America’s Jihadis
Funded and armed by the US and allies, elements of the mujahideen would soon become an enemy of the West
Even before the shock of the Soviet invasion settled, a consensus view emerged in American policy circles, and later on with the press and politicians, that Afghanistan could serve as a springboard for impending Soviet plans to reach ‘warm water’. This imagined geopolitical risk was so pervasive that it galvanized steady support for the anti-soviet mujahideen as well as a beleaguered Pakistan, whose ruling strongman General Mohammad Zia-ul-haq welcomed the Americans’ involvement. With the threat of another war with India always on the horizon, Pakistan’s leader understood he couldn’t afford to ignore the immense Soviet army that was now patrolling the Durand Line, the artificial border separating Afghanistan from Pakistan.
But half the duration of the Soviet-afghan War was a futile struggle for the mujahideen. They were never united into a coalition and faced terrifying odds as the Soviets unleashed the full brunt of their conventional military to crush the rebels. Meanwhile, thanks to the CIA’S persistence and its local ally the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan, financial and material support arrived – but only in trickles. It was not until 1986 that the Reagan administration resolved to openly boost the mujahideen, and that year the US delivered batches of Stinger shoulder-launched SAMS along with other sophisticated NATO weaponry such as Milan anti-tank missiles. China was also an accomplice as huge quantities of assault rifles, machine guns and rockets paid for by the CIA were shipped to Karachi and then distributed by the ISI.
The Stinger SAM, an improvement over the earlier Redeye designed for the US Army, is still considered the iconic weapon of
“THE REST OF THE WORLD SOON PAID A PRICE FOR IGNORING AFGHANISTAN’S DESCENT INTO ISLAMISM”
the Soviet-afghan War – a proverbial gamechanger. But its actual impact on the Soviets was negligible except for discouraging the helicopter flights vital for resupplying far-flung bases. Only a few dozen fixed-wing aircraft were actually shot down using Stingers, while the losses of rotorcraft peaked in the war’s last years. The real headache was the Soviets’ failure to adapt their Hind and Hip helicopters with sufficient countermeasures against the portable missiles.
This problem exacerbated the Soviets’ ongoing quagmire. In the final years of their long campaign morale in both the 40th Army and the Afghan armed forces had almost collapsed, and desertion and narcotics use were tearing apart the ranks. The financial burden of the long war was already being felt in Moscow, whose global reputation took another blow in 1986 when the Chernobyl power plant erupted in the Ukrainian SSR. The threat of the Stinger missiles and the mujahideen’s growing numbers floored the Soviet generals, whose strategy never moved beyond employing more and more firepower against the defenceless Afghan populace.
By the time the last Soviet troops departed in February 1989 the newly elected Bush administration exulted over their symbolic victory at the cost of only a few billion dollars. As American financial aid dwindled the mujahideen factions, disunited as ever and now armed to the teeth, fought the regime of President Mohammed Najibullah in Kabul. The Soviets had left their ally a wellarmed military supported by local militias who distrusted the Pashtun-dominated mujahideen. The civil war lasted for another few years until Najibullah fled his palace in 1992 after the mujahideen, by then financed by the Gulf monarchies, bombarded Kabul and left much of the city ruined. Failing to establish a lasting peace and an interim government, the rebels continued fighting, with the Uzbek warlord General Dostum carving a fiefdom in Afghanistan’s northwest while Tajiks like Ahmad Shah Massoud maintained a stronghold in the east.
At this point, Afghanistan no longer mattered to the foreign policy of the United States. Meanwhile, in Pakistan’s teeming refugee camps a generation of radicalised young men educated in Saudi-funded madrassas, or schoolhouses, launched a reformation movement of sorts. How much support the government of Pakistan extended to the fledgling Taliban at the time is unquantifiable. By 1996, however, they had overrun much of Afghanistan and imposed a brutal legal code that enforced religious adherence and corporal punishment. The establishment of terror camps in the country with illicit funding, even when these were known to American intelligence agencies for years, was the Taliban’s worst-kept secret.
The rest of the world soon paid a price for ignoring Afghanistan’s descent into Islamism. The horror of the September 11 attacks, when four hijacked passenger planes filled with civilians were used for catastrophic suicide operations, launched a punitive ‘war on terror’ that saw the
US and its allies remove the Taliban from power in late-2001 and hunt Al Qaeda on a global scale. As an international coalition set to rebuild Afghanistan it’s apparent many former mujahideen, whose leaders found new prominence as local politicians, actually served the new government while the extremists of the Taliban committed to a longterm insurgency.
The anti-soviet mujahideen, for all their faults, were not the forerunners to global terror. Rather, the extreme fringes of their cause exploited Afghanistan’s chaos amid the world’s indifference to a long-suffering country. Now the world still pays a price for Afghanistan’s trouble.