For Brzezinski, who worried that the Soviet Union might fill an “arc of crisis” that ran across the global South, the mujahedin and backers like Zia’s Pakistan and the Saudi royals represented a reactionary “arc of Islamism” that could be encouraged to provide a powerful counterweight to communist influence. He urged Carter to “concert with Islamic countries both a propaganda campaign and a covert action campaign to help the rebels.”
The anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan therefore offered the Saudis an opportunity to project its state religion into Central Asia, but also provided a convenient ventilation mechanism for the extremism gestating within its borders. Saudi Arabia arranged a special fund that matched every dollar the CIA gave to the cause of the mujahedin. Bolstered by the contributions of ideologically inclined princes, the Saudi backing was crucial in purchasing hundreds of Stinger antiaircraft missile systems without congressional knowledge. By backing the covert US war effort, the Saudi royal family was able to provide the most fanatical members of their society with a one-way ticket to Pakistan, where they could be shepherded over the border to vent their pent-up aggression against the atheistic Soviet invaders. At the urging of his government, bin Baz—now the Saudi Grand Mufti—issued a new fatwa compelling worldwide Muslim participation in the anti-Soviet jihad.
Thanks to Saudi support, the indigenous mujahedin in Afghanistan were supplemented by tens of thousands of foreign fighters locally referred to as the “Afghan Arabs.” Many of the foreign fighters flocking to the battlefield were drawn by the preaching of a Palestinian theologian named Abdullah Azzam. Before arriving in Pakistan, Azzam had spent several years teaching at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz University, educating students on the texts of proto-Wahhabi clerics like Ibn Taymiyyah, the medieval scholar who laid the basis for takfiri doctrine. In Jeddah, Azzam instructed a young Osama bin Laden, helping him hone the religiously zealous sensibility that set him apart from his more secular siblings.
The seventeenth son of billionaire construction baron Mohammed bin Laden, Osama had been shaken by the scenes of Saudi tanks barreling into the Grand Mosque to break the siege in December 1979. His family had been renovating the mosque at the time, and its construction blueprints were used by the military to devise the assault. Bin Laden’s revulsion at the ensuing bloodbath left him captivated by Utaybi’s vision. But his growing resentment of the royal family momentarily dissolved in the anti-Soviet jihad it was backing in Afghanistan. His family was contributing heavily to the war effort at the time, and it eventually dispatched young bin Laden to join his mentor, Azzam, in Peshawar. There, he joined several of Utaybi’s former cohorts, including Muhammad Amir Sulayman Saqr, who became one of Al Qaeda’s most skilled document forgers.
In 1984, Azzam and bin Laden founded the international Islamist organization known as Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), or the Services Bureau. With bin Laden’s wealth and Azzam’s ardor, this network functioned like a jihadist Abraham Lincoln Brigade, providing free lodging, training and ideological indoctrination to many of the tens of thousands of Islamist fundamentalists from forty-three countries who flocked to the Afghan battlefield. The effort was bolstered by the involvement of Benevolence International, a charity funded by prominent Saudi businessman Adel Batterjee, whom Azzam had praised for being “at the forefront” of jihad.
The following year, President Ronald Reagan formalized US support for the Afghan insurgents when he issued National Security Directive 166. Among the directive’s goals was to “improve the military effectiveness of the Afghan resistance in order to keep the trends in the war unfavorable to the Soviet Union.”
From this classified authorization, the largest covert operation in CIA history was born. Known as Operation Cyclone, it committed over a billion dollars to the mujahedin, affording them state-of-the-art weapons and advanced hunter-killer training. While the American national security state cheered the gradual collapse of the Soviet military campaign, its efforts transformed Afghanistan into a petri dish for international jihadism.
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Vincent Cannistraro, a CIA counterterrorism officer who served as director of intelligence for Reagan’s National Security Council at the height of Operation Cyclone, monitored intelligence operations from Nicaragua to Afghanistan. He likened briefing Reagan to talking at a brick wall: “Reagan was a very amiable, likable person,” Cannistraro told me, “but you weren’t going to get any burst of mental energy from him on the questions of the day.”
The president’s rapidly advancing Alzheimer’s rendered him incapable of absorbing the details of foreign policy, leaving a cast of hard-liners and rogues with substantial control over covert operations. For some Cold War cowboys, the war in Afghanistan offered a chance to get revenge on the Soviets for the humiliation they experienced as enlisted soldiers in Vietnam. For others, it was an opportunity to realize the lucre and glory of war without risking American lives. For Representative Charlie Wilson, it was a bit of both.
On Capitol Hill, Wilson was known as an alcoholic vulgarian who did little for his largely African American constituency back in east Texas but provided the timber industry with a loyal servant. He had also cultivated a reputation as the most ardent supporter of the mujahedin in Congress, leveraging his position on two congressional committees to double funding for the covert war in Afghanistan. He did this with a single phone call to the staffer in charge of the House Appropriations Committee’s black operations budget. “I was expecting to have to debate it and justify it and all that,” Wilson said, “but when it was read out in the closed session of the appropriations committee, nobody said a word.”
Covert proxy wars were easy this way. The public never had to know how or where their money was being spent. And by subverting the democratic process, policymakers insulated themselves from antiwar agitation and scrutiny from the fourth estate. Opaque operations like these were also perfect vehicles for war profiteering.
Wilson made sure to insert special language into the appropriations bill requiring the Pentagon to buy $40 million in .22-millimeter cannons produced by a Swiss weapons company called Oerlikon. The guns were deemed utterly worthless against Soviet airpower and required the rebels to cart them onto the battlefield by mule and cart. But Wilson was attached to the weapon, successfully lobbying for its approval with an almost messianic zeal. According to Cannistraro, the CIA had reason to suspect a financial relationship between Wilson and Oerlikon. Wilson also owned some $250,000 worth of stocks in an oil company that became a Pakistani subsidiary right before he developed his sudden interest in Afghanistan. The mutually beneficial relationship with Pakistan paved the path for Wilson to serve as a registered lobbyist for the country upon his retirement from public life.
In the meantime, Cannistraro joined Wilson on a fateful congressional delegation to Pakistan at the height of the anti-Soviet jihad. In Islamabad, during a dinner with President Zia, the Pakistani junta leader rose spontaneously before his guests and demanded they ship shoulder-mounted Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahedin. “Everyone was taken by surprise,” Cannistraro recalled, “but then they said, okay, we agree. And that’s what broke the opposition.” The Stingers turned the tide of the battle, enabling the mujahedin to take down the Soviet Mil Mi-24 Hind combat helicopters and MiG jets that had been pulverizing the supply convoys flowing over the border from Pakistan.
The rapid improvement in weapons to the rebels complemented a CIA-built complex of tunnels and mujahedin training camps near the border city of Khost in Afghanistan’s mountainous Paktiya province. To complete the job on time, the agency tapped an experienced contractor named Osama bin Laden, who dutifully carted in his family’s earthmoving equipment. “My job was to raise the alarm and if there was an opportunity to do it and I failed to do it, it would be my failure,” Cannistraro said. “And none of us knew who bin Laden was at the time.”
Weapons were not all that flowed into Afghanistan courtesy of the US government. A $51 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the University of Nebraska’s Center for Afghanistan Studies and a former Peace Corps volunteer who directed the center, Thomas Gouttierre, produced some 4 million third-grade textbooks that helped transform Afghan schools into jihadist indoctrination centers. Introduced in 1986, the books encouraged Afghan children to gouge the eyes and amputate the legs of Soviet soldiers.