La 'Secreta' Operación Que Hundió a la URSS — Y Creó al Talibán Sin Saberlo

July 3, 1979. Washington, D.C. Jimmy Carter signs a four-page presidential order. No press conference. No statement. That order, Operation Cyclone, authorizes the CIA to arm Afghan resistance groups. The Soviet Union has not yet invaded Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski would explain it decades later with brutal honesty: the objective was to give the Soviets their own Afghan trap. Their own Vietnam. It worked. Ten years. More than $20 billion. 2,300 Stinger missiles transported by mules through the passes of the Hindu Kush. Three of the first four Stingers fired shot down Mi-24 helicopters. On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet soldier crossed the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan. The Soviet Empire collapsed two years later. But no one had planned what would happen next. The Mujahideen didn't disband. They fragmented. The Taliban took Kabul in 1996. Al-Qaeda built its bases in Afghanistan. On September 11, 2001, planes attacked New York. The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. The war lasted twenty years. Charlie Wilson, the Texas congressman who did the most for the operation, summed it up before he died in 2010: "We won it. And then we abandoned it." ⏱️ TABLE OF CONTENTS 00:00 — July 3, 1979. The order no one announced. 02:30 — Afghanistan 1978: The Communist Coup and the Resistance 05:00 — The Soviet Invasion of December 24, 1979 07:30 — The First Lee-Enfield Rifles: The Modest Beginning 10:00 — Charlie Wilson: "Good Time Charlie" in the Refugee Camps 12:30 — Gust Avrakotos, Michael Vickers, and the Royal Strategy 15:00 — From 20 Million to 630 Million a Year: The Escalation 17:30 — The Stinger: Three of the First Four Shoot Down Helicopters 20:00 — The Mules of the Hindu Kush and Sergeant Rice 22:30 — February 15, 1989: The Last Soviet Crosses the Bridge 25:00 — The Power Vacuum and the Birth of the Taliban 27:30 — Al-Qaeda, 9/11, and Twenty Years of War 29:00 — "The We won. And then we abandoned it." 📌 SOURCES AND REFERENCES — Operation Cyclone — Wikipedia and Military Wiki, full records. — We Are The Mighty — Operation Cyclone: ​​The CIA's covert program to arm the Mujahideen. — Coffee or Die Magazine — Operation Cyclone: ​​The Green Berets Who Armed the Afghan Mujahideen. — Office of the Historian, US Department of State — The Horn of Africa Crisis in the context of the Cold War. — Crile, George. Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003. — Explore The Archive — Charlie Wilson, the Man Behind the CIA's Biggest Covert Op. 🔔 If you found this story as extraordinary as we did, please like and subscribe. It helps us more than you can imagine to continue producing this type of content. And if there's a battle, operation, or war story you'd like us to cover in the next video, let us know in the comments. See you in the next video.