reagan and, even more, his intensely ideological CIA director,
William Casey, saw the battle for Afghanistan as a titanic struggle in the war
between Eastern tyranny and Western freedom. (Jimmy Carter and his national
security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had started assisting the resistance, but
with not nearly the same largess or ambition.)

At a Politburo meeting of Nov. 13, 1986, Gorbachev laid his position on the
table: The war wasn't working; it had to be stopped:

People ask: "What are we doing there?" Will we be there endlessly? Or should we
end this war? ... The strategic objective is to finish the war in one, maximum
two years, and withdraw the troops. We have set a clear goal: Help speed up the
process, so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there.

In early December, Gorbachev summoned President Najibullah, the puppet leader of
Afghanistan, to give him the news: The Soviet troops would be leaving within 18
months; after that, he was on his own.

Two months later, on Feb. 23, 1987, Gorbachev assured the Politburo that the
troops wouldn't leave right away. He first had to foster a stable environment
for the reigning government and to maintain a credible image with India, the
Soviet Union's main ally in the region. The exit strategy, he said, would be a
negotiated deal with Washington: The Soviets pull out troops; the Americans stop
their arms shipments to the rebels.

However, within days, Gorbachev learned to his surprise that Reagan had no
interest in such a deal. In a conversation on Feb. 27 with Italy's foreign
minister, Giulio Andreotti, Gorbachev said, "We have information from very
reliable sources ? that the United States has set itself the goal of obstructing
a settlement by any means," in order "to present the Soviet Union in a bad
light." If this information is true, Gorbachev continued, the matter of a
withdrawal "takes on a different light."

Without U.S. cooperation, Gorbachev couldn't proceed with his plans to withdraw.
Instead, he allowed his military commanders to escalate the conflict. In April,
Soviet troops, supported by bombers and helicopters, attacked a new compound of
Islamic fighters along the mountain passes of Jaji, near the Pakistani border.
The leader of those fighters, many of them Arab volunteers, was Osama Bin Laden.

In his magisterial book, Ghost Wars (possibly the best diplomatic history
written in the past decade), Steve Coll recounts the fateful consequences:

The battle lasted for about a week. Bin Laden and 50 Arab volunteers faced 200
Russian troops. ? The Arab volunteers took casualties but held out under intense
fire for several days. More than a dozen of bin Laden's comrades were killed,
and bin Laden himself apparently suffered a foot wound. ? Chronicled daily at
the time by several Arab journalists ? the battle of Jaji marked the birth of
Osama bin Laden's public reputation as a warrior among Arab jihadists. ? After
Jaji he began a media campaign designed to publicize the brave fight waged by
Arab volunteers who stood their ground against a superpower. In interviews and
speeches ? bin Laden sought to recruit new fighters to his cause and to
chronicle his own role as a military leader. He also began to expound on
expansive new goals for the jihad.

Had Gorbachev thought that Reagan was willing to strike a deal, the battle of
Jaji would not have taken place?and the legend of Bin Laden might never have
taken off.

Reagan can't be blamed for ignoring the threat of Osama Bin Laden. Not for
another few years would any analyst see Bin Laden as a significant player in
global terrorism; not till the mid-1990s would his organization, al-Qaida,
emerge as a significant force.

However, Reagan?and those around him?can be blamed for ignoring the rise of
Islamic militancy in Afghanistan and for failing to see Gorbachev's offer to
withdraw as an opportunity to clamp the danger. Certainly, the danger was, or
should have been, clear. Only a few years had passed since the Ayatollah
Khomeini rose to power in Iran?the shah toppled, the U.S. Embassy employees held
hostage, the country turned over to the mullahs, the region suddenly
destabilized. Reagan beat Jimmy Carter so decisively in the 1980 election in
part because of the hostage crisis.

Gorbachev had accepted that Afghanistan would become an Islamic country. But he
assumed that Reagan, of all people, would have an interest in keeping it from
becoming militantly, hostilely, Islamist.

