Volume 7, No. 10, October 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Eqbal Ahmad draws our attention to the television image from 1985 of Ronald Reagan inviting a group of turbaned men, all Afghan, all leaders of the mujahideen, to the White House lawn for an introduction to the media. “These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers,” said Reagan (Ahmad 2001). This was the moment when the US tried to harness one version of Islam in a struggle against the Soviet Union. Before exploring its politics, let me provide some historical background to the moment. I was a young lecturer at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania in 1975. It was a momentous year in the decolonisation of the world as we knew it; 1975 was the year of the US defeat in Indochina, as it was of the collapse of the last European empire in Africa. In retrospect, it is clear that it was also the year that the centre of gravity of the Cold War shifted from Southeast Asia to southern Africa. The strategic question was this: who would pick up the pieces of the Portuguese empire in Africa, the US or the Soviet Union? As the focal point of the Cold War shifted, there was a corresponding shift in US strategy based on two key influences. First, the closing years of the Vietnam War saw the forging of a Nixon Doctrine, which held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.” The Nixon doctrine was one lesson that the US brought from the Vietnam debacle. Even if the hour was late to implement it in Indochina, the Nixon Doctrine guided US initiatives in southern Africa. In the post-Vietnam world, the US looked for more than local proxies; it needed regional powers as junior partners. In southern Africa, that role was fulfilled by apartheid South Africa. Faced with the possibility of a decisive MPLA victory in Angola,6 the US encouraged South Africa to intervene militarily. The result was a political debacle that was second only to the Bay of Pigs invasion of a decade before. No matter its military strength and geopolitical importance, apartheid South Africa was clearly a political liability for the US. Second, the Angolan fiasco reinforced public resistance within the US to further overseas Vietnam-type involvement. The clearest indication that popular pressures were finding expression among legislators was the 1975 Clark amendment, which outlawed covert aid to combatants in the ongoing Angolan civil war. The Clark amendment was repealed at the start of Reagan’s second term in 1985. Its decade-long duration failed to forestall the Cold Warriors, who looked for ways to bypass legislative restrictions on the freedom of executive action. CIA chief William Casey took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and prototerrorist movements around the world – from Contras in Nicaragua to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) in Mozambique7 and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in Angola8 – through third and fourth parties. Simply put, after the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, the US decided to harness, and even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet. The high point of the US embrace of terrorism came with the Contras. More than just tolerated and shielded, they were actively nurtured and directly assisted by Washington. But because the Contra story is so well known, I will focus on the nearly forgotten story of US support for terrorism in Southern Africa to make my point.
South Africa became the Reagan Administration’s preferred partner for a constructive engagement, a term coined by Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Chester Crocker. The point of ‘constructive engagement’ was to bring South Africa out of its political isolation and tap its military potential in the war against militant – pro-Soviet – nationalism9. The effect of ‘constructive engagement’ was to bring to South African regional policy the sophistication of a blend of covert and overt operations. In Mozambique, for example, South Africa combined an official peace accord (the 1984 Nkomati agreement) with continued clandestine material support for RENAMO terrorism.10 Tragically, the US entered the era of ‘constructive engagement’ just as the South African military tightened its hold over government and shifted its regional policy from detente to ‘total onslaught’.
I do not intend to explain the tragedy of Angola and Mozambique as the result of machinations by a single superpower. The Cold War was fought by two superpowers, and both subordinated local interests and consequences to global strategic considerations. Whether in Angola or Mozambique, the Cold War interfaced with an internal civil war.11 An entire generation of African scholars has been preoccupied with understanding the relation between external and internal factors in the making of contemporary Africa and, in that context, the dynamic between the Cold War and the civil war in each case. My purpose is not to enter this broader debate. Here, my purpose is more modest. I am concerned not with the civil war, but only the Cold War and, furthermore, not with both adversaries in the Cold War, but only the US. My limited purpose is to illuminate the context in which the US embraced terrorism as it prepared to wage the Cold War to a finish.
The partnership between the US and apartheid South Africa bolstered two key movements that used terror with abandon: RENAMO in Mozambique, and UNITA in Angola. RENAMO was a terrorist outfit created by the Rhodesian army in the early 1970s – and patronised by the South African Defence Forces. UNITA was more of a prototerrorist movement with a local base, though one not strong enough to have survived the short bout of civil war in 1975 without sustained external assistance. UNITA was a contender for power, even if a weak one, while RENAMO was not – which is why the US could never openly support this creation of Rhodesian and South African intelligence and military establishments. Because the 1975 debacle in Angola showed that South Africa could not be used as a direct link in US assistance, and the Clark amendment barred US covert aid in Angola, the CIA took the initiative to find fourth parties – such as Morocco – through which to train and support UNITA. Congressional testimony documented at least one instance of a $ 15 million payment to UNITA through Morocco in 1983. Savimbi, the UNITA chief, acknowledged the ineffectiveness of the Clark amendment when he told journalists, “A great country like the US has other channels; the Clark amendment means nothing” (Minter 1994:152).
By any reckoning, the cost of terrorism in Southern Africa was high. A State Department consultant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that RENAMO was responsible for 95 percent of instances of abuse of civilians in the war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as 100,000 persons. A 1989 UN study estimated that Mozambique suffered an economic loss of approximately $ 15 billion between 1980 and 1988, a figure five and a half times its 1988 GDP (Minter 1994). Africa Watch researchers documented UNITA strategies aimed at starving civilians in government-held areas through a combination of direct attacks, kidnappings, and the planting of land mines on paths used by peasants. The extensive use of land mines put Angola in the ranks of the most mined countries in the world (alongside Afghanistan and Cambodia), with amputees conservatively estimated at over 15,000. UN1CEF calculated that 531,000 died of causes directly or indirectly related to the war. The UN estimated the total loss to the Angolan economy from 1980 to 1988 at $ 30 billion, six times the 1988 GDP (Minter 1994:4-5).
The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another name: ‘low intensity conflict’. Whatever the name, political terror brought a kind of war that Africa had never seen before. The hallmark of terror was that it targeted civilian life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power stations, destroying health and educational centres, mining paths and fields. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerrilla war by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerrillas claimed that they were like fish in water, rightwing terrorists were determined to drain the water – no matter what the cost to civilian life – so as to isolate the fish. What is now called collateral damage was not an unfortunate byproduct of the war; it was the very point of terrorism.
Following the repeal of the Clark amendment at the start of Reagan’s second term, the US provided $ 13 million worth of ‘humanitarian aid’ to UNITA, then $ 15 million for ‘military assistance’. Even when South African assistance to UNITA dried up following the internal Angolan settlement in May 1991, the US stepped up its assistance to UNITA in spite of the fact that the Cold War was over. The hope was that terrorism would deliver a political victory in Angola, as it had in Nicaragua. The logic was simple. The people would surely vote the terrorists into power if the level of collateral damage could be made unacceptably high.
Even after the Cold War, US tolerance for terror remained high, both in Africa and beyond. The callousness of Western response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was no exception. Or consider the aftermath of January 6, 1999, when Revolutionary United Front (RUF) gunmen maimed and raped their way across Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, killing over 5,000 civilians in a day. The British and US response was to pressure the government to share power with the RUF rebels.
Afghanistan: The High Point in the Cold War
The shifting centre of gravity of the Cold War was the major context in which Afghanistan policy was framed, but the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was also a crucial factor. Ayatollah Khomeini anointed the US the ‘Great Satan’, and pro-US Islamic countries as ‘American Islam’. Rather than address specific sources of Iranian resentment against the US, the Reagan administration resolved to expand the pro-US Islamic lobby in order to isolate Iran. The strategy was two-pronged. First, with respect to Afghanistan, it hoped to unite a billion Muslims worldwide around a holy war, a crusade, against the Soviet Union. I use the word crusade, not jihad, because only the notion of crusade can accurately convey the frame of mind in which this initiative was taken. Second, the Reagan administration hoped to turn a doctrinal difference inside Islam between minority Shia and majority Sunni into a political divide. It hoped thereby to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution as a minority Shia affair. The plan went into high gear in 1986 when CIA chief William Casey took three significant measures (Rashid 2000, 129-130). The first was to convince Congress to step up the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan by providing the mujahideen with US advisors and US-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles to shoot down Soviet planes. The second was to expand the Islamic guerrilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The third was to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come and train in Pakistan and fight with the Afghan mujahideen. The Islamic world had not seen an armed jihad for centuries. Now the CIA was determined to create one, to put a version of tradition at the service of politics. Thus was the tradition of jihad – of a just war with a religious sanction, nonexistent in the last 400 years – revived with US help in the 1980s. In a 1990 radio interview, Eqbal Ahmad explained how “CIA agents started going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight,”12 Pervez Hoodbhoy recalled. With Pakistan’s Ziaul Haq as the US’s foremost ally, the CIA advertised for, and openly recruited, Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funnelled support to the Mujahidin, and Ronald Reagan feted them on the lawn of the White House, lavishing praise on “brave freedom fighters challenging the Evil Empire.” [2001]
This is the context in which a US/Saudi/Pakistani alliance was forged, and in which religious madrassahs were turned into political schools for training cadres. The CIA did not just fund the jihad; it also played “a key role in training the mujahideen” (Chossudovsky 2001). The point was to integrate guerilla training with the teachings of Islam and, thus, create “Islamic guerrillas”, the Indian journalist Dilip Hiro (1995) explained. Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete sociopolitical ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by (the) atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow [in Chossudovsky 2001].
Notes:
The writer teaches at the Department of Anthropology and International Affairs, Columbia University, New York.
Courtesy American Anthropologist
(To be continued)