When a group of Muslim Arab immigrants were arrested for bombing New York’s World Trade Center on February 25, 1993, investigations into their background pointed to a common link: most had participated in the war in Afghanistan.1 News organizations seized on tenuous leads to see whether another Pulitzer Prize–worthy scandal might be uncovered. Did the CIA, in its all-out effort to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan, secretly train fanatical Muslim Arab terrorists who had now turned their U.S.-supplied weapons and skills on their former masters? More specifically, in return for services rendered in Afghanistan, had the CIA arranged entry to the United States for the group’s spiritual leader, Shaikh Umar Abd al-Rahman, wanted in Egypt for authorizing killings by members of a radical Islamist group called al-Jihad? So charged, among others, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
Similarly, when Saudi Arabia announced that it would execute four young men found guilty of placing a car bomb that exploded at a U.S.-run Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh in November 1995 (killing five Americans and two Indians), the authorities first produced them on television. There they confessed to the bombing, and three of the four recounted their history of fighting in the Afghan jihad, where they learned both the ideological fervor and military skills they brought home with them.
To the surprise of no one who had followed Afghanistan before six Americans were killed in New York and five in Riyadh, the trail led back to Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, leader of the Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party) of Afghanistan. Not that Hikmatyar or any other Afghan was even remotely implicated in this or any other act of violence outside of Afghanistan and its neighborhood2; and not that it had not been common knowledge among those who cared that Hikmatyar as well as other Afghan leaders who had not achieved his international bugbear status had been assassinating and terrorizing other Afghans for years; but all of the bombing suspects who had been to Afghanistan seemed to have worked with Hikmatyar’s group. As had also been no secret for years, this was the group that had received the largest share of the U.S. and Saudi aid distributed to the mujahidin groups by Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
U.S. and Saudi support for Islamist organizations that opposed Western policies and that also turned against Saudi Arabia in the 1990–91 Gulf War grew out of the Cold War bipolar view of the world. This view affected all U.S. foreign policy thinking and was especially dominant in the security agencies, particularly the secret ones. Overt support for “right-wing authoritarians” against “left-wing totalitarians” was not so different from covert support for terrorists or Islamic extremists. The standard put-down of critics of this policy (worthy of inclusion in any updated edition of Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues) was, “of course, he is not a Jeffersonian Democrat,” implying that anyone who argued against arming political killers was naïve and ethnocentric enough to think that in foreign policy one could collaborate only with eighteenth-century Americans (slave owners, by the way, so perhaps the remark is not as apt as it might be). Hikmatyar and his ilk were even helping us avenge Vietnam by carrying out the supreme Cold War goal: “Killing Russians.”3
On the other side, some of those ignorant of the situation in Afghanistan who have rushed to condemn a policy they ignored for years have extended their criticism to the whole Afghan resistance movement and the effort to assist it. It is worth remembering that the Soviet occupiers and their Afghan clients employed at least as much terror and violence as their most ruthless opponents.4 The Afghans, who have suffered from these extremists more than anyone, do not constitute a “terror nation,” as a CNN Special Report called it. To the extent that terrorists have found refuge and training in Afghanistan, the blame must go to all those who destroyed that country’s fragile institutions, starting with the Soviet Union. Nor does the experience of Afghanistan alone explain violence by some Islamists in Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, despite the predictable attempts of ineffective, corrupt, or dictatorial governments to find external scapegoats for their problems.
In some quarters, the undifferentiated image of the “fundamentalist terrorist” seems to be replacing that of the “Soviet-inspired Communist” (or, in Moscow, “American imperialist”) as the enemy image of our time. Then as now, wise policy will take into account the real grievances that lead people to follow extremist leaders and will avoid labeling whole groups or nations with catchy slogans. As in the Cold War, simplified bipolar thinking can lead one into dangerous alliances.
The links to the Arab world that contributed to the development of Arab participation in the Afghan jihad were initiated by the Afghan state in its quest for Islamic legitimacy. Afghan rulers feared privately (or poorly) educated ulama attached to tribes as well as ulama educated in British India or subsequently Pakistan because of their penchant for preaching jihad against the government, as a result of either “ignorance” or British/Pakistani gold. Since at least the late nineteenth century, Afghan governments had denounced such movements as “wahhabi,” linking them to the anti-Sufi Salafi movement of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. They in turn linked “wahhabism” to Britain and Western imperialist interests. Afghanistan’s communist president, Najibullah, used identical rhetoric against the mujahidin a century later.5
Nonetheless, the government required a corps of competent and loyal ulama to administer the judicial system, whose relation to Hanafi jurisprudence was essential to state legitimacy. It therefore established a faculty of theology at Kabul University in collaboration with Egypt’s al-Azhar University.6 In conjunction with the founding of various faculties, nearly all with foreign sponsorship, Afghans who were to become professors received scholarships to study at the sponsoring institutions. Thus, for example, in the early 1970s, half of the teachers in the theology faculty had degrees from al-Azhar.7
In turning to al-Azhar, the regime undoubtedly had in mind the Azhar of, among others, Muhammad Abduh, whose version of Islamic modernism legitimated the same type of rule by secular figures, seemingly Western reforms of customs, the pursuit of modern professions, and the combination of Western, traditional, and Islamic legal sources that the Afghan monarchy sought to promote. A number of prominent figures of the old regime indeed brought exactly such views back from Cairo. Sending students into the turbulent Islamic milieu of Cairo in the 1950s and 1960s, however, inevitably brought the young Afghan scholars into contact with the Muslim Brotherhood and the exciting new writings of the Brotherhood’s most charismatic thinker, Sayyid Qutb.
