As the United States remembers the victims of the deadly 9/11 terrorist attacks that shook the country 22 years ago, it is worth noting that Washington made a “deliberate choice” to "help create" the very extremists who masterminded them, Peter Kuznick, professor of history at the American University, told Sputnik.
“We knew exactly who these people were and what their organizations were like,” said the co-author of the "Untold history of the United States."
"The US did help train, recruit and arm and educate the Islamic extremists who would then blow back against the United States on 9/11," said Peter Kuznick.
The US believed that the 9/11 attacks were planned by Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who at the time was in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban**, which had been in power since 1996. It is a well-documented fact that Washington funded Maktab al-Khidamat, the forerunner to Al Qaeda, which was founded, among others, by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
“Early in 1979, the US had already been working with Islamic extremists... In fact, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to then-US President Jimmy Carter, on July 3, 1979, the 39th POTUS signed the first directive for secret aid to the rebels," said Peter Kuznick.
The insurgents that the US began funding were opposed to the Soviet Union-backed “modernist” government in Afghanistan, that was “supporting industrialization,” and “educating women,” the professor of history emphasized. The US-backed Islamic extremists were mostly working in Pakistan, with the government of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and would “go into the schools, US allies, and not only threaten and kill teachers, they would actually skin people alive,” he said, adding:
“That's who the US was supporting there. It was the people who were most opposed to educating women. It began on a smaller scale with Brzezinski. But the Ronald Reagan administration increased this.”
10 September 2021, 14:24 GMT
A trove of declassified White House documents made public in 2019 showed that in 1980, then-President Carter’s CIA lavished close to $100 million on weapons shipped to the rebels in question, with the administration of Ronald Reagan eventually upping the ante to $700 million annually. According to the same declassified docs, shared by US media outlets in 2019, Brzezinski received a warning from an National Security Council staffer, Thomas Thornton, who said that the Afghan extremists they were arming were, “a pretty ugly bunch. I shudder to think of the human rights problems we would face if they came to power.” The CIA also set its sights on Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who would go on to receive more than $1 billion in armaments from the US over the next decade.
“The main person the US was sending aid to was [Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar, according to James Sparks, who is the director of terrorism studies at West Point. He said Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was ‘known to patrol the bazaars of Kabul with vials of acid, which he would throw in the face of any woman who dared to walk outdoors without a full burqa covering her face,’" said Peter Kuznick.
"So the US was providing aid and providing arms and providing training in these camps in Pakistan, and then they [the extremists] would be deployed to Afghanistan. So this became a magnet for the jihadis around the world who wanted to fight against the secular government in Afghanistan. Among those who went to Pakistan under these circumstances was Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the future leaders of Al Qaeda," recalled the historian. Ayman al-Zawahiri was subsequently killed by a US drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2022.
The expert cited Cheryl Benard, wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, as saying that America had made a "deliberate choice", at the time, to “throw the worst crazies” against the secular government in Afghanistan, irrespective of the “collateral damage.”
“We knew exactly who these people were and what their organizations were like. We didn't care that we allowed them to just kill all the moderate leaders.”
In April 1992, rebel groups stormed the besieged capital of Kabul, overthrowing then-president Mohammad Najibullah, with civil war erupting and the Taliban succeeding in taking over. Osama bin Laden returned with Al Qaeda forces to Afghanistan in 1996, said Kuznick, adding:
“Now, these people had been trained and educated with books run by the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Center for Afghanistan Studies, funded by the US government, which taught the young Afghans to read, with pictures and books, learn to count and do math by the number of dead soldiers they killed, a number of Kalashnikov rifles that had been provided... And so these were the extremists the United States helped to create".
Following the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, controlled by the Taliban at that time, and led by Osama bin Laden, took responsibility. It called the brazen attacks a revenge for US support of Israel and meddling in the affairs of the Muslim countries. When Kabul refused to extradite bin Laden, the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan in November 2001, finding themselves then mired in a long insurgency against the Taliban. The US went on to capture or assassinate the key people deemed responsible for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, as was the case with the murder of Bin Laden on May 2, 2011.
The US war in Afghanistan lasted almost 20 years claimed the lives of over 65,000 Afghan security forces personnel, over 3,500 coalition troops, nearly 4,000 Western mercenaries, between 67,000 and 72,000 Taliban fighters, and over 38,000 civilians. After the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in August of 2021, it triggered the collapse of the US-backed government led by President Ashraf Ghani, and accelerated the United States' troop pullout. On August 31, 2021, US forces completed their withdrawal from the country, ending the 20-year-long military presence there.
Looking back at how the US was supporting the most extreme Islamist zealots in Afghanistan, and how it blew up in their face, one invariably draws parallels with the current Ukraine conflagration.
With ample proof of neo-Nazism permeating the Kiev regime, and Ukrainian military, one wonders if the US is “stepping onto the same rake,” by funneling billions-worth of military support to fuel the NATO-led proxy war against Russia there. Last month, documents from the Danish Embassy in Kiev seen by Sputnik revealed that NATO military instructors had trained Ukrainian soldiers at a base of the nationalist Azov battalion*** (banned in Russia), despite the latter's exclusion from US military funding due to its radicalism. In August 2022, the Russian Supreme Court designated Azov as a terrorist organization. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office said that Azov militants use prohibited means and methods of warfare and are complicit in the torture of civilians and the killing of children.
Washington has vowed to support the Ukraine government, which openly features neo-Nazi battalions, and has assassinated Russian journalists, to the last Ukrainian.
"US policy of lending arms and doing everything it can to prolong the fighting there [in Ukraine], is not a wise policy," and some of the repercussions might deliver blowback "similar to the US experience with the Afghan Mujahideen," Peter Kuznick concluded.
*Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.
**Taliban is a terrorist organization under UN sanctions.
***Azov Battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.