In 1979, the #Jimmy #Carter administration launched #Operation #Cyclone, a #CIA project that founded and armed right-wing religious extremists known as the mujahideen to fight against Afghanistan’s left-wing government, which was allied with the Soviet Union.

One of the biggest advocates of Operation Cyclone was Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, a notorious anti-communist hawk. In a 1998 interview, Brzezinsky explained that the covert operation “had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” as the US sought to give “the USSR its Vietnam war”.

On December 24, 1979, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. They remained for 10 years until the USSR ultimately collapsed. Over the course of a decade, the US spent $20 billion propping up the mujahideen. To this day, Operation Cyclone remains the most expensive covert operation program.

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the US cut funding to the mujahideen. Three years later, Afghanistan erupted into civil war waged by rival mujahideen groups. At the same time, a faction of mujahideen fighters formed a group known as the Taliban in northern Pakistan. The Taliban entered Afghanistan in 1994, seized the capital city of Kabul in 1996 and went in to rule the country until the US invasion of 2001.