The expansion of the state funded by foreign aid created new elites, who organized political groups. Some of these groups adopted revolutionary ideologies; they sought to seize control of the state in order to transform society. Like revolutionaries elsewhere, they also included many who had studied abroad, an experience that provided a firsthand encounter with foreign models of modernity and a perspective from which to criticize their own society.
Most studies of revolutionary “counterelites” during the Cold War adopted the same bipolar view as the policymakers, equating revolutionaries with communists or leftists, foreign education with “Western” education, and cosmopolitanism or modernization with Westernization. In Afghanistan, however, as in the rest of the Islamic world, Islamic revolutionary ideas (Islamism) competed with Marxism, creating two distinct and opposed tendencies among the disaffected, with different international ties as well.
The Islamic movement in Kabul had roots in the 1950s, when a group of students and teachers at the faculty of theology, including some who had contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood while studying in Egypt, began meeting to study how to refute the arguments put forward by the Marxists on campus.8 After 1965, as the university expanded rapidly with provincial recruits, a newly invigorated Islamic movement gained influence among students under the name of the Muslim Youth Organization (Sazman-i Javanan-i Musulman).9 Around the beginning of 1973, the movement began to register its members and formed a leadership shura (council). The first meeting of the shura took place in the home of Burhanuddin Rabbani,10 then a junior professor of the sharia faculty, who was elected leader and chairman of the leadership council. Ghulam Rasul (later Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul) Sayyaf, also a lecturer at the sharia faculty, was elected deputy leader.11 All three had studied at al-Azhar. Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a former student of the engineering faculty, was in jail for having ordered the murder of a Maoist student and was not present at the meeting, but he was to be in charge of political activities together with another jailed activist (since killed). The council later selected the name Jamiat-i Islami (Islamic Society) for the movement.12 Two-thirds of the members of the Islamic movement’s shura and about two-fifths of all the early leaders had advanced Islamic educations.13 The top three leaders and the official in charge of cultural affairs had all studied at al-Azhar or in Saudi Arabia.
The Islamists had been in contact with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and had regular contact with the Pakistani Jamaat-i Islami, but at first they had no formal links with either.14 Although their opponents called them “Ikhwanis” (and this was an accurate depiction of their ideology), according to Roy the Egyptian Ikhwan did not organize formal branches outside the central Arab world.15 The writer who seems to have influenced them the most was Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by Nasser about the time that the Islamic movement began to grow on the Kabul campus. Both Rabbani and Khalis translated his work in the 1960s.16
In exile, the Islamists set about their search for foreign aid. In 1974, Rabbani spent six months in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis provided assistance for the first year of exile, probably through the Muslim World League (Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami), but after 1975 and Daoud’s shift toward U.S. allies, the Shah’s Iran and the Saudis, they stopped their aid.17
The programs of Hizb and Jamiat clearly show the influence of Qutb and Mawdudi, particularly in their use of the term jahiliyyah (pre-Islamic ignorance or barbarism) to describe Western or communist societies, but neither fully adopted the ideology of takfir, declaring as unbelievers people who are Muslims by customary criteria (Muslim father, profession of the faith, prayer, etc.).18 Qutb was the first to use this term the way Stalin used the term “revisionist”—as a capital crime.19 Qutb’s views were never adopted by the mainstream of the Ikhwan.
The question for many Islamists in the Arab world, whether to concentrate on the seizure of power from above (à la Lenin) or the Islamization of society from below (à la Gramsci), had little resonance in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Faced with a military occupation by an atheist power, Muslims had to engage in jihad, which in itself Islamicized society. The Islamists were as a whole the least Westernized (or Sovietized) of the Afghan elites. Their education embodied the Islamist slogan “Neither East nor West.” Not a single one of them had been educated in the Soviet bloc or in non-Islamic Third World institutions such as the American University of Beirut or Indian universities. Their only significant international ties were with the Islamic ummah.
By the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Afghan Islamists were already connected to an international network that included both radical Islamists in the Arab world and the U.S. security establishment. The key links at the center of this network were the Saudi monarchy and the Pakistani military regime of Zia ul-Haq, the pillars of U.S. security policy in the Gulf. The development of the Islamic networks in the Afghan war resulted largely from the policies of the United States and these two Muslim states.20
The Saudi monarchy’s legitimacy rested on its alliance with possibly the most conservative religious establishment in the Islamic world. The rise of the dynasty of ibn Saud consisted of the classic combination of a tribal chief and a charismatic preacher, in this case Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab preached return to the early days of Islam, to the original, former (Salafi) practice of the faith—before Sufism, excessive tolerance for non-Muslims, and other foreign practices had polluted the ummah. The Saudi monarchy claimed that the Quran was their only constitution and based the judicial system on the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, known as the strictest of the four Sunni schools.
