Volume 7, No. 11, November 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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The CIA looked for, but was unable to find, a Saudi Prince to lead this crusade. It settled for the next best thing, the son of an illustrious family closely connected to the Saudi royal house. We need to remember that Osama bin Laden did not come from a backwater family steeped in premodernity, but from a cosmopolitan family. The bin Laden family is a patron of scholarship. It endows programmes at universities like Harvard and Yale. Bin Laden was recruited with US approval, and at the highest level, by Prince Turki al-Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence (Blackburn 2001:3). This is the context in which Osama bin Laden helped build, in 1986, the Khost tunnel complex deep under the mountains close to the Pakistani border, a complex the CIA funded as a major arms depot, as a training facility, and as a medical centre for the mujahideen. It is also the context in which bin Laden set up, in 1989, al-Qaeda, or military base, as a service centre for Arab Afghans and their families (Rashid 2000:132). The idea of an Islamic global war was not a brainchild of bin Laden; the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) hoped to transform the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by Muslim states against the Soviet Union. Al-Qaeda networks spread out beyond Afghanistan: to Chechnya and Kosovo (Blackburn 2001:7), to Algeria and Egypt, even as far as Indonesia. The numbers involved were impressive by any reckoning. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Ahmad Rashid estimated that 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight in the decade between 1982 and 1992. Eventually, Rashid notes, the Afghan jihad came to influence more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals (Rashid 1999). The non-Afghan recruits were known as the Afghan-Arabs or, more specifically, as the Afghan-Algerians or the Afghan-Indonesians. The Afghan-Arabs constituted an elite force and received the most sophisticated training (Chossudovsky 2001). Fighters in the Peshawar-based Muslim “international brigade’’ received the relatively high salary of around $1,500 per month (Stone 1997:183). Except at the top leadership level, fighters had no direct contact with Washington; most communication was mediated through Pakistani intelligence services (Chossudovsky 2001).
The Afghan jihad was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In fiscal year 1987 alone, according to one estimate, clandestine US military aid to the mujahideen amounted to $ 660 million “more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua” (Ahmad and Barnet 1988, 44). Apart from direct US funding, the CIA financed the war through the drug trade, just as in Nicaragua. The impact on Afghanistan and Pakistan was devastating. Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the production of opium (a very different drug than heroin) was directed to small regional markets. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at University of Ottawa, estimates that within only two years of the CIA’s entry into the Afghan jihad, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of US demand” (2001:4). The lever for expanding the drug trade was simple: as the jihad spread inside Afghanistan, the mujahideen required peasants to pay an opium tax. Instead of waging a war on drugs, the CIA turned the drug trade into a way of financing the Cold War. By the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Central Asian region produced 75 percent of the world’s opium, worth billions of dollars in revenue (McCoy 1997).13
The effect on Pakistan, the US’s key ally in waging the Cold War in Central Asia, was devastating. To begin with, the increase in opium production corresponded to an increase in local consumption, hardly an incidental relation. The UN Drug Control Programme estimated that the heroin-addicted population in Pakistan went up from nearly zero in 1979 to 1.2 million by 1985, “a much steeper rise than in any nation” (McCoy 1997, in Chossudovsky 2001). There were two other ways in which the Afghan jihad affected Pakistan. The first was its impact on Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, which were key to giving the CIA an effective reach in Afghanistan and, more generally, in Soviet Central Asia. The more the anti-Soviet jihad grew, the more the intelligence services, particularly the ISI, moved to the centre of governmental power in Pakistan. The Islamisation of the anti-Soviet struggle both drew inspiration from and reinforced the Islamisation of the Pakistani state under Zia (Hoodbhoy 2001:7). Second, the more the Afghan jihad gathered momentum, the more it fed a regional offshoot, the Kashmiri jihad (Hoodbhoy 2001:7). The jihadi organisations were so pivotal in the functioning of the Pakistani state by the time Zia left office that the trend to Islamisation of the state continued with post-Zia governments. Hudood Ordinances14 and blasphemy laws remained in place. The Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islam, a key party in the alliance that was the Afghan jihad, became a part of Benazir Bhutto’s governing coalition in 1993 (Chossudovsky 2001).
By now it should be clear that the CIA was key to forging the link between Islam and terror in Central Asia. The groups it trained and sponsored shared three characteristics: terror tactics, embrace of holy war, and the use of fighters from across national borders (the Afghan-Arabs). The consequences were evident in countries as diverse and far apart as Indonesia and Algeria. Today, the Laskar jihad in Indonesia is reportedly led by a dozen commanders who fought in the Afghan jihad (Solomon 2001:9). In Algeria, when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was prevented from taking power by the Algerian military after it became evident that it would win the 1991 election, those in the political leadership of FIS who had pioneered the parliamentary road were eclipsed by those championing an armed jihad. The Algerian-Afghans “played an important role in the formation of the Islamic extremist groups of the post-Chadli crisis.” Though their precise numbers are not known, Martin Stone reports that “the Pakistani embassy in Algiers alone issued 2,800 visas to Algerian volunteers during the mid-1980s.” One of the most important leaders of the Algerian-Afghans, Kamerredin Kherbane, went on to serve on the FIS’s executive council in exile (Stone 1997:183).
