FULL CIRCLE
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“The problem in Afghanistan is that everybody there holds a piece of a mirror, and they all look at it and claim that they see the entire truth.” - Mohsen Makhmalbaf, President of Asian Film Academy
Afghanistan.
Before 1980, most Americans knew or cared little about this impoverished, land-locked Central Asian nation. After the Soviet Union invaded, though, Afghanistan became a flash point—one that threatened to ignite a Cold War into the flames of a World War. Throughout the 1980s, American foreign policy sought to counter the Soviet presence there. The Carter and Reagan Administrations secretly supported a Mujahedeen resistance movement that eventually led to Soviet defeat and its withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. The Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics imploded two years later. The dissolution of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War, beckoning a period of unprecedented world peace. Or at least many Americans believed so at the time—not understanding the unintended consequences and true legacy of our Central Asian policies.
“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?” asked Zbigniew Brzezinski who served as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. “Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Understandably proud of America’s Cold War triumph, Brzezinski rationalized and tolerated the emergence of Islamic extremists in post-Soviet Afghanistan, even in 1998. However, in retrospect, he significantly underestimated the Taliban’s impact on world history. We collectively washed our hands of Afghanistan after the fall of the USSR—and paid dearly for it.
While the Communist-Mujahedeen conflict in Afghanistan displaced millions of people and destabilized the region, Western leaders largely ignored the chaos in favor of their more pressing national concerns, like trade policy or common currency.
You can read the rest of the story in the book Full Circle.