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1979-1992 Soviet - Afghan War - Operation Cylcone

1 President Reagan meeting with Afghan Mujahideen leaders in the Oval Office in 1983. Operation Cyclone was the codename for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention

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Soviet Afghan War Gina Leon
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1. 1980s Soviet–Afghan War Afghan Mujahideen fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s. The ensuing chaos among the well-armed rebel factions proved fertile ground for the eventual rise of the Taliban, which in turn played host to al-Qaeda. Now, more than 30 years after the CIA's initial intervention, the U.S. is withdrawing combat troops from a country that remains fragile and plagued with violence.
2. 1981 Soviet- Afghan War Afghan rebels, or mujahedeen, climb on a Soviet helicopter they shot down in 1981. U.S. assistance helped the rebels drive out the Soviet forces. But the chaotic conditions in Afghanistan allowed al-Qaeda to take root in the 1990s. Afghanistan: This major CIA operation spanned the 1980s, as the Afghan rebels, or mujahadeen, steadily chipped away at the occupying Soviet army. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, it was considered a huge success and also seen as a factor in accelerating the Soviet Union's decline. But then the U.S. and everyone else abandoned Afghanistan
3. Soviet - Afghan War An Afghan guerrilla with a US-made Stinger anti-aircraft missile in this photo taken between November 1987 and January 1988. Pakistan also controlled which rebels received assistance: Of the seven mujahideen groups supported by Zia's government, four espoused Islamic fundamentalist beliefs—and these fundamentalists received most of the funding. Despite this, Carter has expressed no regrets over his decision to support what he still considers the "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan
4. Soviet -Afghan War A mujahideen resistance fighter shoots an SA-7, 1988. The thrust of U.S. policy for the duration of the war was determined by Carter in early 1980: Carter initiated a program to arm the mujahideen through Pakistan's ISI and secured a pledge from Saudi Arabia to match U.S. funding for this purpose. U.S. support for the mujahideen accelerated under Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, at a final cost to U.S. taxpayers of some $3 billion. The decision to route U.S. aid through Pakistan led to massive fraud, as weapons sent to Karachi were frequently sold on the local market rather than delivered to the Afghan rebels; Karachi soon "became one of the most violent cities in the world."
5. 1979-1992 Soviet - Afghan War - Operation Cylcone President Reagan meeting with Afghan Mujahideen leaders in the Oval Office in 1983. Operation Cyclone was the codename for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention
6. Soviet–Afghan War President Ronald Reagan gestures while talking to Burhaneddin Rabbani, a spokesman for the Afghan Resistance Alliance, at the White House in Washington, June 16, 1986. Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken. Funding officially began with $695,000 in mid-1979, was increased dramatically to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987, described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency"
7. Soviet–Afghan War - Sharbat Gula Afghan Girl is a 1984 photographic portrait of Sharbat Gula, an Afghan refugee in Pakistan during the Soviet–Afghan War. Taken by American photojournalist Steve McCurry near the Pakistani city of Peshawar, famously appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic. Gula's image became "emblematic" in some social circles as the "refugee girl/woman located in some distant camp" that was deserving of compassion from the Western viewer, and also as a symbol of Afghanistan to the West.
8. Soviet–Afghan War A Soviet officer shows off his American M16 acquired from Mujahideen fighters. Soviet-Afghan war, 1980s. The U.S. government has been criticized for allowing Pakistan to channel a disproportionate amount of its funding to the controversial Hekmatyar, whom Pakistani officials believed was "their man". Hekmatyar has been criticized for killing other mujahideen and attacking civilian populations, including shelling Kabul with American-supplied weapons, causing 2,000 casualties
9. Soviet–Afghan War Charlie Wilson meeting with Afghan Mujahideen fighters during the Soviet-Afghan War. Hekmatyar was said to be friendly with Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, who was running an operation for assisting "Afghan Arab" volunteers fighting in Afghanistan, called Maktab al-Khadamat. Alarmed by his behavior, Pakistan leader General Zia warned Hekmatyar, "It was Pakistan that made him an Afghan leader and it is Pakistan who can equally destroy him if he continues to misbehave." The CIA and State Department have been criticized for publishing textbooks intended to indoctrinate children with racism and hatred towards foreigners and towards non-muslim Afghans.
10. Soviet–Afghan War Afghans killed by Soviet forces in the 1980s, after a raid on a caravan. Between 562,000 and 2,000,000 Afghans were killed and millions more fled the country as refugees, mostly to Pakistan and Iran. Between 6.5%–11.5% of Afghanistan's 1979 population of 13.5 million is estimated to have perished in the conflict. The war caused grave destruction in Afghanistan, and it has also been cited by scholars as a contributing factor to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

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1970s Research Timeline Taylor Robertson
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1. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Protestors in the rain
2. 1979 The National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights
3. Activists arrive during the Occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, 1969 (AP Photo/RWK).
4. 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’S artistic director and founder Judy Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over five summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
5. Kids participate in a print making workshop at Self Help Graphics, 1973.
6. 1975 UFW grape boycott poster
7. 1973 Reverend Troy Perry stands in his burned-down church The church has also endured its share of troubles. MCC has faced anti-LGBTQ violence, particularly during what Perry terms a period of persecution in the 1970s when they lost five churches to arson—including a New Orleans gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge where MCC members were holding a meeting; it was the worst mass murder of LGBTQ persons in the U.S. until the Pulse night club massacre in 2016. According to the MCC History Project, their churches began to experience the full brunt of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s; the Rev. Elder Don Eastman wrote that by the time effective HIV treatments became available in 1996, MCC had lost one-third of its congregants. “I don’t believe that any disease, I don’t care what it is, is a gift from God to a class of people,” Perry said to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1983 during a televised debate. “We don’t want political games played with this issue. We want to make sure that people don’t die.”
8. 1973 Roe v Wade was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court
9. 1970 First Earth Day “Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin was flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a meeting right around the time the spill happened. That huge, 800 square-mile oil slick was out there on the ocean, and he could see it out the plane window. That’s what gave him the impetus to organize Earth Day. He had this idea that we should have a day where, across college campuses, professors do a teach-in where they talk about the environment. I think with the ’69 oil spill, people had this realization that we should protect the environment for the environment’s sake. This concept of environmental rights emerged. UCSB history professor Rod Nash wrote this declaration of environmental rights and it was presented at this conference that was on the one year anniversary of the spill. He then went on to found the first environmental studies program in the U.S.”
10. 1971 San Fernando Earthquake Damage to Road 2
11. 1975 Christopher Street West Pride Parade The Gay Pride parade on Hollywood Boulevard in 1975. Before Stonewall, the Queer Revolution Started Right Here in Los Angeles. L.A. gays launched the movement (and the battle cry) that shook the world. Founded in 1970 and incorporated in 1976, Christopher Street West Association, Inc. is a nonprofit service organization within the LGBTQ community. The organization was responsible for organizing the world's first LGBTQ pride parade, which took place in Los Angeles. The original intent behind this parade was to celebrate LGBTQ resistance during the 1969 New York Stonewall Riots and to provide an experience in which LGBTQ individuals could feel pride in their identities, see others like themselves in a public setting, and not feel alone. The first pride parade took place on June 28, 1970, with approximately 1,000 people in attendance. Since its beginnings in the early 1970s, the parade now known as LA PRIDE has had a mardi gras-like and carnivalesque quality, presenting political platforms and viewpoints in a fun and celebratory manner. Each year, the parade reflects current social and cultural happenings within the LGBTQ community.
12. 1973 Wounded Knee: Russell Means, right, beats the drum at a meeting of the Wounded Knee occupation Russell Means, right, beats the drum at a meeting of the Wounded Knee occupation on March 10, 1973. A photojournalist who managed to get inside the cordon made a series of images of the stand-off and negotiations. On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, some 200 Sioux Native Americans, led by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), occupy Wounded Knee, the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. The AIM members, some of them armed, took 11 residents of the historic Oglala Sioux settlement hostage as local authorities and federal agents descended on the reservation. AIM was founded in 1968 by Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other Native leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM members occupied Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, saying they had the right to it under a treaty provision granting them unused federal land. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development. Then, in early 1973, AIM prepared for its dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee. In addition to its historical significance, Wounded Knee was one of the poorest communities in the United States and shared with the other Pine Ridge settlements some of the country’s lowest rates of life expectancy.
