The #AfghanistanWar began 40 yrs ago when the US decided it could not tolerate the leftist, Soviet-allied Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. To bait a USSR invasion, the CIA began Operation Cyclone, which financed the Afghan “mujahideen,” a group of radical jihadist militants.
Many pundits believe the Soviets invaded Afghanistan first. In reality, Operation Cyclone predated the invasion by six months. The general goal, confirmed years later by Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, was to bait the USSR into its own Vietnam quagmire. 
Operation Cyclone was top secret and wildly expensive, one of the CIA’s longest and costliest operations to date. It began in 1979 and cost $675,000. Funding soon ballooned to $20-30 million per year through the 80s during the Soviet occupation, rising to $690 million in 1987.
During Operation Cyclone the CIA facilitated the manufacture and delivery of billions of dollars (and thousands of tons) of munitions to the mujahideen. This influx of money, arms and training assisted greatly in the rise of other rebel groups, of note Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
To be clear, the “Afghan mujahideen” does not refer to a specific ethnic or regional paramilitary group. It consisted of various groups across many ethnic and ideological lines. The common thread was a commitment to fundamentalist Islam and, more importantly, anti-communism.
Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the US and Saudis continued financing mujahideen fighters during the Afghan Civil War. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban became major factions during this conflict, the latter taking over the government from 1996 till the US invasion in 2001.
You can draw your own conclusions of course. The purpose of the above is to provide some useful facts about the history of the #AfghanistanWar, context absent from the analysis of a corporate press united in its goal to maintain US occupation for multinational corporate gain.
The Soviet-Afghan War was horribly violent and the Soviets carry blame as well. This thread focuses on CIA actions because they are consistently omitted from mainstream media accounts despite their continuing to haunt the Afghan people long since the USSR vanished from the earth.
Like clockwork.
The CIA said “Run it back.”
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1430772053511221248
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