[Music] to understand how the war in Afghanistan turned into a major conflict with global implications we must go back in history the USSR and Afghanistan had always been the best of friends Russia was the first major power to recognize the state of Afghanistan in 199 just as Afghanistan would be the first country to recognize Soviet Russia in 1921 throughout the 20th century relations between the two countries were excellent and Soviet leaders were at Great pains to pamper Afghanistan this buffer state with its strategic location at the heart of Central Asia wedged between the USSR to the north Iran to the west and China and Pakistan to the east in the 1970s Afghanistan was a liberal Republic run by President da Khan who got on marvelously with the Soviets at the time Moscow was cabal's main economic partner the USSR was actively involved in the country's construction drive and hundreds of Soviet advisers were sent to Afghanistan the honeymoon between the two countries paradoxically came to an end the day the Communists seized power in carbal on the 27th of April 1978 [Applause] [Music] for [Music] [Music] [Applause] the people's Democratic party of Afghanistan led by n Muhammed taraki seized power by means of a bloody kudeta despite T's communist credentials the Soviets were Furious it took the Kremlin several months to accept this ill-timed revolution the Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party Leonid bnff finally did so to escape the disapproval of other socialist Powers around the world in December 1978 8 months after after seizing power president taraki finally arrived in Moscow to sign a friendship treaty between the two countries an economic and Military treaty which secured Soviet aid for the new communist regime in Afghanistan the transition from feudal to socialist society was to be brought about by agrarian reform this was the Afghan Communists first failure this excessively brutal reform which failed to take ancestral Traditions into account was not well received by land owners in the provinces the second stumbling block was educational reform the government in Kell decreed that school was compulsory for girls the religious authorities violently opposed this measure the mulas who opposed the Communists were cracked down on harshly attacking religious leaders can be very dangerous as the Soviets knew only too well especially as in February 1979 a revolution in neighboring Iran had just brought Ayatollah Ki to power right on Afghanistan's doorstep a veritable theocracy was being established an Islamic Republic run by the mulas at the Kremlin events in Iran were observed very closely this Revolution was a real slap in the face for the American enemy as it brought down the sh's regime which was supported by Washington the Soviets repeatedly tried to calm the anti-religious fervor of the Afghan Communists but to no avail fore on the 15th of March 1979 in herat a town in the west of the country an entire division of the regular Afghan Army rebelled it was under the command of Captain tan Ismael who would thereafter become famous under the name isma Khan as a warlord of the Afghan resistance [Music] fore fore [Music] [Music] the herat uprising in which 30,000 died was a serious concern for president taraki he phoned the USSR prime minister Alexi kigin the conversation conserved in the Kremlin secret archives is an edifying One n muhamed taraki requested Soviet military aid advocating a discreet intervention by the Red Army on Afghan soil kin was very reticent I don't want to annoy you but it's very difficult to inter discreetly the whole world would find out and within a couple of hours everyone would be screaming that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan but president taraki was not short of convincing arguments and ideas just sending tanks driven by Soviet soldiers from Central Asia tajiks USCS and turis there are lots of these people in Afghanistan if they put on Afghan army uniforms they won't be noticed president takaki's idea took root the KGB and the gru foreign military intelligence started to round up Soviet soldiers to form a battalion which would later become famous as the mbat the Muslim battalion [Music] the secret formation of the Muslim Battalion in May 1979 shows that the KGB was starting to get ready but ready for what at the time no one knew but they were sure of one thing the situation in the Afghan provinces was becoming extremely serious especially close to the Pakistan border where a large number of anti-communist combatants had taken Refuge it was at this point that this still undeclared war Drew in new protagonists the United States and its Ally Pakistan the he the isi general akar came to us for uh with a request for assistance this the middle of 79 and uh you know in order to conduct a covert action abroad in modern times you have to have the authorization of the president which is contained in what is called a presidential finding which he signs and he signed a finding that was Jimmy Carter in the summer of 79 to give non-lethal Aid to the mujahedin who were in contact with the isi and they were revolting against the uh Communist Party