Olympic Boycotts

After the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, U.S. president Jimmy Carter ordered American athletes to stay away from the 1980 Moscow games. In ordering the boycott, Carter sought to call attention to Soviet actions in Afghanistan--hoping all the while that U.S. actions in Afghanistan would remain secret.

By banning the participation of U.S. athletes and persuading 61 other countries to follow suit, President Carter was following in a long tradition of sporting boycotts. Just four years earlier, 33 nations had boycotted the Montreal Olympics to protest the participation of New Zealand, whose rugby team was touring apartheid South Africa in defiance of another boycott.

While the specific causes of sporting boycotts vary greatly, the reasoning underlying each appears to be something like this: "Participating would send the message that nothing is wrong. Staying away will call attention to a problem the world should address."

In ordering the 1980 boycott, Carter forced Russian officials onto the defensive and brought the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan back into the international spotlight.

American moral authority would have been severely undermined if the world had known that America had goaded the Soviets into invading. But this, according to Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, is more or less what occurred. For months before the Soviets invaded, Brzezinski said in a 1998 interview, the United States had been arming anti-Communist Muslim fighters (the mujahideen). In providing weapons to the Afghan mujahideen, Brzezinski implied, the Carter administration was knowingly--and, what's more, deliberately--increasing the likelihood that the Soviets would invade Afghanistan to prop up Kabul's Communist government.



The Afghan mujahideen enjoyed considerable support from the United States.
Eastern Afghanistan, 1980s
© Getty Images, Inc.

If Brzezinski's account is accurate, then the United States--just like the Soviet Union--had a vested interest in suppressing the full story of the war in Afghanistan. Such a statement does not imply moral equivalence between U.S. and Soviet actions. But it does suggest that feeling good about the American-led boycott was easier with some of the facts about American involvement in Afghanistan suppressed.

The student should read through the history sections of the World Conflicts Today report on Afghanistan, and address the essential questions for critical thinking below. Each question should require an essay response of about 100 words:

• How might wider knowledge of American actions in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion have weakened support for the U.S.-led Olympic boycott?

Now read through the history sections of the World Conflicts Today report on Darfur, and answer another essential question for critical thinking:

• Why might people who advocate boycotting the 2008 Beijing games seek to downplay or suppress information about rebel crimes in Darfur?

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