Nope, I don't have any timing wrong.
In April 1978 in Afghanistan a new government took the power headed by the leftist and progressive Nur Mohammad Taraki, who had been a writer, poet and professor of journalism at the University of Kabul.
"The Taraki government’s first course of action was to
declare non-alignment in foreign affairs and to affirm a commitment to
Islam within a secular state. Among the much needed reforms, women were
given equal rights, and girls were to go to school and be in the same
classroom as boys. Child marriages and feudal dowry payments were
banned. Labour unions were legalized, and some 10,000 people were
released from prisons. Within a short time hundreds of schools and
medical clinics were built in the countryside.
The landholding system hadn’t changed much since the feudal period;
more than three-quarters of the land was owned by landlords who composed
only 3 percent of the rural population. Reforms began on September 1,
1978 by the abolition all debts owed by farmers – landlords and
moneylenders had charged up to 45 percent interest. A program was being
developed for major land reform, and it was expected that all farm
families (including landlords) would be given the equivalent of equal
amounts of land.
What happened to this progressive government? In brief,
it was
undermined by the CIA and the mujahedeen, which triggered a series of
events that destroyed the country – and ironically led to the disaster
of September 11, 2001 in the USA and to the present chaos and tragedy in
Afghanistan...
Most of the 250,000 mullahs were rich landlords who in
their sermons told people that only Allah could give them land, and that
Allah would object to giving women equal rights or having girls go to
school. But the reforms were popular, so these reactionary elements left
for Pakistan, as “refugees.”
With assistance from Pakistan, they
proceeded to conduct raids on the Afghan countryside where they burned
clinics and schools, and if they found teachers teaching girls, they
would kill the teachers, often disembowelling them in the presence of
the children – to instill fear and panic in the population.Although
having no right to interfere in another country’s affairs, the USA
viewed the new government as being Marxist and was determined to subvert
it.
At first unofficially, but officially after July 3, 1979 with
President Carter’s authorization, the CIA, along with Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia, began to provide military aid and training to the Muslim
extremists, who became known as the mujahedeen and “freedom fighters.”
All this took place before any soviet soldier put a foot in the country, which happened in December 1979.
"Zbigniew Brzezinski, president Carter’s National Security Advisor,
afterwards bragged that he had convinced Carter to authorize the CIA to
set a trap for the Russian bear and to give the USSR the taste of a
Vietnam war. Brzezinski saw this as a golden opportunity to fire up
the zeal of the most reactionary Muslim fanatics,... and for the next 10 years, with an
expenditure of billions of dollars from the USA and Saudi Arabia, and
with the recruitment of thousands of non-Afghan Muslims into the jihad
(including Osama bin Laden), this army of religious zealots laid waste
to the land and people of Afghanistan.”
"Being unable to entice enough Afghanis for this war, the CIA, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan recruited about 35,000 Muslim radicals, from 40
Islamic countries to conduct the war against the Afghan government and
the Soviet forces.
The CIA covertly trained and sponsored these foreign
warriors, hence the fundamentalism that emerged in Afghanistan is a CIA
construct. Although the mujahedeen were referred to as “freedom
fighters,” they committed horrific atrocities and were terrorists of the
first order.
As reported in US media, a “favourite tactic” of the mujahedeen was
“to torture victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their noses,
ears, and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another,”
leading to “a slow, very painful death.” The article describes Russian
prisoners caged like animals and “living lives of indescribable horror.”
(Washington Post, January 13, 1985).
Another publication cites a journalist from the Far Eastern
Economic Review reporting that “one [Soviet] group was killed, skinned
and hung up in a butcher’s shop” (John Fullerton).
Despite these graphic reports, President Reagan continued to refer to
the mujahedeen as “freedom fighters” and in 1985 he invited a group of
them to Washington where he entertained them in the Whitehouse.
Afterwards, while introducing them to the media, he stated, “These
gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.”
Here's the interview made by Le Nouvel Observateur to Zbigniew Brzezinski where he confirms that the US Government backed, funded and armed the muyahideen terrorists to provoke the soviet invasion:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the MujahideenThe former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, also confirm this version in his memoirs “From the Shadows”
