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ix IntroductIon and acknoWLedgMents the War In Afghanistan that took place between 1979 and 1989 was a pivotal event in modern history. The defeat there of the Soviet 40th Red Army proved to be the final battle of the cold war, a struggle between the United States and its allies on one hand and Russia and its allies on the other that lasted from 1945 to 1990. For those four decades, the cold war dominated global politics. It was a conflict between democracy and communism that shaped the history of millions of people across the globe, and the modern U.S. national security state—including institutions like the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency—was fashioned to fight it. The Soviet army left Afghanistan in February 1989; the Berlin Wall fell in November of the same year; East and West Germany were reunited a year later; and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991. The near-constant threat of global nuclear war between the two superpowers that had dominated world politics for four decades vanished almost overnight. Victory for the U.S. side in the cold war seemed complete. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was followed so quickly by the collapse of the Soviet state that one former U.S. ambassador observed that the “defeat led to the rapid collapse of a five-hundred-year-old system [and] the last great European empire came to an end.”1 The Afghan war also marked the beginning of a new era, the era of global jihad. The Afghan war was not the first in which Muslims defeated a Western power (the Algerian war for independence from France preceded it), but it was an Islamic triumph over a superpower. What is now known as the global jihad movement began as an unintended (by the 00-2595-4 fm.indd 9 4/30/14 2:14 PM x IntroductIon and acknoWLedgMents United States) consequence of the Afghan war. This new threat—global jihad and especially al Qaeda—has seen another restructuring of the U.S. national security state. Once again new institutions have been created to ensure national security, including the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center. Armed drones and global surveillance systems have become instruments of U.S. policy. At the core of the Afghan war in the 1980s—what might be called the first part of the conflict, because it did not end with the defeat of the Soviets in 1989—was an intelligence war between the United States and its allies and the Soviets and their ally, the Afghan communist party. The Central Intelligence Agency was given the mission—first by President Jimmy Carter and then by his successor, President Ronald Reagan—of turning Afghanistan into a “Russian Vietnam.” In 1989, when the Soviets crossed the border to go home after the most successful covert intelligence operation in U.S. history, the CIA’s chief in Islamabad famously cabled headquarters this simple message: “WE WON.” Both presidents had a clear definition of “victory.” Carter wanted Afghanistan to become a Soviet quagmire, a drain on its resources that would discourage further aggression in South Asia and isolate the Soviet Union diplomatically. Reagan initially had the same definition, but he upped the ante in his second term when the goal became defeating the Soviet army and driving it out of Afghanistan for good. All of those goals were achieved by early 1989. The defeat in Afghanistan helped precipitate the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, although, of course, its collapse had many causes besides the defeat. Nonetheless, it can never be known whether the USSR would have survived if its army had not lost the Afghan war. Those issues lie beyond the scope of this work; they are for other experts to debate. It is very clear that many Russians remain angry at the results of the war. In his 2005 state-of-the-nation address, Russian president Vladimir Putin called the demise of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Putin served as a KGB intelligence officer in East Germany from 1985 to 1990, while the war in Afghanistan was going on, and he undoubtedly followed the progress of the clandestine war closely. The U.S. secret war in Afghanistan was initiated by Jimmy Carter and accelerated by Ronald Reagan. It was done legally, under congressional 00-2595-4 fm.indd 10 4/30/14 2...

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