Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski is presented through his public account of covert policy in 1979: as national security adviser to President Carter, he said that he had helped initiate support for Afghan mujahideen in an effort to draw the Soviet Union into what he called the “Afghan trap.” Noam Chomsky uses that claim, while noting it might have been boastfulness, to distinguish aiding resistance to an invasion from provoking an invasion and organizing a militant force for one’s own purposes. In Chomsky’s account, the policy’s consequences reach beyond the Soviet-Afghan war to the formation of armed networks whose members later turned against other former patrons and targets.

The 1979 Afghan policy

Chomsky dates the beginning of the organization of these forces to 1979, citing Brzezinski’s account of covert assistance to mujahideen fighting the Afghan government around the middle of that year. Brzezinski said the support was intended to draw the Soviets into the “Afghan trap”; Soviet forces entered Afghanistan about six months later to support the government. Chomsky emphasizes the order of events because it changes the moral and political description of the policy: assisting a resistance movement after an invasion, he argues, is not the same as deliberately helping bring about an invasion.

Chomsky also marks the limits of what can be established from Brzezinski’s statement. He reports the former adviser’s pride in the Soviet decision and its consequences, but allows that the claim about having set the policy in motion may have been a boast. Brzezinski’s account therefore functions both as a pointed admission, in Chomsky’s reading, and as a claim whose self-presentation warrants caution.

Building and dispersing a force

Chomsky describes the United States and its allies as assembling a vast mercenary army, possibly numbering one hundred thousand or more, from highly militant recruits. Many were radical Islamists from outside Afghanistan, though they came to be called “Afghans.” He identifies the CIA, Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence services, and Saudi funding among the forces and resources involved in the broader organization of the networks. Brzezinski’s account supplies an early policy point in this history; the resulting movement, as Chomsky tells it, was international rather than simply Afghan.

Osama bin Laden joined the forces during the 1980s and became involved in financial networks that Chomsky says probably continued to exist. The armed campaign against Soviet occupiers ended in victory in 1989, but it was not the only activity associated with these groups. Chomsky links elements drawing on the same networks to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and notes that a 1983 suicide attack may have involved related forces and helped drive the United States out of Lebanon. These examples widen the frame from Brzezinski’s Afghan policy to the later reach of the armed networks it helped set in motion.

Reversal of allegiance and political argument

Chomsky’s central contrast is the reversal of the weapons’ 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 and turned against the United States. Chomsky says a similar reversal had already occurred in Lebanon in 1983. The militants’ declared enemies, in his account, included Saudi Arabia and Egypt, whose governments they regarded as non-Islamic, as well as other Middle Eastern and North African governments and their supporters.

In a separate interview, Chomsky uses Brzezinski’s “Afghan trap” claim to challenge the language of noble ends and convenient alliances. Supporting resistance to a Russian invasion, he argues, cannot be equated with inducing an invasion and organizing a militant army to serve one’s own designs. The distinction gives Brzezinski’s recollection a role beyond personal attribution: it becomes a test case in Chomsky’s broader argument that policies presented as strategic victories can create forces whose violence later escapes the purposes for which they were assembled.