Guerre soviéto-afghane

Guerre soviéto-afghane is the 1979–1989 war in Afghanistan as interpreted by Noam Chomsky: a conflict in which the United States and its partners recruited, trained, and armed a large force of militant Islamist fighters to oppose Soviet intervention, and whose networks and consequences outlasted the war itself. Chomsky presents it as both a Cold War military project and a formative episode in the later history of transnational militant groups, while distinguishing that historical connection from a claim that later attacks followed directly from U.S. policy.

Origins and the “Afghan trap”

Chomsky traces the organization of the forces opposing the Afghan government to 1979. Citing Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, he recounts Brzezinski’s claim that covert support for the mujahideen began before Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. Brzezinski later described the strategy as an “Afghan trap”: an effort to draw the Russians into a conflict. Chomsky notes that Brzezinski took pride in the fact that Soviet forces entered six months after that initial support, though he cautions that the account may also have involved self-aggrandizement.

The effort expanded into a vast force of mercenaries, perhaps one hundred thousand or more, recruited from militant circles across many countries. The recruits were overwhelmingly not native to Afghanistan. Though commonly called “Afghans,” many were foreigners, a distinction Chomsky stresses when tracing the movement of people and networks across the war’s end. The account describes the coalition as organized and supported by the CIA and associates, with Pakistan’s intelligence services playing a central role and assistance also coming from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Britain, and others.

Recruitment, training, and the anti-Soviet war

In Chomsky’s account, the United States and Pakistan, with Saudi, British, and other assistance, recruited, armed, and trained some of the most extreme Islamist fundamentalists they could find. The purpose was to inflict the greatest possible damage on the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The effort thus joined a specific military objective to the creation of an extensive armed network whose participants and resources would not necessarily remain confined to that objective.

Osama bin Laden joined these forces during the 1980s and became involved in their financial networks, which Chomsky says probably continued to exist. The campaign was presented as a holy war against the Russian occupiers; Chomsky also notes that terrorist acts were committed on Russian territory. In 1989, the forces won their war in Afghanistan and the Soviet invaders were driven out. The military victory ended one phase of the conflict, but it did not dissolve the formations or settle where their members would turn next.

Networks beyond Afghanistan

Chomsky connects the war’s aftermath to further activity by people he calls the “Afghans,” while emphasizing that many, including bin Laden, were not Afghan. After the war, some turned their attention to places including Chechnya and Bosnia, where, he says, they received at least tacit U.S. support and were welcomed by local governments. In Bosnia, many Islamic volunteers obtained citizenship in recognition of their military service. The movement of fighters into these later settings illustrates how the anti-Soviet mobilization could leave behind networks with their own subsequent trajectories.

The account also places the war’s legacy alongside earlier and contemporaneous violence involving forces connected with the same militant milieu. Chomsky says that elements relying on these groups assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981; he also identifies a 1983 suicide bombing as possibly linked to the same forces and as a decisive factor in the U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon. These examples widen the frame beyond Afghanistan: the network’s history, in his telling, was not reducible to its campaign against Soviet troops.

From wartime allies to adversaries

A central reversal in Chomsky’s account follows the establishment of a permanent U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia. In 1989, after the anti-Soviet victory, bin Laden and his associates described that presence as comparable to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and turned their weapons against the United States. Chomsky notes that this was not the first instance of such a reversal: U.S. forces in Lebanon had already become a target in 1983.

The same passage complicates any simple division between allies and enemies. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which Chomsky identifies as principal enemies of bin Laden’s network, were also countries whose governments the network sought to overthrow, along with other governments in the Middle East and North Africa that it considered un-Islamic. In the 1990s, the groups carried out attacks in several regions. Chomsky cites the 1997 killing of sixty tourists in Egypt, which dealt a severe blow to the local tourism industry, and describes activity extending across North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, western China, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

Chomsky’s causal argument is qualified rather than absolute. He says the September 11 attacks were not a direct consequence of U.S. policy, but argues that they were indirectly connected to a network whose roots lay in forces organized, trained, and armed by the CIA and its partners. He also links recruitment to a broader pool of anger, despair, and frustration that included both rich and poor people and both secular and radical Islamist constituencies. The distinction matters to his account: the history of the Soviet–Afghan war helps explain the development of networks, but does not, by itself, explain all later violence or its participants’ motives.

Strategic legacy and historical contrast

Chomsky uses the war’s scale to distinguish the Soviet campaign from the U.S. offensive he discusses in 2001. Soviet forces, he says, confronted an organized army of one hundred thousand or more, equipped with powerful weapons and supported by the CIA and its associates. By contrast, he describes the Taliban forces facing the United States as an impoverished army in a country devastated by twenty years of violence, for which he assigns substantial responsibility to the United States and its partners. He therefore warns against treating the two interventions as straightforwardly comparable, and suggests that Taliban troops, apart from a small hardened core, might collapse quickly.

The conflict also enters Chomsky’s wider account of U.S. strategic reach. He argues that the 2001 war in Afghanistan enabled the United States to establish major military bases in Central Asia for the first time. He connects those bases to access to regional resources and to a broader military network around the Gulf: before the war, Diego Garcia had been the most secure base in that system, while Central Asian facilities would make intervention easier if deemed necessary. These are Chomsky’s interpretation of the strategic consequences, not simply a description of the earlier anti-Soviet war.

He further compares the rationale offered for the Afghanistan bombings with the earlier NATO bombing of Serbia. In both cases, he argues, the central purpose was to demonstrate U.S. power and preserve credibility: in Serbia, the stated concern was NATO’s credibility, understood in practice as that of the United States and its principal arms client. Against that later strategic frame, the Soviet–Afghan war appears as an episode whose immediate Cold War objective ended in 1989, but whose recruited forces, regional afterlives, and place in the geography of military power remained consequential in Chomsky’s account.