The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

than $3 billion over the course of the civil war, were carried across the bor- der into Afghanistan on mule back. Included were several thousand shoul- der-fired Stinger missiles that turned the tide by taking away air superiority from the Soviets. Now, of course, we are trying to buy them back. Be Careful What You Wish For When Mikhail Gorbachev as- sumed power in 1985, there was growing skepticism in the Politburo that the war in Afghanistan was winnable. It appeared to be turning into a Soviet Vietnam. Gorbachev pressed the military either to devise a plan to win the conflict or admit defeat and cut their losses. With a large Muslim population in the Soviet Union, he also was worried about a fundamentalist takeover in Afghanis- tan. (If only we had had similar con- cerns.) As the casualties mounted, the Politburo decided to withdraw. The Soviet foreign minister leaked the decision to the State Department, but no one took him seriously. The Red Army finally left the country (with difficulty) in 1989. Our foreign policy in those years was a good example of the law of unintended consequences. Our goal was to defeat the Red Army, and we did. At the same time, we created an environment in which anti-American, anti-Western terrorists thrived. They are still haunting us today. So why didn’t an event as monu- mental as the Soviet defeat prompt a thorough review of U.S. policy in the region? Simply put, we were not interested in helping to rebuild the country, or even in providing badly- needed humanitarian aid. The in- coming George H.W. Bush adminis- tration’s priorities — all legitimate — were Iranian nuclear proliferation, German unification and the end of the Cold War. Afghanistan was not on the radar screen, a serious mis- take. Filling the resulting power vacu- um, local warlords fought savagely for control. The most important of these were Gulbuddin Hekymatyr, a devout Pashtun, and Ahmed Shah Massoud, D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 55 The Saudis and the Pakistan Army gave the Taliban cash, equipment, transport, planes, food, fuel and ammunition as we looked the other way.