© Mohammad Ismail / Reuters
The role of the CIA in the rise of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in 1980s Afghanistan is well known; what is less understood is the pivotal part played by MI6 and the SAS in this sordid operation.
The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) swept to power in Afghanistan in 1978 on a platform of land rights, workers' rights, and an end to forced marriages. This was effectively a social revolution against the feudal system that had shaped Afghans' lives for centuries, and it naturally angered the country's entrenched landed interests as well as its' religious establishment. Their anger, however, presented an opportunity to an imperial fraternity determined to deliver a blow to the Global South in general, and its Soviet ally in particular. As the armed counter-revolution against Afghanistan's new, socialist government got underway,
the US and Britain seized the chance to give the Soviet Union, in the words of US President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, "their own Vietnam".The defeat of the US at the hands of Vietnamese peasants was, in fact, the most obvious sign of imperial decline during that tumultuous period. Earlier in the decade, Portuguese efforts to hang on to their colonies in Angola and Mozambique had been smashed by determined independence movements, with communist forces in the leadership, whilst the US' loyal South African ally was facing a resurgence of youth resistance.
The Vietnam war had catalysed communist victories in Laos and Cambodia whilst the pro-US Shah was being rocked by determined street protests in Iran. Newly independent countries were overwhelmingly rejecting US overtures to become neo-colonies and were instead forging ahead, through entities such as the Non-Aligned Movement, with plans for a 'New International Economic Order', challenging the West's rigging of world trade. In other words
the Global South - increasingly allied to the socialist bloc - was rapidly posing an existential threat to the Western-dominated, white supremacist, capitalist world order.
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