A M A C D O N A L D - L A U R I E R I N S T I T U T E P U B L I C A T I O N

After all, it had been the battlefield in the 1980s that had sent the Red Army into retreat, feeding and amplifying new thinking that had led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in 1991. [...] In the 1980s, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan provided a pretext for Pakistan to scale up its proxy war in Afghanistan with the support of the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and other partners. [...] The signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty reaffirmed “their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” (NATO 1949). [...] President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski visited Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Briti. [...] The war in Afghanistan was a centrepiece of his remarks: Throughout the world the Soviet Union and its agents, client states, and satellites are on the defensive – on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive.