PARIS, Jan 14: The US Central Intelligence Agency began secret aid to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in mid-1979, knowing it would probably draw the Soviet Union into a military intervention, a former US official said in an interview here this week.

"It was on July 3, 1979 that President (Jimmy) Carter signed the first directive on clandestine aid to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Advisor, told the weekly Nouvel Observateur.

"On that day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my view this aid would bring a military intervention by the Soviets," he said.

"We did not push the Russians into intervening, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would," said Brzezinski.

"That secret operation was an excellent idea," he added. "The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."

According to the official US version, the CIA aid to the Mujahideen began in 1980, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979.

Brzezinski rejected the contention that the US aid had encouraged the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, asking:

"What was most important in the world view of history? The Taliban, or the fall of the Soviet empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"-AFP

© DAWN Group of Newspapers, 1998