seems to have weighed all too lightly on policy circles in
Washington (Maley, 2000a: 6).
Once the invasion occurred, President Carter, under
Brzezinski’s influence, offered a relentlessly geopolitical interpret-
ation of the Soviet invasion as positioning the USSR to threaten
the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, and constituting ‘the
most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War’
(Grasselli, 1996: 121). In the light of evidence which has since
become available, this apocalyptic view cannot be sustained.
However, it was far from clear in January 1980 that it was unsus-
tainable, and as a result there was widespread support in Congress
and internationally – especially from British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser
- for some of the measures which the Administration proposed to
use to signal its dismay. While the prospects of Senate ratification
of the new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) had
always been poor, the invasion of Afghanistan doomed them al-
together. Carter also proposed two major positive measures in
response to the invasion. One was a partial grain embargo, reflect-
ing US awareness of the Soviet Union’s need to import grains
from time to time in significant quantities. The other was a US
boycott of the Olympic Games, which in 1980 were to be held in
Moscow. The Olympic boycott sent a powerful message. The
grain embargo was much less effective, since it was rapidly mired
in domestic political controversy, and other states could not be
compelled to cooperate to make it effective. Sanctions are a tricky
tool to employ, and this certainly proved to be the case in respect
of Afghanistan (Nossal, 1989).
Given that US support for the Afghan Mujahideen had com-
menced even before the invasion, it is unsurprising that the inva-
sion itself led to the development of a robust programme of
military assistance. A conservative estimate of the total value of
covert US aid to the resistance by the year of the Soviet with-
drawal is nearly US$2 billion (Cogan, 1993: 77). Immediately after
the invasion, Carter signed a new directive providing for the sup-
ply of lethal weapons to the Mujahideen, and a shipment of .303
The Development of Afghan Resistance 79