A history of the relationship between the Taliban and the U.S.
By Zahra Nader and Hamayon Rastgar
On June 30, U.S. President Joe Biden claimed a strategic win over al-Qaeda in Afghanistan with the help of the group against which the U.S.-led coalition fought for the past two decades: The Taliban. “Do you remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said al-Qaeda would not be there. I said it wouldn’t be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right,” Biden said at a press conference. The U.S. president made that statement just two weeks after the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, told the UN Human Rights Council about “serious deprivations” of women and girls rights under the Taliban regime that “may constitute the crime against humanity of gender persecution.”
The Taliban Ministry of Foreign Affairs jumped on Biden’s remarks, welcoming them as proof of the regime’s commitment to not allow foreign terrorists to base themselves in Afghanistan: “We consider the remarks by U.S. President Joe Biden about the non-existence of armed groups in Afghanistan as acknowledgment of reality.”
That the U.S. president would boast about the Taliban’s actions against al-Qaeda as effectively a win for American foreign policy shocked and disappointed some of those who were hoping that the U.S. would use its clout over the Taliban to hold them more accountable for the crimes the regime is committing against the people of Afghanistan.
Biden’s comments also ignited a debate about the relationship between the U.S. and the Taliban. Many Afghan social media users called them proof of the Taliban’s subservience to the U.S. Some saw them as proof of the U.S. support for the Taliban and that, as long as the Taliban are serving those interests, their violation of human rights, even those that constitute crimes against humanity, do not matter.
However, if one looks at the long history of the relationship between the Taliban and the U.S., they would discover a relationship that extends well beyond the Doha agreement in 2020, by which the administration of Republican president Donald Trump agreed to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan within 14 months and the Taliban stated that they would not allow al-Qaeda or any other militant groups to operate in areas of Afghanistan under Taliban control. Indeed, the Taliban movement is a true Frankenstein’s creature and the product of Western, particularly American, geopolitical self-interest.
The history goes back to the early days of the Cold War. It was in the 1950s that the United States government made a strategic decision to curb the influence of communism and the Soviet Union in the Muslim world by supporting Islamic fundamentalists who would fight the “godless communists” and their secularizing influence. In 1953, president Dwight Eisenhower shook hands with Said Ramadan, a senior leader of Muslim Brotherhood, a pioneering organization of political Islam, and a key theorist of modern Islamism, in the Oval Office of the White House. After that meeting, Said Ramadan became a key operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and received financial support from a CIA propaganda effort, the American Committee for the Liberation from Bolshevism. He helped establish Islamist networks across the Muslim world, which, in turn, spread Islamic fundamentalism as a counterforce against the cultural and ideological influence of the Soviet Union. The U.S. efforts benefited the Islamist fanatics at the cost of secular political forces in the Muslim world, including leftists, nationalists, liberals, and feminists.
American support for Islamic fundamentalists intensified in the 1980s, when the U.S. and its allies actively funded and aided Islamist groups in Afghanistan that were fighting the Soviets, who had invaded the country in December 1979.
The US spent billions of dollars to support Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, which is said to be the “largest CIA covert operation of the Cold War,” according to declassified CIA documents. The U.S. efforts were aided by the military and intelligence forces of countries in the region, especially Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
“By Jan. 21, 1980, the CIA was shipping at least 16 tons of guns, grenades, and mines to Pakistan’s intelligence service, which delivered them to the Afghan rebels. The Saudis began buying millions of dollars of Soviet-bloc arms from Egypt, and the CIA flew them into battle. The Chinese trucked missiles for the Afghans over the world’s highest mountain pass. Two thousand Soviets and tens of thousands of Afghans were dead before winter’s end,” wrote Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian, for the Washington Post in January 2019.
Even the Islamist regime in Iran aided the CIA’s covert operation to support fundamentalists in Afghanistan. “The Iran deal was done because the Pakistani pipeline was full. By summer’s end, the CIA had delivered, in addition to millions of dollars in cash, 10,000 AK-47s with 13 million rounds of ammunition, 720 anti-tank rocket launchers and 14,000 rockets, 15,000 land mines, 158 surface-to-air missiles, 200 heavy machine guns and 800,000 rounds of ammunition, along with other weaponry and nonlethal aid” Weiner wrote.
The U.S. support for the fundamentalists in Afghanistan extended beyond military hardware and expertise. According to the Washington Post, “In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers, and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.”
The US was not the only Western country that helped the rise of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan. In 1981, the New York Times reported on a visit by Margaret Thatcher, then Britain’s prime minister, to the Pakistan-Afghan border accompanied by Pakistani president Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. While at an Afghan refugee camp, she told “bearded” men: “You left your country because you refused to live under a godless Communist system which is trying to destroy your religion and your independence.” The New York Times also reported that Thatcher said that “even though no diplomatic initiatives had yet succeeded, her country would do all it could to seek Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
A recent article on the Declassified UK website focuses on what the U.K. did in the 1990s, in the wake of Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in 1996. As the article details, the U.K. government approved exports of arms and military equipment to Pakistan even though the government was aware of Pakistan’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, as Declassified UK explains, “London never raised public objections to Pakistan’s sponsorship of these militants.”
Western officials knew of the dangers that could spread from their support of Islamist fundamentalists, especially as more sophisticated Islamist organizations were formed, thanks to Western funds. As historian Weiner wrote in the Washington Post, the “declassified CIA documents reveal that the U.S. knew about the ideological and political nature of the forces they were supporting” including that they will face “human rights problems” if the Taliban come to power. Later, Zbigniew Brzezinski, president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser and the early architect of the American policy of support for the jihadists in Afghanistan, famously justified U.S. government actions after the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the 1990s: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems [sic] or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Knowing this history provides context to Joe Biden’s remark about getting help from the Taliban in a fight against al-Qaeda. However, those who support those remarks should answer one critical question: How is the U.S. convinced that the Taliban would turn on their ideological brethren?
The CIA covert operation against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan succeeded because the Islamists wanted to fight the “godless communists.” However, the Taliban share many features, including ideological beliefs, with Islamist organizations like al-Qaeda to the point that al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, pledged allegiance to the Taliban’s leaders in the 1990s, when they had bases in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda’s leaders have renewed that pledge several times. As well, it is important to note that the Taliban’s rise to power was facilitated by crucial support of Islamists from around the world, including al-Qaeda, who consider it a religious obligation to support each other.
In 2022, the U.S. fired a drone at an al-Qaeda safe house in an exclusive area of Kabul popular with senior Taliban leaders. The pinpoint precision of the strike, which killed the group’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, might indicate that there are elements within the Taliban who might have helped the US with intelligence about the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leader, but Zawahiri’s presence in downtown Kabul also provides undeniable proof of the Taliban’s links with international Islamists, and the global character of their movement.
The Taliban’s return to power is a harbinger of profound cultural, social, political, and economic devastation, for Afghanistan, the region, and beyond. The prominent Pakistani journalist, Eqbal Ahmad, who visited Afghanistan in 1998, two years after the Taliban takeover of Kabul, warned about the danger inherent in supporting such a reactionary regime: “The Taliban are the expression of a modern disease, symptoms of social cancer which shall destroy Muslim societies if its growth is not arrested and the disease is not eliminated.”
Zahra Nader is the editor-in-chief of Zan Times.
Hamayon Rastgar is the communications and research officer at Zan Times.
