Recently Noam Chomsky tweeted out the video below of Hillary Clinton testifying before Congress in 2009 about how the U.S. – with the help of Pakistan – helped create, fund and train the jihadist fighters who became Al Qaeda in order to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
However, the U.S.’s role started even before Clinton acknowledges. President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, bragged in a 1998 interview with the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur that he had encouraged Carter to sign a secret order in 1979 to begin training and funding jihadists in Afghanistan. The purpose of the order was to lure the Soviet Union into invading – so it could have “its own Vietnam” quagmire. This was known as Operation Cyclone.
The Soviet-Afghan war is estimated to have killed around a million Afghans*.
Here are images from 1960’s era Afghanistan taken by an American college professor named Bill Podlich who was there at the time – before the horrors of the Taliban and other extremist jihadists were unleashed on behalf of Brzezinski’s wet dream of socking it to the Soviets:
See the full article with more images at My Modern Met.
The Atlantic also has a great photo-journal of this era here.
*Afghanistan: Demographic Consequences of War, 1978-1987” by NA Khalidi. Central Asian Survey, Volume 10, No. 3, pp. 101-126. 1991.