during the short interval between the Security Council meeting and
the convening of the UNGA Emergency Special Session’ (Khan,
1991: 15). The unintended, but significant, consequence of this
was to accord the regime installed by the USSR a status which it
hardly merited, and to skew subsequent UN involvement with the
Afghanistan issue away from the crucial question of internal polit-
ical order and towards the purely external dimensions of the situ-
ation, by giving the Kabul regime an effective veto over the
engagement of the resistance in serious negotiations over
Afghanistan’s future. Even as late as 1988, UN Secretary-General
Pérez de Cuéllar was to remark that it would be ‘against our phil-
osophy to be in touch with the enemies of governments’ (Franck
and Nolte, 1993: 150; see also Rubin, 1995b: 43).
Western reactions to the invasion
The Carter Administration was deeply affronted by the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. However, its involvement in Afghanistan
had begun to deepen even before the invasion took place. In a
1998 interview with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur,
Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that US support for the Mujahideen
had begun six months before the Soviet invasion (Brzezinski,
1998). According to Brzezinski’s account, President Carter signed
a directive on 3 July 1979 approving aid to the opponents of the
Afghan communist regime, and Brzezinski himself offered to
Carter the opinion that this would result in a Soviet military inter-
vention. This action he characterised as knowingly increasing the
probability that the USSR would invade Afghanistan. Even allow-
ing for the possibility of hyperbole on Brzezinski’s part – a rea-
sonable assumption given that the July 1979 directive provided
only for non-lethal medical and propaganda assistance (Cogan,
1993: 76) – it is hardly surprising that the US Administration
should have been willing to support the overthrow of the regime of
Taraki and Amin given the assassination of Ambassador Dubs in
February 1979. It is notable, however, that the likely effects on
ordinary Afghans of turning their country into Moscow’s Vietnam
78 The Afghanistan Wars