WASHINGTON: To a greater extent than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan’s unfinished 24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign intelligence agencies: The Soviet Union’s KGB, America’s CIA, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department and Iran’s multiple clandestine services. They primed various Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, financed propaganda and manipulated political conventions.

When spies help construct a civil war, one seed they sow is confusion. Afghans today have little basis to trust their own recent history; too much remains hidden. The country has become a cauldron of interlocking conspiracies, both real and imagined, a maze of fractured mirrors designed by warmakers who embraced deception as a winning weapon. Afghanistan’s successful reconstruction as even a semi-normal country, then, must eventually include some reclamation by Afghans of the truth about their recent past.

The KGB was present at the creation of this clandestine architecture. But there has been too little evidence to allow even an intelligent guess about how the Soviet secret services operated as the Afghan war developed after the Soviet invasion in 1979.

Now a section of the shroud has been lifted. In a 178-page paper released this month, former Soviet archivist Vasili Mitrokhin extensively quotes KGB cables and files to describe violent guerrilla deception campaigns, assassinations, sabotage and bribery carried out by the KGB in Afghanistan between 1978 and 1983. In the context of current events, Mitrokhin’s disclosures read like a catalogue of the Afghan war’s original covert sins. Among other things, they forecast and explain many of the sins that followed.

The Soviet military’s occupation of Afghanistan occurred in plain view. Unseen were large-scale, adjunct operations mounted by the Soviet secret services. They worked, Mitrokhin writes, out of a large Kabul-based KGB “Residency” and through numerous ad-hoc training, sabotage and small-unit paramilitary missions, some organized directly from Moscow.

Most strikingly, according to Mitrokhin’s paper, the KGB ran scores of secret “false flag” military operations inside Afghanistan during the 1980s. In these, Soviet-trained Afghan guerrilla units posed as CIA-supported, anti-Soviet Mujahideen rebels to create confusion and flush out genuine rebels for counterattacking. The KGB attached “particular importance” to this programme, Mitrokhin writes: As of January 1983, there were 86 armed, KGB-trained “false bands,” as they were called, operating throughout Afghanistan.

They “provoked clashes between different (genuine rebel) groups and when necessary pretended to abandon their armed opposition,” falsely surrendering to the Kabul government. In a relatively small country riven by ethnic and tribal suspicions, a successful programme of this kind could have created widespread confusion.

In addition, KGB “Cascade” units, consisting of about 150 men, were given “broad powers” to operate around Afghanistan, according to Mitrokhin. They engaged in sabotage, recruited agents, coopted Afghan tribes through bribery, and attempted to disrupt the operations of the CIA-backed Mujahideen.

By Mitrokhin’s account, the KGB Residency in Kabul spent much of the Soviet war complaining about how lazy, factionalized, and unreliable its Afghan communist clients had become.

The clandestine structure of the Cold War-era Afghan war anticipated the character of the fractured, deception-laden civil war that raged there during the 1990s. After Moscow and Washington withdrew, regional intelligence agencies - in most cases trained, inspired and funded by the CIA or the KGB during the 1980s _ intervened directly. They often used the same covert methods pioneered by their mentor agencies.

Pakistan’s still-obscured role in aiding the rise of the Taliban between 1994 and 1996, and Uzbekistan’s clandestine support for ethnic Uzbek warlords reigning in Mazar-e-Sharif are two examples among many.

In addition, after his expulsion from Sudan in 1996, Osama bin Laden introduced his stateless terrorist network to Afghanistan - a secret brotherhood that operated as a conspiracy within the Taliban’s Pakistani-supported conspiracy.

A consequence of this history for Afghans is evident in today’s headlines. When political violence occurs, it is very difficult for anyone to express confidence about its origins. A government minister was killed on Feb 14 by a cold, hungry, angry mob at the Kabul airport.

The country’s interim government, eschewing the obvious, made arrests and announced that the minister had been assassinated in a covert plot, perhaps with international dimensions. Now it has backed away from that assertion. Which is true? Sadly, either seems plausible. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.