About this lecture series
Lectures of Opportunity (LOOs) offer U.S. Naval War College (NWC) students, faculty, and staff an opportunity to learn more about national and international socio-political subjects that may be of relevance to the NWC community.
Synopsis
There is current value in looking backward at the origins of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The purpose is not a “lessons of history” checklist, but rather to show in detail how the tentacles of the recent past entangle the U.S. and Afghanistan today, whether we are aware of them or not. The centerpiece is an incredible memo, now declassified, that Zbigniew Brzezinski sent to Jimmy Carter on December 26, 1979, one day after the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan. In it, Brzezinski proposed to deliver the Soviets their own Vietnam through four actions related to increasing covert action support for the Mujahedin: 1) to channel CIA support through Pakistan, 2) to waive nuclear nonproliferation sanctions against Pakistan, 3) to “consort with Islamic states,” primarily Saudi Arabia, in supporting the Afghan resistance, and 4) to commit the U.S. to open-ended warfare with no political aim beyond “bleeding” the Soviet Union. The memo is a rare historical example in which it is possible to trace the origins of major consequences to a single document. Although remarked on in general, no one, including Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, has drawn specific lines from concrete decisions taken during the Carter – not Reagan – administration to such consequences as 9/11 and Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. The point is not to argue that U.S. leaders should have been clairvoyant. (Brzezinski claimed, even after 9/11, that he would have done it all over again because Afghanistan contributed to the Soviet collapse.) The larger thrust is the historical continuity that links the Cold War to the ongoing U.S. quagmire in Afghanistan and, by implication, the strategic ambivalence that has afflicted three administrations – Bush, Obama, and now Trump.