How the U.S. Created Al-Qaeda
In 1979 while speaking to the Mujahideen in Pakistan, President Carter’s National Security Advisor told the Jihadist group, “your cause is right, and God is on your side.”
Jackie Thornhill
Mar 15, 2019 · 3 min read
President Reagan meeting with
Afghan Mujahideen leaders in the
Oval Office in 1983. Photo by
Michael Evans.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is a man with a complex legacy. The tenth National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, Brzezinski was born in Poland in 1928 and is was active in politics, teaching and appearing for expert analysis on several news programs until his death in 2017.
His surname also might sound familiar to many, as his daughter Mika Brzezinski co-hosts the news program Morning Joe on MSNBC.
Under Zbigniew Brzezinski’s four-year tenure in the Carter administration, the geopolitical tectonic plates of the world shifted dramatically as the U.S. normalized relations with the People’s Republic of China, hosted the Camp David Accords, and lost the support of Iran when its regime was overthrown.
Amidst his long resume of impressive feats, one of Brzezinski’s lesser known and most ill-advised foreign policy forays turned out to be
funding the rebel
Mujahideen group in hopes they would drag the Soviet Union into a long, costly quagmire in the Middle East.
With the blessing of President Carter, Brzezinski flew to Pakistan in 1979 prior to the Soviet invasion and began to coordinate a joint response with the intent to “make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible.”
In addition to arranging coordination between the CIA, ISI (Pakistani secret service), MI6, Saudi Arabia, and other parties that was subsequently used to funnel roughly billions of U.S. dollars to the Mujahideen, Brzezinski gave a brief speech to the group while on his visit, telling them, “your cause is right, and God is on your side. Your fight will prevail.”
As he pointed to Afghanistan, he said “that land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one day.” For Brzezinski, it’s clear that making the Soviets bleed was personal. He once
bragged that he was “the first Pole in 300 years in a position to really stick it to the Russians.”