In September 1987, after the previous spring's escalation failed to produce
results, Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze met with Secretary of State
George Shultz to tell him that Gorbachev planned to pull out of Afghanistan
soon. He asked Shultz for help in containing the spread of "Islamic
fundamentalism." Shultz had nothing to say. Most Reagan officials doubted
Gorbachev would really withdraw, and they interpreted the warnings about Muslim
radicals as a cover story for the Soviet Union's military failure.

By this time, Reagan and Gorbachev had gone some distance toward ending the Cold
War. The dramatic moment would come the following spring, during the summit in
Moscow, when Reagan declared that the U.S.S.R. was no longer an "evil empire."
At the same time, though, the U.S. national-security bureaucracy?and, in many
ways, Reagan himself?continued to view the world through Cold War glasses.

After the last Soviet troops departed, Afghanistan fell off the American radar
screen. Over the next few years, Shevardnadze's worst nightmares came true. The
Taliban rose to power and in 1996 gave refuge to the?by then?much-hunted Bin
Laden.

Ten years earlier, had Reagan taken Gorbachev's deal, Afghanistan probably still
wouldn't have emerged as the "friendly, neutral country" of Gorby's dreams. Yet
it might have been a neutral enough country to preclude a Taliban takeover. And
if the Russian-Afghan war had ended earlier?if Reagan had embraced Gorbachev on
the withdrawal, as he did that same autumn on the massive cutback of nuclear
weapons?Osama Bin Laden today might not even be a footnote in history.

Related in Slate

Reagan may have abetted the rise of Osama Bin Laden, but his policies did bring
about the end of the Cold War, says Fred Kaplan. A compilation of Slate stories
on Reagan's death, life, and legacy can be found here.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He was the Boston Globe's
military reporter from 1982-91 and its Moscow bureau chief from 1992-95.

[2RHPZ]

Analysis: Ronald Reagan's Secret Anti-Soviet War

Posted June 10, 2004

By Richard Sale

President Reagan used several deft tactical maneuvers to exploit cracks in the
Soviet armor.
As president of the United States, Ronald Reagan initiated a sweeping and
unprecedented program of covert actions and economic-warfare initiatives that
acted to greatly weaken the Soviet economy, its support for "wars of
liberation," and its hold on its power in Eastern Europe, former top Reagan
administration officials said.

The elements of these programs were contained in top-secret national-security
directives signed by Reagan in 1982 and 1983, these sources told United Press
International.

"Any kind of covert-action program had to be expressed in a presidential
finding," after consultations with attorneys, a former Reagan White House
official explained. He said one of the most important NSC findings was NSDD 32,
which authorized covert U.S. support of the Polish free union, Solidarity, and
other anti-Soviet institutions in Poland to weaken and neutralize Soviet
influence in that country.

Another finding, NSDD-66, authorized the United States to wage economic and
resource war on a "strategic triad" of resources deemed critical to the survival
of the Soviet economy, including technology, trade and credits, according to
former senior Reagan administration officials. This especially targeted Soviet
imports of advanced Western technology and also Russia's oil industry, upon
whose earnings Moscow depended for the bulk of its hard currency, these sources
said.

Other measures included covert support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan who
were resisting Soviet forces that had occupied the country in 1979. Covert
measures included strikes by jihadis on Soviet soil, these former senior sources
said.

Another aspect of the Reagan program was the dramatic U.S. defense buildup,
which unnerved the Soviets by its pace and degree, according to Yvgenny Novikov,
who, in 1982, was the second political officer of the Soviet Embassy in
Washington and who defected to the United States in 1990.

Some of these secret programs were first revealed in a little-known 1994 book,
Victory, by Peter Schweizer, a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University. Schweizer confirmed to UPI that the more secret, hard-line
aspects of Reagan's anti-Soviet policies were never discussed with NSC staff
members such as John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane or Richard Pipes, but only
with CIA Director William Casey and Bill Clark, a longtime Reagan friend.

