Washington D.C. - Today, on the 31st anniversary of the creation of Bangladesh, the National Security Archive published on the World Wide Web 46 declassified U.S. government documents and audio clips concerned with United States policy towards India and Pakistan during the South Asian Crisis of 1971. The documents, declassified and available at the U.S.
The latest phase of military operations in Afghanistan has shifted the emphasis from heavy bombing to more of a “boots on the ground” approach involving hundreds of U.S. special forces units with missions ranging from engaging Al-Qaeda fighters, to interrogating prisoners, guarding sensitive positions and, soon, possibly searching the Tora Bora caves. Special forces have played a part in American military operations for more than 200 years.
Now living in exile outside of Rome, 87-year old Zahir Shah reigned as king of Afghanistan from 1933 until July 1973, when his cousin, prince Mohammed Daoud Khan, seized power and proclaimed a republic. Daoud was subsquently overthrown and killed in a 1978 military coup that produced a Soviet client state. A year and a half later, in December 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan setting off a ten-year war.(1) Throughout the Afghan conflict of the 1980s, proposals to revive the Zahir Shah regime figured in to discussions of a post-war political system.
On October 7, the United States launched an attack against targets in Afghanistan in the beginning of what President Bush has promised will be a long campaign against terrorist groups and the states that support them. In response to these events, the National Security Archive offers the second volume of a series called The September 11th Sourcebooks.
Washington, D.C., November 29, 2000 – The CIA history of operation TPAJAX excerpted below was first disclosed by James Risen of The New York Times in its editions of April 16 and June 18, 2000, and posted in this form on its website at: http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html This extremely important document is one of the last major pieces of the puzzle explaining American and British roles in the August 1953 coup against Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadeq.
Washington, D.C., November 5, 1999 – The shocking seizure of the American embassy and its staff in Tehran on November 4, 1979, placed U.S.-Iran relations firmly in the deep freeze. Whatever hopes existed on either side for a rapprochement after the Shah’s departure at the start of the year were quickly doused. Twenty years later, the controversy over reestablishing ties rages on in both countries.
Washington, D.C. – In August 1948, the U.S. Air Force created the Office of Atomic Energy-1 [AFOAT-1], giving it responsibility for managing the Atomic Energy Detection System [AEDS] discovering foreign atomic tests and other nuclear-weapons related activities. AFOAT/1 [later renamed the Air Force Technical Applications Center, or AFTAC] soon had an early triumph--the discovery of the first Soviet atomic test in 1949.
This briefing book contains material from the National Security Archive's project on U.S. policy toward South Asia, which is documenting nuclear developments in India and Pakistan from the 1950s to the present. The Archive is collecting U.S. government records that illustrate American policies and perspectives. Information is being collected from the National Archives and the presidential libraries, and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Mandatory Review requests, used to obtain the declassification of now- secret materials. A selective and focused collection of documents will be made available to researchers.
Washington, D.C. -- May 12, 1998 --In the wake of India's first nuclear weapons tests in 24 years, the National Security Archive has published 22 declassified U.S. government analyses of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear program on the World Wide Web. These documents illustrate issues and concerns that guided policy during a critical period in South Asia's nuclear history: as the U.S. assessed the liklihood that India would opt for nuclear weapons, tried to devise means of dissuading it from doing so, and gauged the response of neighboring Pakistan.