From 100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World
The Reagan Doctrine
Frustrated by what they saw as Soviet advances in Africa, Central America, and Central Asia, the right-wing cohort around Ronald Reagan renewed an idea for countering communism, what came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine. The logic was simple. Just as the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Chinese leader Mao supported armed insurgencies against colonial or U.S.-aligned states, American power would now encourage and support rebels against communist states. The results have been a catastrophic failure.
There were three targets in particular: Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola. In Afghanistan, a Soviet-backed regime had come to power in 1978 after a coup, and, to support this tottering government, Soviet forces invaded and occupied the country in December 1979. In Nicaragua, a widely popular revolution by the Sandinistas, named for a legendary rebel, Augusto Cesar Sandino, overthrew a decades-old oligarchy in 1979, and moved gradually toward the communist orbit. And Angola, an oil-rich Portuguese colony, won its independence in 1974 after the right-wing regime in Lisbon collapsed; the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which had waged a war of independence for 20 years with support from Cuba, came to power. (Cambodia is often cited as a fourth example, but that was more a legacy of the Vietnam War.)
In Angola, a rival rebel group led by Jonas Savimbi vied with the MPLA for most-independence leadership, but when several peace agreements failed to hold, Savimbi returned time and again to the battlefield to attempt to settle matters by force. Savimbi was supported by the white apartheid regime in South Africa—telling enough—and then by Reagan. By turns a Maoist and a “freedom fighter,” Savimbi was a classic warlord who violated several peace agreements. The Organization of African Unity, the continent’s main multilateral body, condemned him as a tool of South Africa. Reagan welcomed him to the White House and hailed him as “America’s best friend in Africa.” He provided the warlord with $30 million annually in weapons and other needs to sustain the insurgency.
When the war finally wound down—Savimbi was killed in an ambush in 2002—its toll was staggering: an estimated one million were dead, many of them civilian collateral deaths of the war, including 300,000 children. The MPLA stayed in power, Angola was crippled, and the surrounding countries also felt the impacts of 27 years of warfare. “The effects of civil war led to Angola having the highest infant mortality rate in the world in 1990—of every 1000 children born, 350 died before the age of five,” reports an Australian health journal. “Children who do survive are affected by war in other ways including poverty, malnutrition, separation from parent(s), exposure to destructive violence, witnessing death or other atrocities, permanent disablement, having parents who are seriously affected by war experiences, and the loss of life sustaining infrastructure of society.” When the war finally ended and relief workers were able to access areas controlled by Savimbi, they described the malnourishment and disease in those areas as “catastrophic.”
In Nicaragua, the United States was faced with the repudiation of its 30-year history of support for the Somoza family of dictators when the popular Sandinista movement, led by Daniel Ortega, overthrew the last of the Somozas in 1979. As with Cuba, U.S. hostility hastened the new leftist government toward the Soviets. When Reagan took office, the Sandinistas were high on the right-wing hit list. With covert and largely illegal support for an oddball collection of Somoza partisans, mercenaries, drug runners, and anti-communist zealots—collectively called the contras—an immense amount of pressure was exerted on the Managua government. The contras “were major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict,” concludes a Human Rights Watch report, and supported themselves by building cocaine networks that persist to this day.
The Central American presidents consistently voiced their opposition to Reagan’s lavish support for the contras, to no avail. And so did Congress, but the Reagan White House circumvented congressional prohibitions to funnel arms and other aid to the contra gangs. Carried out by the notorious Lt. Col. Oliver North, convicted for his misdeeds (but now a host on Fox News), the illegal aid to the contras prolonged the war that killed 50,000 and displaced 200,000, by conservative estimates.
By 1990, exhausted by the isolation and contra violence, and having mismanaged the economy, the Sandinistas lost an election to a moderate coalition. The Soviets never had much interest in Central America and jettisoned support for Ortega early on. The Sandinistas have remained close to power, however, in a country—and a region—which was devastated by Reagan’s war.
“The Contra war left Nicaragua bitterly divided and heavily armed. An estimated 25,000 to 100,000 weapons remain in civilian hands,” reports the U.S. Library of Congress country series. In the early 1990s, the “recontras,” as they called themselves, carried out “kidnappings of Sandinistas for ransom and attacks on members of farm cooperatives. In 1993 the United States Department of State described their activities as principally criminal, with political overtones.” A Senate committee in 1989 reported that "there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region.” The drug smuggling problem in the United States in the 1980s and subsequently is largely facilitated, if not run by, the networks supporting the contras. From the beginning, the criminality of the contras was breathtaking.
Afghanistan represents the most vivid assertion of success by Reagan Doctrine advocates, who say that the CIA’s supplying of the mujaheddin defeated not only the Soviet army but precipitated the collapse of Soviet communist itself. These claims are so insistent perhaps because the actual consequences are so obviously disastrous.
It was Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski who first suggested that the United States should provoke the USSR into invading Afghanistan (with a threatening movement of U.S. forces into the region). But the Soviets were rattled mainly by the Islamic revolution in Iran and parallel unrest in Afghanistan, then friendly to Moscow but not wholly dominated by the Soviets. After they did invade and occupy Afghanistan in late 1979, a gradually effective guerrilla resistance formed, generally called the mujaheddin, a mixed bunch but significantly “fundamentalist” Muslims waging jihad against the Russians.
The CIA funded the mujaheddin, supplying training and weapons in the early 1980s and more openly providing stinger anti-aircraft weapons and the like after 1985. The Soviets, sustaining some 14,000 casualties, did withdraw in 1989. But the U.S. actions were only part of a much larger set of events and considerations for Moscow. Very early in the occupation, the Soviets had misgivings about the Afghan venture and were seeking a withdrawal strategy, as Politburo minutes show. Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, was committed to withdrawal from the start of his premiership. So the major part of U.S. arms only began to flow after the Soviets had begun their maneuvers to get out. Since the Soviet public knew little of what was going on in Afghanistan, the notion that this misadventure caused the downfall of the Soviet state is not credible.
What is plain is the devastation the war wrought, however, and not just in the endlessly beleaguered Afghanistan. Weapons shipped to the mujaheddin were discovered during the 1980s and ‘90s in civil wars as far away as Mozambique. An estimated 3 million AK-47s were provided to the muj. That fighting force itself became the beginning of the jihadists, including Osama bin Laden’s debut as an anti-West fighter, which have since grown to be such a significant threat worldwide.
Afghanistan was thoroughly undone by the long wars and then the nearly total abandonment by the United States after the Soviet forces departed. It became the quintessential failed state, its economy buoyed by heroin production, its society radicalized or newly repressed by warlords and religious zealots. After a lengthy civil war, the Taliban came to power in the late 1990s and were soon seen as among the most backward regimes on the planet. President Bush nonetheless sent them aid in the summer of 2001.
So it is obvious that the Reagan Doctrine was not only a colossal failure, but immoral by nearly any standard of international conduct. It is almost impossible to calculate its bloody consequences—millions dead, many more millions displaced and driven from their homes, millions of children orphaned, maimed, and left destitute; failed states and devastated economies in place; cocaine and heroin industries flourishing; international criminal gangs and terrorist networks (contras, al Qaeda) given sanctuary and official standing, some now still thriving. A truly astonishing range and depth of destruction.
It would be difficult to conceive of a more depraved set of policies. The intentions were illegal and immoral from the outset, and the results have cascaded into one series of catastrophes after another.
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