Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan became, in Noam Chomsky’s account, the hinge between a Cold War proxy war and a much wider history of militant networks, retaliatory violence, and American power. The conflict drew foreign fighters into a campaign supported by the CIA and its partners; after the Soviet forces were driven out, some of those networks turned toward other targets, including the United States. Chomsky uses this history both to explain the background of later attacks and to challenge a response that, in his view, could reproduce the conditions for further violence.

The invasion and the “Afghan trap”

Chomsky traces the origins of the armed mobilization to 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, then national security adviser to President Carter, later claimed that secret support for mujahideen fighting the Afghan government began at his initiative in the middle of that year, before Soviet forces entered the country. Chomsky presents Brzezinski’s account with a qualification: it may have been self-aggrandizement. Brzezinski nevertheless described the aim as drawing the Soviet Union into what he called the “Afghan trap.” Six months later, Soviet forces entered Afghanistan to support the government, and the intervention expanded the conflict that the earlier covert policy had sought to influence.

The campaign was not simply a local Afghan resistance effort. The CIA worked with Pakistan and other partners, including Saudi Arabia and Great Britain, to recruit, train, and arm Islamist fighters for a “holy war” against the Russian occupiers. Chomsky describes the resulting force as a vast army of militants, perhaps one hundred thousand or more, recruited from highly committed Islamist circles across multiple countries. Many of those called “Afghans” were not from Afghanistan. The label thus obscured the international character of the force assembled for the war.

Chomsky’s account also places the recruitment effort within a longer pattern of intervention. He compares the sequence to the American role in South Vietnam: the United States backed a government and later attacked and invaded the country in the name of defending it. The comparison is presented as an analogy about the construction of political and military commitments, not as a claim that the two conflicts were identical. In the Afghan case, the decisive feature was that a foreign-backed army built to fight the Soviet Union did not disappear when that war ended.

Networks after the Soviet withdrawal

Osama bin Laden joined the forces during the 1980s and became involved in their financial networks, which Chomsky says may have persisted. The war ended with victory for the fighters and the expulsion of Soviet forces in 1989. But the end of the campaign against the Soviet occupation did not mean the end of the armed networks or of their activity. Chomsky traces later movements of these fighters to places including Chechnya and Bosnia, where they pursued causes of their own; he notes that foreign Islamist volunteers in Bosnia were welcomed and that many received citizenship in recognition of their military service.

He also describes activity in western China, the southern Philippines, North Africa, and elsewhere. In western China, he refers to Muslim Chinese fighters seeking liberation from Chinese rule. Some, according to accounts he cites, had been sent by China to Afghanistan as early as 1978 to join a guerrilla campaign against the government; later, after the Soviet invasion, they joined forces organized by the CIA. Chomsky reports this history cautiously, attributing the early account to some sources rather than presenting it as settled fact.

The fighters’ later enemies included governments in Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well as other Arab states. Chomsky’s account distinguishes these conflicts from a simple continuation of the Afghan war: the participants had their own political aims and, in some cases, turned against former sponsors or governments that had once been involved in their formation. He notes that the network associated with bin Laden sought to overthrow governments it regarded as un-Islamic in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

A campaign that turned against its sponsors

The relationship between the wartime mobilization and later violence is central to Chomsky’s argument. He says the September 11 attacks were not a direct consequence of U.S. policy, but were indirectly connected to a network whose roots lay in armies organized, trained, and armed by the CIA, Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, Saudi funding, and others. This is a claim about historical formation and indirect consequences, not that the invasion alone explains the attacks or that the network was simply controlled by its original sponsors.

The fighters’ targets shifted as military circumstances changed. After the Soviet war, the United States established a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden and his associates regarded that presence as comparable to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and turned their weapons against the Americans. Chomsky notes that this reversal had an earlier parallel in 1983, when U.S. forces were present in Lebanon. His account therefore follows a recurring pattern: foreign military presence becomes a focus for militant opposition, and a force once useful to a major power pursues an independent agenda.

The network’s history also included violence before the September 11 attacks. Chomsky refers to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat by elements supported by the same groups, and to the 1983 suicide bombing that helped prompt the American withdrawal from Lebanon, which he says may have been connected to those forces. In 1997, militants associated with the network killed sixty tourists in Egypt, damaging the country’s tourism industry. These episodes establish the breadth of the violence in Chomsky’s account, while his qualifications about particular connections mark where he does not claim certainty.

Retaliation, civilian harm, and the cycle of violence

For Chomsky, the history matters not only as an explanation of how a militant network formed, but also as a warning about what might follow a new military campaign. He argues that a massive assault on Muslim populations would answer the wishes of bin Laden and his associates by strengthening their cause and helping them recruit. European leaders and regional specialists, he says, understood this danger, and Chomsky describes the hesitation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in that light. The risk was not simply diplomatic resistance: an attack that killed many civilians could turn a military response into a source of further mobilization.

He sets that danger against an alternative: identify those responsible through credible evidence, pursue them through legal procedures, and address the fears and frustrations that can supply recruitment. Chomsky makes the contrast through other examples, including the response to the Oklahoma City bombing. Rather than treating an entire region as responsible, authorities searched for the perpetrator, tried and convicted him, and considered the grievances that could motivate similar crimes. For Chomsky, such distinctions are essential if the goal is to prevent repetition rather than intensify it.

The argument returns to the language used to describe state violence. Chomsky contends that calling a campaign a “war on terrorism” is propaganda if it does not actually target terrorism according to the government’s own definitions. In his view, applying those definitions consistently would expose the violence of powerful states and their clients as well. The Soviet invasion and the foreign-backed army organized to oppose it therefore belong to a larger criticism of selective naming: violence by adversaries is labeled terrorism, while comparable methods by powerful states are described in more acceptable terms.

The legacy in the post-September 11 order

Chomsky connects the Afghan war’s legacy to the expansion of American military reach after September 11. The United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time, which he associates with access to regional resources, the interests of multinational corporations, and the ability to project force. He places these bases within a network directed toward the Persian Gulf, whose energy resources he describes as strategically central. Before the war in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia was the most secure base in that system; the new positions, in his analysis, improved the capacity for intervention.

He interprets the Bush administration’s new phase of the “war on terrorism” as an opportunity to strengthen American military dominance and to warn other states about the consequences of resisting U.S. power. Chomsky connects that interpretation to the administration’s reported response to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who urged greater attention to Arab opinion about U.S. support for Israeli repression. An official reportedly replied that the United States was more forceful than it had been during Operation Desert Storm, while a former military official said that others would respect that firmness. Chomsky treats the exchange as evidence of a policy language centered on demonstration and deterrence, rather than only the pursuit of those responsible for the attacks.

He makes a related argument about the NATO bombing of Serbia: Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had described its purpose in terms of preserving NATO’s credibility. Chomsky suggests that the Afghanistan bombings may likewise have been calculated to demonstrate American capability, though he acknowledges that the relevant confidential documents are unavailable. The distinction matters: he presents this as a reasoned interpretation of strategic purpose, not as a documented record of secret decision-making.

The invasion’s significance in the book thus extends beyond the defeat of Soviet forces. It marks the creation of a multinational fighting network, the persistence of that network after the war, and its eventual opposition to former sponsors and other governments. Chomsky uses this chain of consequences to question whether military retaliation can contain political violence when it also risks reinforcing the grievances and recruitment on which armed movements depend.