The Road to Afghanistan - George Washington University

forces to the White House in March. That document stated that the Soviet leaders wereobviously concerned by the situation in Afghanistan. In their attempts to explain thereasons for failure, Moscow blamed the United States, Pakistan, and Egypt, which,according to Moscow, were actively supporting the armed opposition. In reality, Americanengagement in Afghan affairs, at least on the federal level, was insignificant at that point. Itwas in that March memorandum that the CIA proposed a significant increase in assistanceto counter-revolutionary forces.American intelligence was watching Afghanistan in the context of the overallregional situation at the time. The United States had been painfully defeated in Iran, whichthey had to leave following the overthrow of the shah. Khomeini’s supporters, who hadseized power in Iran, were fervent critics of America. The enormous territory, rich in oiland natural resources and of great strategic importance from many points of view, at thetime was not in anyone’s sphere of influence, though one could imagine that it might fallunder Soviet control. American political analysts named the region that stretched fromEthiopia and the Near East to Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan an “arch of crises,” and soughtto convince U.S. citizens that the permanent goal of the USSR was to maintain presence inthis important region.But because there was no serious evidence of Soviet expansion then, a story aboutPeter the Great’s will was dug out from the archives. That story told how the tsar allegedlyordered his descendants to get as close as possible to Constantinople and India: “Who rulesthere, rules the world.” Independent American media suddenly joined together, as thoughsomeone had issued a directive, and began exploiting this myth, frightening the populationwith the threat of Soviet expansion in “the arch of crises” area, most importantly in the447