CIA activities in Afghanistan

The Afghanistan conflict began in 1978 and has coincided with several notable operations by the United States (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first operation, code-named Operation Cyclone, began in mid-1979, during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. It financed and eventually supplied weapons to the anti-communist mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan following an April 1978 coup by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and throughout the nearly ten-year military occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.). Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, supported an expansion of the Reagan Doctrine, which aided the mujahideen along with several other anti-Soviet resistance movements around the world.

Operation Cyclone primarily supported militant Islamist groups that were favored by the regime of President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan to the south and east, at the expense of other groups fighting the Soviet-aligned Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).^[1] Specifically and in deference to the priorities of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), CIA funding disproportionately benefited Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Afghan mujahideen commanders, most notably Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani; the CIA also developed a limited unilateral relationship with the comparatively moderate northern Afghanistan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud (a favorite of British intelligence) beginning in late 1984. Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive CIA operations ever undertaken;^[2] costing over $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and peaking at $630 million during the fiscal year ending in October 1987.^[1][3][4][5] The program began modestly with provisions of antique British Lee–Enfield rifles but by 1986 included U.S.-origin state of the art weaponry, such as thousands of FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Michael Pillsbury, Morton I. Abramowitz, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William J. Casey, and the CIA's Islamabad station chief Milton Bearden, among others, have been named as the architects of the ambitious escalation of CIA activities in Afghanistan from 1985 on, as the Reagan administration rejected compromise with reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in favor of a total mujahideen victory. Funding continued until January 1992 as the mujahideen battled the forces of Mohammad Najibullah's PDPA during the civil war in Afghanistan (1989–1992).^[6]

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, the CIA's objective was to topple the Najibullah government, which had been formed under Soviet occupation, even as the George H. W. Bush administration's State Department sometimes showed open skepticism towards the CIA's proposed military solution. By 1990, the ISI and Hekmatyar were working to violently eliminate their Afghan rivals, especially Massoud, in advance of the anticipated fall of the Afghan capital, Kabul. In spite of this internecine warfare, the ISI and CIA jointly formulated a plan to capture Jalalabad and Kabul during 1989–1990, marking a high point in cooperation between the two spy agencies. As part of the offensive, the CIA paid Massoud to close the Salang Pass, which Massoud failed to do. The Najibullah government finally collapsed in April 1992, several months after the December 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of U.S. aid to the mujahideen, leaving Afghanistan a failed state in the grip of a multifaceted civil war marked by horrific atrocities and the destruction of Kabul in mass-casualty rocket attacks. While some U.S. officials initially welcomed the emergence of the Taliban militia as it sought to restore its vision of Islamic order to the Pashtun heartland of Kandahar and then to the rest of Afghanistan, by the latter half of the 1990s the administration of President Bill Clinton became increasingly concerned about the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban, as the Taliban and allied group Al-Qaeda became a more direct threat to the U.S., its citizens, and its foreign dignitaries. In response to the September 11 attacks, CIA personnel coordinated closely with Massoud's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance militia during the 2001 United States invasion of Afghanistan. During the invasion, which was largely planned by the CIA, the administration of President George W. Bush rejected the advice of many CIA officers to send Army Rangers and Marines to Tora Bora, allowing Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders to escape to Pakistan. Throughout the nearly 20-year U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan, CIA-backed Afghan paramilitaries participated in numerous massacres and war crimes, most notably the Dasht-i-Leili massacre in 2001.