13. 1973 Minnie Lee & Mary Alice forcibly sterilized
14. 1976 Harvey Milk on the Campaign Trail 1 Harvey Milk passes out fliers at a San Francisco Safeway grocery store during his 1976 state assembly run. Harvey Milk loved campaigning; that was the real secret of his success. For months out of every year, he would let his business drift into further disarray in order to get up at five in the morning and shake hands at bus stops, to visit people in the neighborhood, to speak at every meeting that he was invited to. He organized a Castro Village business association and the annual Castro Street Fair; he persuaded gay bars across the city to boycott Coors beer in aid of a union campaign. He became a figure in the neighborhood, and, eventually, one who could get things done.
15. 1971 Attica Rebellion: State troopers prepare to retake Attica 2 Armed officers walk by the entrance to the Attica Correctional Facility, in Attica, NY, in the aftermath of the riot at the prison, September 1971. Negotiations were led by a group of journalists, politicians and prison reformers, including the radical civil rights attorney William Kunstler and the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Shuttling between prisoners in the yard and state authorities gathered outside, the negotiators worked heroically toward a settlement. But Rockefeller was uncompromising, and after refusing to go to Attica to join the negotiations himself, he abandoned talks and ordered state troopers to “retake” the prison.
16. 1978 Harvey Milk Elected 1
17. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners with makeshift amor in a hallway
18. 1979 White Night Riots 1
19. 1970 Lavender Menace 2 Rita Mae Brown, in Lavender Menace T-shirt, at the Lavender Menace Action, May 1st, 1970. The term "Lavender Menace" originated as a negative term for the association of lesbianism with the feminist movement, but it was later reclaimed as a positive term by lesbian feminists. The phrase "Lavender Menace" was reportedly first used in 1969 by Betty Friedan, president of The National Organization for Women (NOW), to describe the threat that she believed associations with lesbianism posed to NOW and the emerging women's movement. Friedan, and some other heterosexual feminists, worried that the association would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement.
20. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: LASD officers outside the Silver Dollar Cafe 2
21. 1973 STAR 3 Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in New York City. The term was reclaimed by lesbians within the women’s movement in 1970 who demanded inclusion and recognition. Some staff members from NOW resigned from their jobs to join the group. That same year members of the Lavender Menace disrupted the Second Congress to Unite Women, a conference sponsored by NOW by cutting the lights and changing into shirts with the name “lavender menace” on them, Lesbian rights were included in NOW’s six key issues in 1971 and in 1977, Betty Friedan apologized for her previous remarks and actively supported a resolution against sexual preference discrimination.
22. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: LASD officers outside the Silver Dollar Cafe 3
23. 1978 California Prop 6: Protest Advertisment Advertisement against Proposition 6, an initiative sponsored by State Senator John Briggs to expel gay and lesbian teachers, 1978. The Briggs Initiative galvanized the California LGBTQ+ community, as well as state and national political figures. Harvey Milk, elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors the previous year, was arguably the most vocal and visible opponent of Proposition 6. More surprisingly, Ronald Reagan (then Governor of California) came out against it, as did both former US President Gerald Ford and current President Jimmy Carter. Anita Bryant made frequent appearances in support of Proposition 6 as part of the Save Our Children coalition. The referendum failed by a vote of 58.4% to 41.6%.
24. 1977 Apple first computer for mass market and Floppy Disks After the duo invented the Apple I computer, an improved version known as Apple II was already underway. After getting a loan to make more computers, the company eventually took off selling millions of Apple II's well into the 1980s. 1977: The Second Generation: Apple officially became incorporated in January, then publicly released the Apple II in June, which was the first personal computer for the mass market. That same year, Michael Scott became the president of the company. 1978: Floppy Disks: The tech giant took a break from releasing computers and released the Apple Disk II, which was an external floppy-disk drive. The floppy disk was more expensive than what a gaming console costs in 2016. The Apple Disk had an introductory price of $495, but it was then raised to $595
25. In the 1970s, Davis was a fugitive on the FBI's most-wanted list. Once caught, she faced the death penalty in California but was later acquitted on all charges. Angela Davis raises her fist to give her power salute as she sits in the courtroom at Marin Civic Center in San Rafael, Ca., on March 16, 1971. Davis, who is accused of supplying some of the weapons used in a shoot-out during an attempted escape of prisoners at the Marin County Courthouse, is waiting for her court hearing to start after it was postponed because of bomb threats. In the fall of 1970, she was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. (AP Photo)
26. 1979-1992 Soviet - Afghan War - Operation Cylcone President Reagan meeting with Afghan Mujahideen leaders in the Oval Office in 1983. Operation Cyclone was the codename for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention
27. 1972 Draft Lottery - Drum