Zbigniew Brzezinski
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Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. He enters John Kiriakou's account of Afghanistan as one of the architects, with Carter and Ronald Reagan, of the policy of drawing the Soviet Union into a war there. Presented with that characterization, Kiriakou's answer was "Correct": the country was in utter chaos as a result, and "it was literally destroyed."

Asked in 2022 about the observation that Brzezinski had bragged about tricking the Russians into Afghanistan in order to give them their own Vietnam, Kiriakou answered "absolutely," and drew the parallel forward to Ukraine: the United States, he said, wants the Russians bogged down forever, even at the cost of every last Ukrainian life, and has no interest in peace.

What followed in the ruins

Kiriakou's own contribution to the story picks up in the wreckage. Into that chaos, he says, came Pakistan: Benazir Bhutto, "that great champion of democracy and human rights", created the Taliban, and the original reason was to protect Pakistani truck traffic driving across Afghanistan to deliver goods to Iran. The escalation was incremental: the Taliban began by protecting the trucks, then set up posts in villages along the truck routes, then took the villages, then the regions, then the states, and then the whole country.

Kiriakou grants that the movement was genuinely popular in its early days, even among secular, modern Afghans in Kabul, because in those years people were not being killed in shootouts in the street or having relatives kidnapped and lynched over property disputes. "They really did bring law and order in those early days," he says, and then everything spun out of control.

See also

- Benazir Bhutto
- John Kiriakou
