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The Strategic Mind of Zbigniew Brzezinski: How a Native Pole Used Afghanistan to Protect His Homeland

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The Strategic Mind of Zbigniew Brzezinski: How a Native Pole Used Afghanistan to Protect His Homeland Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2012 The trs ategic mind of Zbigniew Brzezinski: how a native Pole used Afghanistan to protect his homeland John Bernell White Jr Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation White Jr, John Bernell, "The trs ategic mind of Zbigniew Brzezinski: how a native Pole used Afghanistan to protect his homeland" (2012). LSU Master's Theses. 3791. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/3791 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE STRATEGIC MIND OF ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: HOW A NATIVE POLE USED AFGHANISTAN TO PROTECT HIS HOMELAND A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Liberal Arts in The Interdepartmental Program in Liberal Arts By John Bernell White, Jr. B.A., University of Mississippi, 1999 May 2012 Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Bernell and Nell White, and my wife, Eliza. ii Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank God for making this project possible. I would also like to thank Dr. William Clark for spurring the topic that I chose and giving extremely good advice along the way. Professors Stanley Hilton and Karl Roider are also owed a debt of gratitude for teaching their students about the things that matter and allowing those students the academic latitude to create freely. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank Zbigniew Brzezinski, Walt Slocombe, David Aaron, Robert Gates, Leslie Gelb, Bob Shrum, Dennis Ross, Jim Mowrer, and Hedrick Smith for granting me access to their minds. Without speaking to these men, this project would have never gotten off the ground. iii Table of Contents Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………….ii Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………...iii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………….…v Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1 2: Three Acts of God……………………………………………………………………….15 3: A “Vietnamese Quagmire” Contingency and the Merging of Two Crises …………..27 4: Hidden History: The Polish Uprising of 1979…………………………………………47 5: Anything for the Homeland…………………………………………………………….59 6: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….82 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...91 Appendix: Brzezinski Email Linking Afghanistan and Poland……………………………97 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………..98 iv Abstract Many years after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates revealed several formerly classified details regarding the Carter Administration’s pre-invasion aid to the Mujahideen resistance fighters. Unwittingly, these separate yet interconnected disclosures from Brzezinski and Gates gave the appearance that the White House had intentionally lured the USSR into an insurgent-infested trap in Afghanistan designed to give Moscow its own Vietnam War. Brzezinski, being in a much higher position within the administration than Gates and coming forth with the most provocative revelations, was subsequently accused by many of essentially instigating a war all by himself. But although Brzezinski had hoped that the Soviets would get bogged down in a “Vietnamese quagmire” in Afghanistan if they decided to intervene, he did not attempt to lure the Russians into a trap. The covert aid to the Mujahideen was carried out to trap Moscow only if it continued to act aggressively in the Third World. In addition to Brzezinski’s need to limit the Soviet Union’s capability to project strength in the Third World, he admitted to this author that he had other strategic and personal reasons for aiding the Mujahideen. Months before President Carter signed the covert aid directive on July 3, 1979, Brzezinski had begun to receive quite explicit information from CIA assets in his native Poland that the situation there was on the verge of an explosion. These developments prompted him to turn his thoughts toward both crises simultaneously, with the ultimate goal to develop a strategy that would protect his homeland at all costs. In the final analysis, Brzezinski was correct in his assessment that aiding the Mujahideen and turning up the heat on the Soviets in Afghanistan would later prevent the Kremlin from sending its troops into Poland in order to squelch the burgeoning labor movement known as Solidarity. v Chapter 1—Introduction Almost twenty years after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, a series of separate yet interconnected disclosures from Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski created a quiet surge of analyses on the Internet and throughout the academic world. The first disclosure by Gates in 1996 revealed to the general public for the first time that President Jimmy Carter had actually signed a covert aid “finding” for the Mujahideen resistance fighters on July 3, 1979—six months prior to the invasion. 1 Although this piece of formerly classified information appeared quite benign when viewed by itself, a second revelation in Gates’ memoirs, From the Shadows, gave individuals ample reason to pause. Here, the public was made privy to an odd question voiced by Undersecretary of Defense Walt Slocombe in a meeting of the Special Coordinating Committee (SCC) on March 30, 1979. During this meeting, led by Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron who was sitting in for NSA Brzezinski, Slocombe asked the other high-level participants if it would be advantageous for the administration to keep the Afghan insurgency going by “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire?”2 Gates did not elaborate on Slocombe’s question, but let it dangle for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions as to how the question might have been answered by other members of the SCC. Then Brzezinski entered the equation. In a 1998 interview he is reported to have told the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur that on July 3, 1979—the very day Carter signed the covert aid directive—he had written a note to the president giving his opinion that the “aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” 3 After this alleged statement, the reporter asked Brzezinski the following question: “Perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and 1 Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, 1996), 146. 2 Ibid., 144-145. 3 David N. Gibbs, “Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect,” International Politics 37 (2000): 241. 1 looked for a way to provoke it?” He replied: “It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”4Later, when asked if he regretted any of his actions concerning the covert aid to the Mujahideen, Brzezinski appeared annoyed: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into an Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?”5 As the interview was coming to a close, Brzezinski proceeded to outline the “demoralization” that the Soviet Union had suffered due to the extended nature of the war, then he turned the tables and rhetorically asked the French journalist a question of his own: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”6 For the record, Brzezinski later denied that he ever claimed that he had sent a note to Carter on July 3, 1979 stating that the aid would induce an intervention and has vehemently maintained that the French reporter did not accurately record that specific statement. Nevertheless, to this day Brzezinski has never retracted any of the other statements that were published in the interview. Certainly the prospect is intriguing that the administration’s strategy could have possibly been to lure the Soviets into an “Afghan trap,” but one might ask, “What did Brzezinski’s policy recommendations regarding Afghanistan—covert or otherwise—have to do with protecting his Polish homeland?” The answer: Quite a lot, in fact. The parameters of Brzezinski’s geostrategic thinking concerning the problems in Afghanistan went far beyond the year 1979, albeit some researchers have reduced his objectives to a few short paragraphs—often resulting in abridged characterizations. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 241-242. Brzezinski often uses “Central Europe” to refer to what others might call “Eastern Europe.” See Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Geostrategic Triad: Living with China, Europe, and Russia (CSIS, 2001), 59. 2 Warning against this type of indolent strategic analysis, Steven R. Mann of the National War College has noted: Traditionally, we see strategic thought as the interplay of a limited number of factors, principally military, economic, and political. More sophisticated discussions expand the set to include factors such as the environment, technological development, and social pressures. Yet even this list fails to convey the full complexity of international affairs. The closer we come to an honest appreciation
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