Not Everything Is the CIA's Fault

When a socialist government fails, leftists tend to blame the CIA and more broadly the United States Government (USG).

"The reason Afghan mothers are handing their babies to American soldiers is because the United States wiped out their socialist government in the 70s so we could prop up the mujahideen, which is now the Taliban, which is going to kill those f*cking people! Why? Because we propped them up and invented them and got rid of a government that was actually taking care of its people."

Leftists tend to overestimate the power of the USG to avoid blaming socialism itself.

It’s a convenient argument because for better or worse every country on Earth can draw a line to the United States to give it credit or blame, but an intelligent evaluation of historical events requires us to investigate the width of that line.

Did we send 1 trillion dollars, 1 billion dollars, or 1 dollar?

Any dollar amount is enough for leftists to say, “See! It’s the CIA’s fault!”

But if I buy a “Made in China” iPhone am I now 100% responsible for everything bad that goes on in China?

We are all to some degree responsible for everything that’s happening in the world — not just for the things we do, but also for the things we don’t do — so the question is how responsible are we for the outcome of any given case?

The Taliban:

Jimmy Dore claimed the socialist government was “taking care of its people” before the USG “invented” the Taliban to wipe them out.

Another intellectual pitfall of leftists is they tend to over-idealize the time before the fall.

Clearly, it’s an overstatement if not an outright lie to say that the Afghani socialist government — People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) — was “taking care of its people.”

In April 1978, The PDPA seized power in a bloody coup from President Mohammed Khan.

In a "disastrous symbolic move," the PDPA changed the national flag from the traditional black, red, and Islamic green color to a red flag similar to the Soviet Union’s that offended the country’s conservatives.

The PDPA then prohibited usury and passed a land reform measure which led to an agricultural crisis. Journalist Robert Kaplan said their land reform policy was "confiscating land in a haphazard manner that enraged everyone, benefited no one, and reduced food production.”

Naturally, the PDPA’s reforms provoked strong opposition, which they then brutally oppressed, therefore, leading to a Civil War in 1979 with the mujahideen, which translates to “Islamic guerrillas.”

In September 1979, the PDPA General Secretary was assassinated by his own prime minister Hafizullah Amin who then became the new PDPA General Secretary.

Under Amin, the situation deteriorated even faster where thousands of innocent people went missing, or as Jimmy Dore might recall it, “sent on vacation.”

The soldiers' knock on the door in the middle of the night, so common in many Arab and African countries, was little known in Afghanistan, where a central government simply lacked the power to enforce its will outside of Kabul. Taraki's coup changed all that. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan communists executed 27,000 political prisoners at the sprawling Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside. By Western standards, this was a salutary idea in the abstract. But it was carried out in such a violent way that it alarmed even the Soviets. —  Robert D. Kaplan, Soldiers of God

Displeased with Amin's government, the Soviet Army then invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. They killed Amin and replaced him with a Soviet-organized regime. Imagine being so brutal that even the Soviet Union was like, “Hold up! This is too much.” Additional Soviet troops were then sent down to stabilize their hand-picked regime, therefore, marking the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan War.

Jimmy Dore is also wrong in saying the USG “invented” the Taliban.

The US never funded the Taliban, let alone created it.

It’s only natural some Afghan guerillas would rise up in their own self-defense after the Afghani President and most of his family were assassinated by the PDPA, or after the PDPA started killing each other and “caring for” the population, or after the Soviet army invaded.

The USG then funneled $3 billion dollars over the course of nine years (1980 - 1989) to Pakistan’s (ISI) to equip and train those willing to fight the USSR.

The USG’s goal wasn’t so much to “wipe out the socialist government” as much as it was to push out the USSR as evidenced by the fact that the US stopped funding in 1989 when the USSR left even though the PDPA’s leader Mohammed Najibullah was still in power and his government wouldn’t fall until 1992.

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