The Cold War created a political schism in Islam. In contrast to radical Islamist social movements like the pre-election FIS in Algeria, or the earlier revolutionaries in Iran, the Cold War has given the US a state-driven conservative version of political Islam in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. In an essay on 9/11, Olivier Roy has usefully contrasted these tendencies – radical political Islam as against conservative neo-fundamentalism. Islamist social movements originated in the 20th century in the face of imperial occupation; they aimed to rejuvenate Islam, not just as “a mere religion”, but as “a political ideology which should be integrated into all aspects of society (politics, law, economy, social justice, foreign policy, etc.)” (Roy 2001). Though it began by calling for the building of an umma (supranational Muslim community), radical lslamism adapted to the nation state and sprouted different national versions of Islamism. This shift has been the most dramatic in movements such as the Lebanese Hezbollah, which has given up the idea of an Islamic state and entered the electoral process, and Hamas, whose critique of the PLO is that it has betrayed not Islam, but the Palestinian nation. Where they are allowed, these movements operate within legal frameworks. Though not necessarily democratic, they strengthen the conditions for democracy by expanding participation in the political process. In contrast, state-driven neofundamentalist movements share a conservative agenda. Politically, their objective is limited to implementing Sharia (Islamic law). Socially, they share a conservatism evidenced by opposition to female presence in public life and a violent sectarianism (anti-Shia). Though originating in efforts by unpopular regimes to legitimise power, the history of neofundamentalist movements shows that these efforts have indeed backfired. Instead of developing national roots, neofundamentalism has turned supranational; uprooted, its members have broken with ties of family and country of origin. According to Roy, “while Islamists do adapt to the nation-state, neofundamentalists embody the crisis of the nation-state. This new brand of supra-national fundamentalism is more a product of contemporary globalization than the Islamic past” (Roy 2001).
If the mujahideen and al-Qaeda were neofundamentalist products of the Cold War – trained, equipped, and financed by the CIA and its regional allies – the Taliban came out of the agony and the ashes of the war against the Soviet Union. The Taliban was a movement born across the border in Pakistan at a time when the entire population had been displaced not once but many times over, and when no educated class to speak of was left in the country. The ‘Talib’was a student and the student movement, Taliban, was born of warfare stretching into decades, of children born in cross-border refugee camps, of orphans with no camaraderie but that of fellow male students in madrassas, of madrassas that initially provided student recruits to defend the population – ironically, women and young boys – from the lust and the loot of mujahideen guerrillas. Born of a brutalised society, the Taliban was, tragically, to brutalise it further. An old man in a mosque in Kandahar, an architectural ruin, which was once an ancient city of gardens and fountains and palaces, told Eqbal Ahmad, “They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life” (1995).
Both those who see the Taliban as an Islamic movement and those who see it as a tribal (Pashtun) movement view it as a premodern residue in a modern world. But they miss the crucial point about the Taliban: even if it evokes premodernity in its particular language and specific practices, the Taliban is the result of an encounter of a premodern people with modern imperial power. Given to a highly decentralised and localised mode of life, the Afghan people have been subjected to two highly centralised state projects in the past few decades: first, Soviet-supported Marxism, then, CIA-supported lslamisation.15
When I asked two colleagues, one an Afghan and the other a US student of Afghanistan, how a movement that began in defence of women and youth could turn against both,16 they asked me to put this development in a triple context: the shift from the forced gender equity of the communists to the forced misogyny of the Taliban, the combination of traditional male seclusion of the madrassas with the militarism of the jihadi training, and, finally, the fear of Taliban leaders that their members would succumb to rape, a practice for which the mujahideen were notorious.17 True, the CIA did not create the Taliban. But the CIA did create the mujahideen and embraced both bin Laden and the Taliban as alternatives to secular nationalism. Just as, in another context, the Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas to operate unhindered during the first intifadah – allowing it to open a university and bank accounts, and even possibly helping it with funding, hoping to play it off against the secular PLO – and reaped the whirlwind in the second intifadah.18
My point is simple: contemporary ‘fundamentalism’ is a modern political project, not a traditional cultural leftover. To be sure, one can trace many of the elements in the present ‘fundamentalist’ project – such as opium production, madrassas, and the very notion of jihad Akbar – to the era before modern colonisation, just as one can identify forms of slavery prior to the era of merchant capitalism. Just as trans-Atlantic slavery took a premodern institution and utilised it for purposes of capitalist accumulation – stretching its scale and brutality far beyond precapitalist practice or imagination – so Cold Warriors turned traditional institutions such as jihad Akbar and madrassas, and traditional stimulants such as opium, to modern political purposes on a scale previously unimagined, with devastating consequences. Opium, madrassas, jihad Akbar – all were reshaped as they were put into the service of a global US campaign against ‘the evil empire’.
When the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, this new terror was unleashed on the Afghan people in the name of liberation. Eqbal Ahmad observed that the Soviet withdrawal turned out to be a moment of truth, rather than victory, for the mujahideen (Ahmad 1992a). As different factions of the mujahideen divided along regional (north versus south), linguistic (Farsi versus Pashto), doctrinal (Shia versus Sunni) and even external (pro-Iran versus pro-Saudi) lines, and fought each other, they shelled and destroyed their own cities with artillery. Precisely when they were ready to take power, the mujahideen lost the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people (Ahmad 1989, 1992a, 1992b).
Notes
(To be continued)