rule which had begun in uh 78 already by the summer of 1979 Afghanistan was in a state of total Civil War in kaha herat and pania all through the provinces resistance groups were in a state of Readiness but it was in kbal at the heart of communist power that the next Act of this tragedy would play out look at these two men president taraki and his prime minister havid zulah Amin two friends and comrades in arms two Marxist leaders who believed they could establish a socialist state in record time on the 11th of December 1979 taraki returned from a trip to Moscow he was welcomed by his prime minister Amin visibly very happy to see the president home again 3 days later the same Amin had taraki suffocated by Secret Service officers Amin seized power without giving Moscow any warning he was henceforth at the helm of a country plunged in Civil War the purges that followed were brutal Amin had all high-ranking officers loyal to taraki either imprisoned or executed it was at this point that the Soviets started to wonder who this hulah Amin really was I think it was probably part of the the drama that was playing out in Moscow they came up with a list of things that the Americans were doing one of them that Amin was their guy uh that the Americans were going to move short range missiles into into Afghanistan and any number of other Embellishments simply weren't true I don't think anybody in Washington or in the united in the United States government paid much attention to Afghanistan at that time but there is no evidence at all that Amin actually was connected with the CIA there's an evidence that Amin was trying to play both against each other because he felt his position was very precarious and his position was not stable was I mean an agent of the Americans or the Chinese or quite simply a loose cannon at KGB headquarters in Moscow everything was being considered agents in Kabal described a situation which was daily getting worse Yuri andropov head of the KGB passed on some very alarming memos to Leon BN one of the memoranda which was very very important for brv where andropov essentially creates this sense of urgency where we have to do something now before am mean's government turns to the [Music] Americans yet it was Leon bnv who is Secretary General of the Communist Party embodied Supreme power it was up to him to take the most important decisions of State especially as regards foreign [Applause] policy on the 12th of December a select poit Bureau meeting took place it was at this meeting that the decision was taken to eliminate the Afghan leader havid zulah Amin whom they judged to be out of control at the time the young Mikel gov was just a deputy member of the poit bureau buau and had no say in the decisions of the Supreme [Music] office and here is the old God Hof Minister of Defense andropov head of the KGB and gromo Minister of Foreign Affairs it was their decision and their's Al loone to commit the Red Army to this disastrous Enterprise for the previous 10 years the so-called Deton had been in place between the Soviet Union and the United States brev was very attached to it and most of the poit bureau understood that the slightest military intervention could shatter this fragile equilibrium yet these three men managed to Rally the other members to their cause which consisted of carrying out a kitar against Amin and sending in a contingent of the Red Army to proper the new Power regime this is the document confirming the decision to intervene in Afghanistan a quite unique piece of paper it's just one handwritten sheet something unheard of for a document of such importance furthermore the decision itself is worded very vaguely merely conferring on the three men the power to take the necessary measures for restoring order in Afghanistan yet even the word Afghanistan does not appear the country being designated simply by by the letter a drawn up on the 12th of December 1979 it was only countersigned on the 26th of that month by the other members of The polit Bureau with the exception of kosin who never approved of it the K aimed at eliminating president Amin could now go ahead for [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] thanks to Coca-Cola Amin survived the poisoning attempt so the KGB decided to launch a military assault on the presidential Palace operation storm was launched at 7:15 p.m. its aim to finish off the job and eliminate Amin [Music] for for [Music] in the night of the 27th to the 28th of December 100,000 Red Army soldiers poured into Afghanistan according to the official wording it was a limited contingent aimed at upholding the Communist Regime in Afghanistan it was this man babra kalmal who took the Reigns of power chosen by Moscow he patiently awaited his moment in a military base [Music] for how could the Kremlin Old Guard have believed that sending in troops would improve the chances of peace with the Afghan people the result would be the exact opposite with an eventual knock on effect around the world [Applause] [Music] it was at exactly this moment as foreign troops entered the country that the situation took on a new dimension what had been an Afghan Civil War was now