"It was a small, tight-lipped group," a former White House staffer explained.

In the case of Poland, a current administration official who was a White House
official in 1982 said that Casey held key meetings with Israeli intelligence
officials. These officials included Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Hoffi, who, in return for
increased U.S. financial assistance, allowed U.S. intelligence operatives to use
a Mossad "ratline" that ran from Albania to Poland, then east straight into the
heart of the Soviet Union.

The "ratline" was used to smuggle information or dissident Jews out of the
Soviet Union, several former officials said. The secret 1956 speech by then-Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev denouncing Josef Stalin was said to have been smuggled
out to the West via the "ratline," sources said.

According to a State Department official who, in the early 1980s, was assigned
to the Vatican, Casey didn't hesitate to use meetings with Vatican officials to
obtain detailed intelligence about anti-Soviet groups in Poland.

But according to some strategically placed sources, Reagan's use of covert
action was not confined to the Soviets and its Eastern satellites, but also was
used against Western allies who were seen as being "soft" on Moscow.

One example was the tension between the hard-line White House group and then-chancellor
of West Germany, Helmut Schmidt. According to these sources and reported here
for the first time, in 1981 the White House mounted an operation to remove
Schmidt, head of the Social Democratic Party, and replace him with Helmut Kohl,
leader of the Christian Democratic Union, who was seen to be more anti-Soviet
and conservative.

The dispute centered on Schmidt's support for a proposed Soviet-German natural-gas
deal, called by the Russians Urengoi 6, that would run from Siberia to the
Soviet-Czech border. According to former White House officials close to the
deal, senior Reagan officials such as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger
thought such an agreement would result "in a Russian stranglehold over German
energy as well as keeping the Soviets swimming in cash" to the tune of $30
billion a year.

In 1981, Schmidt, although pro-American, was seen as drifting toward a
neutralist stance. One former White House official close to the deal said that
hard-line Reagan Cabinet members "sought to destabilize Schmidt" to "regain
control over German popular forces." The issue split the Cabinet, he said, but
the operation to remove Schmidt was successful, and Kohl became West German
chancellor. With the removal of Schmidt, the gas deal was killed, he said.

Another deft tactical coup in covert activity, also reported here for the first
time, occurred when Weinberger visited the Swedish Defense Ministry from Oct.
15-19, 1981, the first visit ever by a U.S. Defense secretary to that country.

Top Swedish defense officials showed Weinberger ministry charts and action
reports that gave details of earlier penetration by Soviet and Warsaw Pact
submarines into restricted Swedish military areas in violation of international
law, according to U.S. intelligence sources close to the case at the time.

Then, on Oct. 27, a Soviet Whiskey-class sub suddenly and very publicly ran
aground on the rocks inside a Swedish military base, using a route that had been
used previously by another Soviet intruder, these sources said.

Swedish military planners had been increasingly nervous about a Soviet military
buildup in the region on the nearby Kola Peninsula. And politically the Swedes
were deeply embroiled in the pros and cons of deploying new Pershing II and
ground-based cruise missiles in Western Europe, which had been approved by NATO
in a 1979 decision, these sources said. Some Swedes thought this a needless
provocation and a threat to East-West détente.

According to former U.S. Air Force intelligence sources, it was decided at the
Swedish-Weinberger meetings to trap and detain a Soviet submarine, and the
office of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was kept closely apprised of the
plan.

These sources also said U.S. technology was able to manipulate the sub's
instruments, causing them to exhibit "false readings" until it was misled and
went aground. "We had that sort of technology," one of the former intelligence
officials said.

The result was a huge shock to Sweden, a toughening of its political attitudes,
and a huge propaganda victory for the Reagan administration.

Although the activities of the Reagan administration in Afghanistan have been
well-covered by such recent books as Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile and
Stephen Coll's Ghost Wars, perhaps the greatest strategic coup of the Reagan
covert program of economic warfare involved Saudi Arabia.

