CIA Activities in Afghanistan - Afghanistan 1990

Afghanistan 1990

The policy dispute between CIA's Near East Division and the U.S. State Department, regarding political settlement versus continued fighting in Afghanistan, which was initiated between McWilliams and Bearden in 1989, continues with new protagonists, CIA's Thomas Tweeten and State's new special envoy to the Afghan resistance, Peter Tomsen.

Civil war develops as the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and CIA-supported Gulbadin Hekmatyar seeks to violently eliminate all rivals, including the CIA-supported Ahmed Shah Massoud. In spite of this internecine warfare, ISI and CIA formulate a plan to topple the Najibullah government in a winter offensive on Kabul. As part of this offensive, CIA pays Massoud $500,000, over and above his monthly stipend of $200,000, to close the Salang Highway. Massoud fails to do so, and in consequence, his allowance is reduced to $50,000 per month.

In Spring of 1990, ISI hopes to install Gulbadin Hekmatyar contingent on defeating the Najibullah government. Hekmatyar also acquires millions of dollars in additional funding from Osama bin Laden, thus placing ISI, CIA and bin Laden in joint venture. On March 7, 1990, Gulbadin Hekmatyar and Shahnawaz Tanai attempts a coup, with Tanai, a member of Najibullah's government, orchestrating an attack using Najibullah's own forces against Najibullah's palace, with Hekmatyar's forces to follow up from outside Kabul. The money to buy the loyalty of Najibullah's troops comes in part from Osama bin Laden. This attempt fails.

At the same time, ISI asks "bin Laden for money to bribe legislators to throw Benazir Bhutto out of office". "That winter, then, bin Laden worked with Pakistani intelligence against both Najibullah and Bhutto, the perceived twin enemies of Islam they saw holding power in Kabul and Islamabad", according to author Steve Coll. Regarding the issue of whether bin Laden was acting alone or as an agent of Saudi intelligence, Coll writes (see the concept of plausible deniability):

"Did bin Laden work on the Tanai coup attempt on his own or as a semi-official liaison for Saudi intelligence? The evidence seems thin and inconclusive. Bin Laden was still in good graces with the Saudi government at the time of the Tanai coup attempt; his first explicit break with Prince Turki and the royal family lay months in the future. While the CIA's Afghan informants named bin Laden as a funder of the Hekmatyar-Tanai coup, other accounts named Saudi intelligence as the source of funds. Were these separate funding tracks or the same? None of the reports then or later were firm or definitive. "It was the beginning of a pattern for American intelligence analysts: Whenever bin Laden interacted with his own Saudi government, he seemed to do so inside a shroud."

Note that, in a grand historical coincidence, in the investigation following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007, Pakistan's Interior Minisry has laid the blame on "Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban commander who holds sway across a large part of South Waziristan", i.e. on an Al Queda-linked group, while Bhutto herself, in a letter she wrote prior to her death and subsequent to two prior attempts, laid the blame at the ISI's doorstep. In light of the above, perhaps both assertions are correct.