"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979"
About this Quote
Brzezinski’s sentence is a scalpel disguised as a footnote. By leaning on the phrase “official version of history,” he signals that the public story is not just incomplete but curated - a polished narrative designed to preserve legitimacy. The precision of dates does the real work: it turns geopolitics into a timeline cross-examination, inviting the reader to notice the gap between what was said and what may have been done.
The intent is quietly incendiary. If aid “began during 1980,” after the Soviet invasion, the U.S. is cast as reactive: helping an occupied people resist. If support or contact started earlier, the moral geometry shifts. The subtext is about causality and provocation: the possibility that Washington wasn’t merely responding to Soviet aggression but helping create the conditions that made intervention more likely. Brzezinski doesn’t need to accuse outright; he simply sets the dates side by side and lets the implication metastasize.
Context matters because Brzezinski wasn’t a distant commentator; he was a principal architect of Cold War strategy as Carter’s national security adviser. That proximity makes the line read like controlled disclosure - not confession, exactly, but an insider’s nudge toward a harder truth. It also reflects a broader late-20th-century habit of narrative management: sell the public a clean story (“we answered an invasion”) while operating in the murkier logic of great-power competition, where “defensive” and “preemptive” blur by design.
The intent is quietly incendiary. If aid “began during 1980,” after the Soviet invasion, the U.S. is cast as reactive: helping an occupied people resist. If support or contact started earlier, the moral geometry shifts. The subtext is about causality and provocation: the possibility that Washington wasn’t merely responding to Soviet aggression but helping create the conditions that made intervention more likely. Brzezinski doesn’t need to accuse outright; he simply sets the dates side by side and lets the implication metastasize.
Context matters because Brzezinski wasn’t a distant commentator; he was a principal architect of Cold War strategy as Carter’s national security adviser. That proximity makes the line read like controlled disclosure - not confession, exactly, but an insider’s nudge toward a harder truth. It also reflects a broader late-20th-century habit of narrative management: sell the public a clean story (“we answered an invasion”) while operating in the murkier logic of great-power competition, where “defensive” and “preemptive” blur by design.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Zbigniew Brzezinski interview, Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 Jan 1998 — in which he contrasts the 'official version' that CIA aid began in 1980 with his account that covert support began in July 1979. |
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