declared a holy war affecting the entire Muslim world no one in the USSR was aware of what was going on Pravda published a simple dispatch announcing that in response to a request from the Afghan government Soviet troops had entered the country to repel foreign aggression the communic ended with the following words having been judged by his people Amin was sentenced to death and executed until that morning of the 28th of December no one in Moscow had even known the operation was underway [Music] for I'm go a few days after the troops entered the country on the 4th of January 1980 American President Jimmy Carter reacted publicly with a televised address this is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations Charter it is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people Jimmy carer felt I think a huge personal insult from br whom he uh thought he had gotten to know a little bit so when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 Carter made the unfortunate statement looking very naive saying I've learned more about the Soviet Union in the past 24 hours than I've learned in my entire lifetime Carter was rather relaxed about uh about the Soviet Union and believed naively um that he could go to the bargaining table and uh sort things out in a way that would if not end the Cold War at least uh ameliorate it and make it uh safer the reaction around the world was unanimous in January 1980 the USSR was condemned by the majority of the member countries of the UN including those Muslim nations not traditionally aligned as allies of the Soviets Carter froze the ratification of treaties the daytont between the two blocks was well and truly in pieces and very quickly uh Carter said okay we're going to not go to the Moscow Olympics next year we're going to cancel some Consular agreements and some grain deals and that was uh sort of the overt thing and then he told CIA okay it's time for you to get uh get to work over there and provide uh and this is the change lethal assistance to uh the Afghan resistance just 5 years earlier we we'd ended our own Vietnam nightmare this idea of comparing the nightmare of Vietnam to that of Afghanistan came from Jimmy Carter's defense advisor zigu binski known as a fierce anti-communist I remember the day the Soviet walked into Kabul and occupied Afghanistan I gave the president a memo which had the sentence in it we now have the opportunity to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam and we acted accordingly for the first time in the history of the entire cold war brinsky came in and completely muddled uh that policy because he was so anti-soviet with his own East European background so the origins of that were in January of uh 1980 then benski goes out and talks to Muhammad zoh haak the president of of Pakistan and he goes up to Mitchy Point uh looking into Afghanistan there from the kyber pass and he picked up that Kalashnikov and sort of pointed into the into Afghanistan and at that moment um the American commitment was was vividly demonstrated that land over there is yours you'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again because your cause is right and God is on your side he wanted to be uh known as one who's in charge of this operation and at the level of the uh laot politique he was in charge but in reality operationally it was the CIA that was running it we had no presence in in Afghanistan who had the presence and the access to the afghanis themselves it was a Pakistani when we approached the pakistanis we said uh we're with you on this thing and we'll pull together a team like-minded countries the Saudis the the Chinese the Egyptians the British the Americans uh and the pakistanis the first thing we did was we bought a huge number of uh infield 303 rifles uh from the British and within you know a couple of months of the invasion we had delivered these in into Pakistan and at that time it was the preferred weapon of a of an Afghan and so uh that began it and it began with a $10 million here and then Congress started getting involved and then another 20 million there and it grew over the years the cia's program for arming the Afghan Majin was given the code name operation Cyclone the Pakistani president z ulak a sworn enemy of the USSR agreed to let his secret Services act as intermediaries for the CIA but he insisted on absolute secrecy there were to be no American boots on the ground inside Afghanistan all the logistical assistance and training of the muin in Pakistan had to be provided by the pakistanis the CIA merely financing and overseeing the operation it was just over the Afghan Border in Pakistan itself where thousands of refugees flooded that the resistance was organized but better or worse they were the ones that uh basically chose the PO the group together to to comprise a seven party group and that meant people like gin HEC MAA as well as more moderate group but these were from the pakistanis point of view the ones that could be militarily effective and it's true the Afghan resistance was split into seven political groups represented by their commanders the most radical of whom were hekya saaf and Rabani all