The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
How many Russians fled?” read one arithmetic question in the textbook. An aid worker counted forty-three violent images in just 100 pages of one of the books. The Taliban later adopted the books as their own, blotting out the faces of soldiers to comport with religious restrictions on depicting the human form while maintaining the language that described the mujahedin as holy warriors fighting in the service of God. (In a 1989 briefing report to his funders at USAID, Gouttierre argued that educating women would anger the men whom the US depended upon as anti-Soviet proxies. “This type of reform must be left to the Afghans to be solved at their own pace,” the University of Nebraska academic wrote.)
Perhaps the greatest recipient of CIA funding through Operation Cyclone was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a ruthless Afghan warlord described in a 1985 congressional study as “a relatively young leader often compared to the Ayatollah Khomeini in his intense ideological fundamentalism.”
Hekmatyar had been a CIA asset for years before the anti-Soviet jihad, joining a secretive Islamist academic group called “the professors” in 1972. This collection of Islamist ideologues was established with the help of the Asia Foundation, a CIA front group, to counter the rise of leftist popular organizing at Kabul University. The professors there were led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, who taught Islamic law and led the campaign to drive women off campus, inciting followers like the young Hekmatyar to throw acid in the faces of female students and to murder left-wing activists. Over a decade later, Hekmatyar remained in the CIA’s favor because, as Cannistraro bluntly put it, “He was the one who was the most effective fighter.”
Cannistraro worked directly with Hekmatyar during the 1980s, escorting him to Washington to meet Reagan alongside a group of mujahedin commanders. Hekmatyar ultimately refused the face-to-face with Reagan, a flamboyant and calculated maneuver that put his contempt for the United States on international display. The warlord was furious, Cannistraro recalled, by what he considered insufficient American support for the anti-Soviet cause. That eventually changed with the infusion of some $600 million in aid and weapons directly to Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami militia, including Stinger antiaircraft missiles. (During our interview, Cannistraro referred to Hekmatyar as “Gulbud,” hinting at the guerrilla commander’s cozy relationship with Washington’s intelligence community.)
While the CIA and Pakistani ISI armed Hekmatyar to the teeth, diplomats in the region worried that his Hezb-i-Islami was playing a long game, allowing other mujahedin factions to do the bulk of the fighting against the Soviets and focusing his militia’s energy on dominating the opposition. Loathed by fellow mujahedin commanders, Hekmatyar was strongly suspected to be involved in the murder of a British cameraman and the killings of two American escorts. He rejected all negotiation, declaring his goal as “a pure Islamic state in Afghanistan.”
In 1981, before the mujahedin were junketed to Washington, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher traveled to a refugee camp on the Pakistani-Afghan border alongside President Zia. She appeared in a tent before a male-only crowd of some 1,500 mujahedin fighters. Promising an extra $4 million in aid, she encouraged them: “I want to say that the hearts of the free world are with you.” Then, moments later, Britain’s first female prime minister moved to a private tent with a few female refugees. No cameras—or men—were allowed inside. “We will never rest until Afghanistan is free again,” Thatcher declared. Shortly after that, she hustled away on a helicopter, remarking to Zia, “We had better leave while they’re friendly.”
The visit highlights a burgeoning love affair between the salt-of-the-earth mujahedin and Western elites. Hollywood paid tribute to the anticommunist guerrillas in the highly successful Rambo III, which defined Reagan-era Hollywood. The film was an unrestrained tribute to CIA field operatives and the Islamist rebels they trained, even featuring a dedication in its closing credits “to the brave mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan.” (The tribute was later edited to refer to “the gallant people of Afghanistan.”) US mainstream media sided almost reflexively with the rebels, with CBS anchor Dan Rather leading the charge. Branded “Gunga Dan” by media critic Tom Shales for the sensationalist coverage he produced for 60 Minutes while embedded with a band of mujahedin, Rather accused Soviet forces of “genocide” and of borrowing their methods from “early Hitler.”
Radek Sikorski, a young Polish exile and journalist for the UK’s Spectator, took his affection for the mujahedin a step further, donning Pashtun guerrilla garb, toting a rifle and even participating in a raid on a Soviet barracks, during which he fired three cartridge clips of ammo. According to the UK’s Telegraph, the reporter-cum-guerrilla “succeeded only in hitting the outer wall of a Soviet barracks.” After the Cold War, Sikorski went on to serve as Poland’s foreign minister and marry the vehemently anti-Russian Washington Post columnist, Anne Applebaum.
American media coverage of the Afghan conflict was substantially influenced by advocacy NGOs like the Afghanistan Relief Committee (ARC). The ARC received the bulk of its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government-backed organization that advanced American soft power by supporting political parties, media and civil society groups in countries where Washington sought regime change.
ARC’s operations were overseen by John Train, the founding manager of the Paris Review, a CIA-backed literary journal that served as a cover for agency writers. In 1982, Train volunteered his NGO as a funding vehicle for a propaganda film hyping the suffering and courage of the Afghan mujahedin. The film’s goal, according to Train, was “to impose on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan the sort of television coverage that proved fatal to the American presence in Vietnam.”
He imagined his film being aired on public television, shown on college campuses and broadcast on right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. And he proposed Hekmatyar, the CIA-backed Islamist warlord, as the local fixer. In a memo to Freedom House, the US government-supported NGO, Train spelled out the kind of footage he was hoping to capture: “Russians: Coverage live of air assault and destruction of a rural village and mosque. Reprisal killings, use of CBW [chemical or biological weapons].”
In Train’s spy-ops fantasy, ordinary Afghans were little more than imperial stage props. As journalist Joel Whitney wrote in his investigative book Finks, which exposed the CIA’s role in Cold War cultural propaganda, “This seemed to take propaganda to a whole new level that completely dehumanized the victims of the violence in the service of some apocalyptic bet between angels and demons.”
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In 1985, as US support for the mujahedin reached its height, journalist Helena Cobban discovered how deeply the fetishization of the Afghan rebels had penetrated American culture. Cobban had been invited to an event advertised as an academic conference at a resort hotel in Tucscon, Arizona. When she entered the hotel, Cobban found herself inside a Cold War political rally. “I remember mingling with all of these wealthy Republican women and being asked, ‘Have you adopted a muj?” Cobban recalled to me. “Each one had pledged money to sponsor a member of the Afghan mujahedin in the name of beating the communists. Some were even seated at the event next to their personal ‘muj.’”
The keynote speaker of the evening, according to Cobban, was a hard-charging freshman member of Congress named John McCain. During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese Army had captured McCain after he was shot down by a Soviet officer on his way to bomb a civilian light bulb factory. He spent two years in captivity at the so-called Hanoi Hilton, during which he provided the Vietnamese with valuable intelligence on US war planning. McCain returned from the war with a deep, abiding loathing of his former captors, remarking in 2000, “I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” His visceral anticommunist resentment informed his vocal support for the mujahedin as well as the right-wing Contra death squads in Central America.
So committed was McCain to the anticommunist cause that he momentarily served on the advisory board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, a former leader of WACL’s British chapter, described the organization as “a collection of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international.”
Joining McCain in the