The AFP is pushing a wrong history of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and "western" financing of the resistance to that.

West quickly agreed to back Afghan resistance in 1980: files

LONDON (AFP) – Western powers met in secret soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and formed plans to back Islamic resistance, according to British files from 1980 released Thursday.

Senior officials from Britain, France, then West Germany and the United States met in Paris on January 15 that year to discuss the West's response to the December 24, 1979 invasion.

While that meeting may well have taken place, the notion that the financing of a resistance by western money followed only after the Soviets invaded is wrong.

As then CIA director Robert Gates wrote in his memoir and then National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski confirmed in an interview with the French Le Nouvel Observateur, the U.S. was financing an Islamic resistance against the Afghan government long before the Soviets invaded. Indeed part of the intent of pushing such a resistance was to drag the Soviet Union into its Vietnam:

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.