members of the Muslim Brotherhood and backed by Saudi Arabia they were also the main beneficiaries of American Aid since they were the pakistani's favorites the CIA had no choice but to comply with Islam abad's choices the uh other uh group of course masud was uh was favored by us and by the British who had a direct contact with him the saaf group which is I think the third third group was mainly financed by the Saudis we tried to monitor independently what was going to these various groups but it was but it was difficult you know the bulk of the fighting and the brunt of the fighting was born by the Afghan on themselves so in that sense it was an indigenous resistance assisted by outside bars in terms of technology in terms of resources in terms of weapons in terms of training but even without these inputs the resistance would have carried on this is a point that most people seem to miss they believe that it was the provision of assistance and the technology and the resources and the training and the money they did the job no the increasingly well-armed and trained mujahedin were starting to pose serious problems for the Red Army the Soviet soldiers were surprised by the effectiveness of the resistance in the [Music] provinces for for going in Moscow in early 1980 preparations were underway for the Olympic Games that summer a genuine source of pride and joy for the Soviet citizens they were already aware that the United States and 65 other countries were going to be boycotting the games but no one really knew why this was because officially there was no war in Afghanistan for the moment the secret was still well under wraps for [Music] [Music] but in Moscow one solitary voice dared to break the silence the voice belonged to Andre sakarov winner of the Nobel Prize for physics for Andre sako's open letter Drew an angry reaction from the Kremlin and he was sent into internal exile to the town of gorki a few years later having been elected a deputy of the people sakarov reaffirmed the reasons for his earlier action loud and clear for for [Music] [Music] [Music] Afghanistan [Music] [Music] but the traumas the Soviets were starting to undergo were as nothing compared to the nightmare being suffered by the Afghan people in the space of just a few months the red Army's intervention had turned into allout war with civilian victims already numbered in their tens of [Music] [Music] [Music] thousands the war was now spilling well beyond Afghanistan's borders as the call to Jihad against the infidels resounded throughout the world spurred on by this man Abdullah aam a Palestinian scholar and advocate of global Jihad recruitment centers for voluntary combatants opened in many countries from his base in Pakistan aam coordinated the network of jihadist Fighters drawn from all over the world some people came from outside to fight alongside the mujahid people came from Philippines the moros and people came from from from Middle East people came from India uh and people came from America itself the Muslims of America and Europe uh and the Far East they but there were few and far between [Music] [Music] and so the Afghan resistance became the breeding ground for worldwide Jihad it was in the Afghan mountains that a certain Osama Bin Laden from a wealthy Saudi family cut his battle teeth fighting infidels at the time Washington wasn't in the least bit concerned about Jihad on the contrary in 1983 Ronald Reagan decided to go public about the United States involvement in the war in Afghanistan from the Afghanistan Freedom Fighters young lady underwent torture for 4 months while being held by the Soviets there was a man here whose wife was killed in front of their two children former Justice of the Supreme Court in Afghanistan and they're here to try and tell the outside world a free world what's really going on in Afghanistan and then at that point Reagan broke the the secrecy and he just announced they were going to give the madine everything they wanted uh and so it no longer became a secret that the US was doing that the rules had changed and we weren't just fighting to bleed the Soviets we were or to give in their own Vietnam we decided the President Reagan after he took office and Bill Casey who was the director of CIA said let's go win this thing and so Casey called me to his office and uh said you're going to Afghanistan or to Pakistan and we're going to try to win the two blocks were back in Cold War mode fighting a war of influence and Communications the Americans were arming the rebels while the Soviets were ordering the Afghan leaders to organize anti-American protests in Kul you have to understand that brf invaded promptly died and andropov took over and promptly died and shov took over and promptly died and then gorbachov gorbachov wasn't even among the signatures on sending the limited contingent into Afghanistan in the 3 years between 1982 and 1985 the leadership at the Kremlin changed three times and the warmongering old guard of the polit bureau all but disappeared coming to power in 1985 Mikel Gorbachev was convinced that Soviet Society was in need of Rapid reform the period of peris tra was just getting underway