Carter also faced a moment of reckoning in El Salvador, where a small group of wealthy landowners—the Forty Families—had ruled for over a century, using any means at their disposal to subdue the impoverished masses. Death-squad murders increased in the 1970s to quell growing popular resistance. Following the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the various insurgent groups had coalesced to form the Frente Faribundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). By late 1980, with the FMLN insurgents poised to triumph, Carter, pressured by Brzezinski, opted to restore military aid to the dictatorship.
A storm was also gathering in Afghanistan, a backward nation with a per capita annual income of only $70 in 1974. In 1976, the State Department reported that the United States “is not, nor should it become, committed to, or responsible for the ‘protection’ of Afghanistan in any respect.”59 But things changed when pro-Soviet rebels led by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin seized power in April 1978. Taraki, the new head of state, proclaimed, “The future for the people looks very bright.” New York Times reporter William Borders took issue with that assessment: “By the standards of almost any place else in the world, however, the future really does not look all that bright—not in a land where the life expectancy is 40 years, where infant mortality is 18 percent and no more than one person in ten can read.” Borders continued, “Afghanistan has very few highways and not one mile of railway, and most of its people live either as nomads or as impoverished farmers in brown mud villages behind high walls, a life scarcely different from what it was when Alexander the Great passed this way 2,000 years ago.”60
The Soviet Union, which had friendly relations with the previous government, actually opposed the coup, despite the prior government’s repressive behavior toward Afghan Communists. The new government’s reform policies—particularly educational programs for women, land reform, and plans for industrialization—and harshly repressive tactics animated the growing insurgency by Afghan mujahideen, Islamist holy warriors operating out of Pakistan. A civil war was soon raging.
The United States cast its lot with the mujahideen. Carter, uncomfortable with the religious zealotry and reactionary views of the insurgents, initially rejected Brzezinski’s plans for covert operations against the new government. Brzezinski instead worked with the CIA to train and secure outside funding for the rebels. In February, Islamic extremists in Kabul kidnapped U.S. Ambassador Adolph “Spike” Dubs, who was killed when Afghan police and Soviet advisors stormed the hotel in which he was being held. The United States subsequently deepened its involvement in the country.
Brzezinski saw more opportunity than danger in the growing Islamic fundamentalism. For several years, the United States had been working with Iranian and Pakistani intelligence to develop a right-wing Islamic fundamentalist movement within Pakistan that would challenge governments sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Brzezinski later acknowledged that the United States had been supporting the mujahideen even before the Soviet invasion: “It was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”61
Brzezinski understood the Soviets’ fear that the Afghan insurgency would spark an uprising by the 40 million Muslims in Soviet Central Asia. Afghan leaders had been pressing Moscow to send troops to quell the uprising and the Russians rebuffed their requests. Brezhnev instead urged them to ease repression of political opponents. Soviet leaders concluded correctly that the Americans were instigating the insurgency in cooperation with extremist elements in Iran and Pakistan. They figured that China might also be playing a role. But they still hesitated to intervene. Gromyko summed up their concerns: “We would be largely throwing away everything we achieved with such difficulty, particularly détente, the SALT-II negotiations would fly by the wayside, there would be no signing of an agreement (and however you look at it that is for us the greatest political priority), there would be no meeting of [Brezhnev] with Carter, …and our relations with Western countries, particularly the FRG, would be spoiled.”62
The Soviets opted to oust Amin, the driving force behind the repression, and replace him with Taraki. But the plan backfired, leaving Taraki dead and Amin more firmly entrenched in power. Not only did Amin then widen the repression, he also reached out to the United States for help. Dreading the thought of a pro-American regime on their southern border, replete with U.S. troops and Pershing II missiles, Soviet leaders decided to replace Amin with Babrak Karmal, despite knowing that the resulting instability might require them to send troops into the country. Military leaders opposed intervention, fearing that it would incite a unified Muslim response that would bog them down for years in a place they had no business being in. But Brezhnev foolishly insisted the war would be over in three to four weeks. His decision to send troops was made easier by the fact that détente with the West had already begun to unravel with growing U.S. opposition to ratifying SALT II and NATO’s decision to deploy new intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe. Still, as historian Melvyn Leffler reminded readers, “When they made their decision to intervene in Afghanistan, Soviet leaders saw threat, not opportunity.”63
Defying his wary military advisors, Brezhnev deployed over 100,000 Soviet troops on Christmas Day 1979. Up to the very eve of the invasion, the CIA kept assuring Carter that no such action was forthcoming. The world scoffed at the Soviet claim that it was defending against covert U.S. efforts to destabilize a government friendly to Moscow on the Soviet Union’s border. Brzezinski cheered the invasion, believing he had lured Moscow into its own Vietnam trap.
In full Cold War mode by that point, Carter called the invasion of Afghanistan “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War”—a statement so hyperbolic that New York Times columnist Russell Baker felt compelled to remind him of the Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the Suez crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war in Vietnam.64 In his January 23, 1980, State of the Union address, Carter declared:
The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil….