Afghanistan under Soviet occupation

Afghanistan under Soviet occupation stands in this account at the center of a long, consequential chain: a covert campaign to recruit and arm militant Islamist forces for war against the Soviet Union helped create networks that later pursued their own aims, including opposition to the United States. The episode is not presented as an isolated Afghan conflict. It is linked to the origins of transnational militant networks, the changing language used to classify political violence, and the expansion of American military reach after September 11.

The covert campaign and its stated purpose

In the 1980s, the United States joined Pakistan and other partners—including Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom—in recruiting, training, and arming some of the most extreme Islamist militants they could find. The purpose described in the account was to wage a holy war against Russian forces in Afghanistan and inflict the greatest possible damage on the Soviet side. The recruits were commonly called “Afghans,” although many, including Osama bin Laden, came from elsewhere.

The account places this operation within a longer sequence. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, claimed that covert support for the mujahideen had begun in 1979, before Soviet forces entered Afghanistan later that year. He said the support was intended to draw the Russians into what he called the “Afghan trap,” and expressed satisfaction that they had fallen into it. Chomsky notes that Brzezinski may have been boasting, but treats the claim as significant evidence about how the intervention was conceived.

The resulting force was described as a vast mercenary army, perhaps one hundred thousand or more, recruited from militant circles across different countries. The account distinguishes this international formation from Afghans defending their own country: the fighters were brought together for strategic purposes, and many were not Afghan. In Chomsky’s analysis, the United States and its partners were not simply helping a local resistance movement; they were assembling a transnational military network to serve state interests.

Networks after the Soviet war

Osama bin Laden joined the forces during the 1980s and became involved in financial networks that Chomsky says probably continued to exist. The war ended with the Soviet forces driven out, and in 1989 the militants were victorious. But the formation’s activities, as described in the interview, were never confined to the Afghan battlefield. Chomsky associates elements relying on the same groups with the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who had played a role in their establishment, and with a 1983 suicide attack that helped prompt American forces to leave Lebanon.

The later rupture with former sponsors is described through a repeated reversal: the guns were turned in the other direction. After the United States established a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden and his associates treated it as comparable to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Chomsky also points to an earlier parallel in Lebanon, where American military presence had already been followed by an attack in 1983. The networks’ stated enemies included Saudi Arabia and Egypt, whose governments they regarded as non-Islamic, along with other governments in the Middle East and North Africa.

Chomsky places the 1997 killing of sixty tourists in Egypt among the network’s later activities, noting the severe damage it did to the local tourism industry. He describes related activity across North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, western China, Southeast Asia, and the United States. His argument is that these groups were a consequence of the late-1980s wars and, if Brzezinski’s account is accepted, of the earlier decision to create the “Afghan trap.” He also emphasizes that recruitment drew on a broad reservoir of despair, anger, and frustration, among both rich and poor people and among both secular and radical Islamist constituencies.

A difficult chain of responsibility

In discussing September 11, Chomsky distinguishes direct causation from indirect consequence. He says the attacks were not a direct consequence of American policy, but argues that their perpetrators apparently came from a terrorist network whose roots lay in mercenary forces organized, trained, and armed by the CIA and partner services, with support from Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, and Saudi funding. He presents this background as obscure in important respects, while maintaining that the relationship between earlier policy and later networks was consequential.

The account also distinguishes assistance to Afghans resisting Soviet aggression—a goal Chomsky says would have been legitimate—from the strategic motives he attributes to the recruitment campaign. In his view, the effort pursued ordinary state interests, and its consequences for Afghans became disastrous after the mujahideen took control of the country. Afghanistan therefore appears both as the site of resistance to Soviet intervention and as the setting for an externally organized project whose aftermath extended beyond the war.

Chomsky does not claim that every link in this history was fully documented in public. He notes that the background remained murky and that Brzezinski’s version could have been self-aggrandizing. At the same time, he treats the scale and cross-border character of the recruitment effort, bin Laden’s participation, and the later activities of associated networks as evidence against the portrayal of the United States as merely an innocent observer of the forces it had helped mobilize.

Naming violence and assigning responsibility

Afghanistan also anchors Chomsky’s challenge to the political use of the word terrorism. He accepts the official U.S. definition of terrorism as the calculated use or threat of violence to pursue political, religious, or ideological aims, including through intimidation, coercion, or the creation of fear. By that definition, he says, the September 11 attacks were an appalling terrorist crime. His criticism is that the term is often applied selectively to violence by enemies, while coercive actions by powerful states receive other labels.

He connects this asymmetry to the official U.S. doctrine of low-intensity warfare, whose usual definitions he says closely resemble the official definition of terrorism: coercive methods directed at civilian populations for political or other purposes. In his argument, terrorism is therefore not exclusively “the weapon of the weak”; it can also be a component of state policy. Calling a campaign a “war on terrorism,” he contends, becomes propaganda if it does not actually target terrorism—and if applying the term consistently would expose the violence of powerful states and their clients.

This framing matters to his account of Afghanistan. The anti-Soviet campaign was described as a holy war against an occupying power, but its organization also served the strategic purposes of outside governments. Chomsky’s broader point is not that the violence of non-state networks and state violence are identical in every respect; it is that the actors’ power and political alignment should not determine whether a common definition of coercive violence is applied.

The post-September 11 strategic aftermath

Chomsky argues that the response to September 11 accelerated trends already under way. The Bush administration, he says, used the attacks to strengthen military dominance and pursue global preeminence. His analysis connects the war in Afghanistan to the establishment of major U.S. military bases in Central Asia, which he describes as a first for the United States. He relates those bases to the region’s substantial resources, the contemporary “Great Game,” and the strategic encirclement of energy reserves in the Persian Gulf.

Before the war in Afghanistan, Chomsky identifies Diego Garcia as the safest U.S. base in the system directed toward the Gulf, a network extending from the Pacific to the Azores. The new Central Asian bases, in his account, improved the capacity for intervention if American leaders judged it appropriate. These are presented as Chomsky’s interpretation of strategic consequences, not as an officially stated purpose of the bombing campaign.

He further reads the bombings as a warning about American capabilities and the consequences of defying U.S. rules. To illustrate the doctrine of dominance, he recounts a meeting in April between the Bush administration and Saudi Prince Abdullah, who urged the United States to consider Arab reactions to its strong support for Israeli repression. According to Chomsky’s account, American officials answered that they did not care what he or other Arabs thought. He compares the message to the rationale given for the NATO bombing of Serbia: the need to establish the alliance’s credibility, which he interprets as chiefly the credibility of the United States and its principal arms client.

The argument thus returns to the war’s central reversal. A force assembled to weaken the Soviet position in Afghanistan outlasted that purpose, spread into other conflicts, and eventually regarded American military presence as a target. After September 11, the United States expanded its own military position in and around the region in the name of counterterrorism. For Chomsky, the history shows how a policy designed for immediate strategic advantage can create networks and political consequences that its sponsors cannot simply control—and how the language of counterterrorism can obscure the state interests carried forward in the aftermath.