and GF was prepared to take a whole series of Economic and political measures in this direction but the most urgent measure of them all concerned Afghanistan so garbacho found himself in a really really tough situation uh he was losing money he was losing people he was losing domestic support for the war because now with glass nness everybody heard about terrible things that were going on in Afghanistan [Music] the first effect of peris sta was the freeing up of public opinion in the USSR previously muzzled the Soviet people were now free to express themselves and were gradually becoming aware that this war was a catastrophe Gorbachev knew he had to bring it to an end he also knew to whom he had to speak about it first [Music] but the United States was very uncooperative because within the United States especially when Reagan came to power um people who wanted to bleed the Soviet Union in Afghanistan prevailed and so the Reagan Administration was not interested in the Soviet withdrawal what it wanted to achieve is the defeat decisive defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by the time I was called in to go take over the program in uh 1986 on very short notice um I was called to Bill Casey's office and he said I want you to go over there and I want you to win I'll give you a billion dollars is that enough and I was a billion dollars sounds like a lot of money in 1986 uh he says you can have the Stingers uh which were already approved and you know I want you to to uh we're going to win now the famous Stingers which According to some changed the course of the war were Ground to AAR missiles fired from ultra light shoulder-mounted launchers enabling a single man to bring down an enemy helicopter or fighter plane while the Soviets had clearly announc anounced their intention to withdraw the Americans delivered from 500 to 2,000 Stinger missiles to the muin the first Stingers were used at jalalabad in September 1986 and they down three Uh Russian helicopters and overall the Russians suffered great losses among in helicopters I think it was something like a thousand for American deliveries of stingers helped the Majin inflict a first Battlefield defeat on the Red [Applause] Army in 1986 Moscow decided to replace president caral by a who seemed better suited to the situation Muhammad najiah Gorbachev thought he could impose his own version of perista in Afghanistan and launched the idea of a national reconciliation of the Afghan [Music] [Music] people for for the Soviets were trying to bring the moderate opposition into the government the Soviets were negotiating with um Shah masud who was the Comm Commander legendary commander of the northern Northern Territories in Afghanistan northern part of Afghanistan the United States supported the most radical the most fundamentalist forces among the [Music] speee for at the UN in Geneva in 1988 negotiations were concluded despite the reticence of the Americans the regional Powers managed to hammer out a series of treaties regarding the resolution of the situation in Afghanistan it was Now official the Soviet troops would be leaving the country we were putting the Soviet Union and what we now know were its last days under a great deal of pressure and the IGN minous defeat in Afghanistan was certainly part of that uh it was psychologically significant it was politically significant on the ground the Soviet generals had long understood that the war was unwinable and had secretly begun negotiating with certain resistance Chiefs especially with commander masud who was Master of the entire north of the country the territory through which the withdrawing Soviet troops would have to pass for [Music] [Music] [Music] despite the Afghan Army show of strength president najoua was extremely worried he knew that once the Soviets had withdrawn he would have to face the resistance Chiefs who had now become fearsome political adversaries although the Soviet generals had managed to negotiate a ceasefire with Commander massud for the duration of the troops withdrawal they now received a contrary order to deliver a killer blow to him it was an order from the politicians [Music] Army com for [Music] [Music] [Music] for 48 hours from the 24th to the 26th of January 1989 the Red Army carried out operation typhoon shelling Commander mud's positions and killing over 600 of the muin yet masud patiently bore this Deluge of fire not reacting to this final attack by the Red [Music] Army fore [Music] [Music] this shameful Act was the final Act of this disastrous War an Enterprise which the whole world called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but which the Kremlin right up to the end maintained was a deployment of a limited contingent [Music] [Music] [Music] the figures from this war are staggering 1,200,000 dead on The Afghan side 15,000 on the Soviet and 6 million refugees es a country in total ruin and today The NeverEnding conflicts still continue in Afghanistan a land known since time immemorial as the graveyard of Empires it was the war that changed the world and was the starting point for yet another War the outcome of which no one yet knows [Music] [Music]