In an interview released to French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur [1], Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, revealed that the CIA had secretly operated in Afghanistan to undermine the regime in Kabul since July 1979, that is to say, five months before the Soviet invasion. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive to provide secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. That very day the Polish-born U.S. strategist wrote a note to President Carter in which he explained that this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. And this is precisely what happened the following month of December. In the same interview, Brzezinski recalls that, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he wrote another note to President Carter in which he expressed his opinion that at that point the USA had the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.
In Brezinski’s opinion, this intervention was unsustainable for Moscow and in time would have led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. In fact, the drawn out Soviet war in support of the communist regime in Kabul further contributed to the weakening of the Soviet Union, already engaged in a severe internal crisis, encompassing both political- bureaucratic and socio-economic aspects. As we now well know, the Soviet withdrawal from the Afghan theatre left behind an exhausted country, whose political situation, economy and geo-strategic assets were extremely weak. Indeed, after less than 10 years from the Teheran revolution, the entire region had been completely destabilized exclusively to the advantage of the western system. The parallel and unrestrained decline of the Soviet Union, accelerated by the Afghan adventure, and, afterwards in the nineties, by the dismemberment of the Yugoslav Federation (a sort of buffer state between the Western and Soviet blocks) changed the balance of power to favour U.S. expansionism in the Eurasian region.
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