Former senior Reagan advisers who spoke with UPI solely on condition of
anonymity told how the Reagan group ingeniously had targeted Soviet hard-currency
earnings. If Moscow were broke it couldn't develop or buy weapons and couldn't
even pay the troops of its overextended military machine, much less finance wars
of liberation around the world. It could talk tough, but "it would no longer be
tough," as one former Reagan official put it.

The first blow was struck in May 1983, when American pressure forced the
International Energy Agency to put a limit on European exports of Soviet natural
gas, blocking huge sums of money from reaching Moscow. But natural-gas earnings
were only a Kremlin sideshow: Russia's top engine of economic wealth was its oil
industry, which generated half of its hard-currency earnings, these sources
said.

By early 1983, the Treasury Department, under the direction of Casey and
Weinberger, had completed a voluminous study of U.S. and Soviet energy costs.
The study had discovered that the best price required by the United States for a
barrel of crude oil was only $20. This was far below the $34 per barrel being
charged in 1983. If oil prices came down, it would save the United States almost
$72 million a year, or almost one percent of the gross national product. What
would a fall in the oil price do to the Russians?

Very ugly things, it seemed. The study concluded that while a cut in oil prices
would boost U.S. economic welfare, the same cut would have a "devastating effect
on the Soviet economy," in the words of one former Reagan adviser. In fact,
Reagan National Security Adviser Bill Clark told Schweizer that "Ronald Reagan
was fully aware that energy exports represented the centerpiece of Moscow's
hard-currency earnings." The energy-export industry was working at full
capacity. A drop in price, and the Russians were badly lamed.

Soon U.S. officials were huddling in Geneva with the Saudi oil adviser, Sheikh
Ahmed Zaki Yamani. Following the meeting, the United States announced it was
cutting its oil imports from 220,000 barrels per day to 145,000 barrels. In late
February, the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, met with senior U.S. officials,
including Casey and Weinberger, according to former Reagan officials who were
involved.

Abruptly, the Saudis boosted production of oil, resulting in lower world prices.
By August 1985, Saudi production jumped from 2 billion barrels a day to 9
billion. Since Saudi Arabia was the swing producer in OPEC, which used its
production levels to control the market price of crude, the effect was
instantaneous. In Russia, the effect was calamitous, former Reagan officials
said.

How did the price cuts affect Saudi incomes? Did they lose money on the deal?
Hardly. According to former senior CIA officials, CIA currency-exchange
specialists bounced billions of dollars of Saudi currency reserves from one
currency to another: from the Belgian franc to the British pound and back. This
earned the Saudis "billion of dollars" in the words of one former official.

"Reagan's doctrine was simple -- no quarter for the Soviet Union, no
concessions. Instead, stop and counter it any way you could -- whether it was
support for free unions or groups resisting its encroachments," said a former
White House staffer.

Richard Sale is an intelligence correspondent for UPI, a sister news
organization of Insight.

[Flagg]

My perception of the articles is as follows:

US foreign policy under Reagan was to:

make the Afghanistan debacle as costly for the Soviets as possible in both manpower and co$t, indirectly and as covertly as possible.

curtail hard currency generating activities by the Soviets by way of impeding the sale of Soviet natural gas to Western Europe and "influencing" the price of oil downward via Saudi Arabia.

utilise allied(Vatican/Catholic Church and Israeli) resources to foment internal dissent

Sounds like a low-cost, low-risk, and potentially high gain policy to me. (And a successful one given the opportunity of retrospect.)

I would have to agree that US policy, post Soviet Afghanistan a la 1989 will ALWAYS be remembered as a massive and inexcusable foreign policy failure....my opinion is that had Reagan been in officer after the Soviet withdrawal...the results would have likely been the same.

But it looks to me that Reagan's "teflon" moniker is well deserved.....he came away smelling like a rose......with the exception of Iran/Contra.

The massive outpouring of support displayed at his services goes to show how powerful PERCEPTIONS are as they often BECOME the NEW REALITY.

[Flagg]

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