Hillary Clinton, former US Secretary of State, has said in a recent interview with FOX TV that the United States’ military is fighting in Afghanistan Al Qaeda that it had helped create! The interview has caused a great deal of uproar in Washington at a time when the US President is under some serious attacks in the country with the way the US has fared in the international arena in recent times. Hillary Clinton’s interview has gone viral on the Internet. In fact, in her interview, the former First Lady and the most likely candidate to become the Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in the 2016 election did not say anything that most people did not know. Nevertheless, this is for the first time that such acknowledgement about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan has come from someone so powerful in US politics.

Hillary Clinton’s admission of US connections with Al Qaeda have raised serious discussion on US’ past about similar connections with terrorists in other parts of the world. One analyst, while examining Hillary Clinton’s interview, stated that she was partly correct and partly not in what she said about US involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s. For instance, the analyst stated that the US connections with Al Qaeda at that time had occurred before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The US had established Al Qaeda to de-stabilize the pro-Soviet Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) that had come to power after the US friendly dictatorship of Daud Mohammad was overthrown in 1978 by the Saur Revolution. In fact, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, admitted that in a way it was the United States that had “baited” the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan because the pro-SDR had invited it for help it to deal with the terrorist forces including Al Qaeda and Taliban that the United States had actively helped to build to de-destabilizing the DRA. The US’ interest was to overthrow the unfriendly DRA and bring to government, a power that would be friendly towards it.

In fact, what the US did in Afghanistan by supporting/creating Al Qaeda, was not anything new. During the Cold War, the USA was in the habbit of planning overthrows of unfriendly regimes in the way it attempted to overthrow the unfriendly DRA worldwide. CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt had trained and used Iranian agents in 1953 to “ destabilize the government of the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh because he nationalized the Iranian oil fields to the dismay of British private oil interests.” The US intelligence was similarly involved in Guatemala in 1954 against President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán who was trying to start to the annoyance and anger of the US Government, New Deal type programme in what the United States considered was its own backyard. The US involvement in Guatemala encouraged the civil war in that country that lasted for 40 years during which CIA with State Department collusion assisted the death squads that ended killing 400,000. The objective of the US involvement was to stop “the evil of the New Deal from spreading across Latin America.”

There are many other examples of the United States’ “conspiratorial” overseas involvements that were initiated and supported by its intelligence in order to either bring a friendly government to power or remove an unfriendly government from power. The support of the US Government to the counter-revolutionaries (Contras) in Latin America has been well documented and hence now well known. There is strong suspicion that the CIA also has had a hand in the change in Bangladesh in August 1975, as it perceived the Bangladesh government at that time as friendly towards the Indo-Soviet axis and therefore was considered to be unfriendly to the United States.

The interview of Hillary Clinton has started renewed discussions in the United States and elsewhere about US’ overseas involvements in a critical light. Therefore there is some degree of curiosity about why Hillary Clinton had decided to give such an explosive interview at a time when the country is set to come out of Afghanistan without any guarantee about what the future there holds for US’ interests. The two Presidential candidates in Afghanistan, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai who would face off in the final round of the Presidential election on June 13, are both committed to sign that Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States that Hamid Karzai had refused to, an agreement crucial for a future role for the United States in the country. Nevertheless, the Taliban is lurking in the wings that many suspects could make serious bid for political power once the US troops leave. Added to the US’ current predicament in Afghanistan which is not a favourable one, the country has recently been snubbed by Russia in Ukraine/Crimea and its position in Syria is also tentative.

Perhaps, Hillary Clinton was trying to explain the way things are ending for the US in Afghanistan in comparison to how things ended in its earlier involvement. Towards the end of the interview, Hillary Clinton concluded that the US must be careful about what it sows “because we will harvest.” In case of the US involvement in the 1980 in Afghanistan, she stated that although that involvement had cost the country billions of dollars, that was not “a bad investment to end the Soviet Union.” In the present case, the US would be leaving Afghanistan after spending billions of US $ and sacrificing the lives of more than 2000 US soldiers in pursuit of the war on terror without any certainty about its future role in the country and that too, with the chances of the Taliban, the sponsors of Al Qaeda, returning to power.

Hillary Clinton’s interview also went to show how shabbily the United States has treated Pakistan both in the 1980s and now. In the 1980s, the US that had used Pakistan actively for sponsoring, training and assisting the Taliban/Al Qaeda abandoned Pakistan like a hot potato once the Soviet Union was gone. Pakistan is still suffering the consequences of that abandonment. In the present situation, the United States would again be leaving Afghanistan without any thought or consideration for what would happen to its erstwhile ally that it would be abandoning a second time to deal with the mess that it created. Perhaps, there may be a lesson in all these; that a country may decide to go along with the United States, only at its own peril.

The writer is a retired career Ambassador. His email id is  HYPERLINK "mailto:ambserajulislam@gmail.com"
ambserajulislam@gmail.com