Nonetheless, the Saudi use of Islam in international relations was not a pure outgrowth of ideology. It was aimed at two rivals in the Muslim world: secular Arab nationalism, especially in its leftist, anti-imperialist, Soviet-leaning forms (as represented by Gamal Abdul Nasser); and later, the Iranian revolution, which was both revolutionary and Shia.
A principal organization used by the Saudis in this struggle was the Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami, founded in 1962.21 This organization financed the printing of Qurans and other religious literature; it supported Islamic centers in various parts of the world, including the United States.
At the time the Rabita was founded, the Saudis were engaged in a direct military struggle with Nasser in Yemen, and it is reasonable to suppose that this organization was intended to strengthen their alliance with the Ikhwan there against their common enemy. Although the Brothers’ revolutionary and anti-imperialist orientation was anathema to the Saudi monarchy, their opposition to “communism,” of which Nasserism was for them only a local variant, made them allies. The evolution of the wing of the Brothers led by Hudaybi and then Talamasani, rejecting Qutb’s teaching and favoring a strategy of Islamicizing society from below rather than seizing political power (what Olivier Roy calls “neo-fundamentalism,” in distinction from Islamism) fit well with the Saudi strategy.22 This strategy also made them amenable to Anwar al-Sadat in the 1970s, as he purged Nasserites from the state and attempted to use the Islamists against the leftists on the street and the university campuses. This strategy of Sadat enjoyed the support of Saudi Arabia and the United States.23 Saudi Arabia, via the Rabita, is thought to have supported Muslim Brotherhood activity throughout the Arab world. In return, the Ikhwan never tried to organize a branch, even clandestinely, in Saudi Arabia.24 In South Asia, the Saudis supported the Jamaat-i Islami of Pakistan, whose more conservative approach was already closer to their views.
After the Iranian revolution, the Saudis increased their activity as, for the first time, another state contested their position as the leading Muslim state. The jihad in Afghanistan arrived at the right time for this effort, and much of the Saudi effort there must be understood as directed at establishing a militant Sunni Islamist movement, anti-Shia and under their patronage.
In the 1970s, after the OPEC price rises and the division of Pakistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia became closer in foreign policy. At the same time, the Jamaat, though deprived of any direct access to the state under the regime of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had been pursuing a policy of recruiting sympathizers in the military. The Pakistani officer corps had been undergoing a social change that replaced the more aristocratic officers recruited and trained by the British for their colonial army (the archetype of which was Ayub Khan) with more-middle-class Punjabis from rural or provincial families, a social group much more amenable to Islamist appeals.25 One such officer, the chief of army staff, General Zia ul-Haq, seized power in a coup in July 1977. As he sought a way to legitimate his rule, he seized on “Islamization” in the fall of 1979, for which reason he enjoyed the support of the Jamaat. At the same time, the U.S. government (especially after the election of President Ronald Reagan a year later) was eager to build up his regime as a partner to Saudi Arabia both in the Gulf and in resisting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Under the Nixon doctrine, the United States sought regional partners in the Third World. After the loss of the shah’s Iran, a principal regional partner, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan replaced that partner in the region. The Saudi government supported Zia ul-Haq financially (as did the United States); the Saudis also supported the Rabita, which funded various branches of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-i Islami, which in turn supported Zia ul-Haq. These networks were reflected in the cooperation that later developed among the intelligence agencies of the three countries, with the Jamaat as principal local implementing partner and activists from the Rabita, Muslim Brotherhood, and other Arab Islamist organizations in supporting roles.
Besides these mainstream groups, the international Islamist movement included a variety of splinter factions of more extreme orientation. Though they differed on many counts, they generally accepted one version or another of Qutb’s teaching, including the idea that Muslims were obligated to wage armed jihad against all regimes that did not fully implement Islam, and that many of those commonly labeled Muslims were in fact unbelievers or, worse, apostates. There were at least as many variations on these themes as on the Trotskyite idea of the degenerate workers’ state, and this account cannot do them justice.26 These groups’ relation to the main Muslim Brotherhood organization varied from country to country; in some they were part of it, in others opposed. The Arab world, especially the youth of Egypt, generated many such groups in the 1970s and 1980s. In Pakistan, the only kindred group seems to have been the well-established Ahl-i Hadith, which was much more akin to extreme Salafi teachings (rejection of the schools of fiqh in favor of direct reference to Quran, Sunna, and hadith, opposition to Sufism and the adornment of tombs rather than working for the seizure of state power). Ahl-i Hadith, which had also received the support of the Saudi religious establishment for decades, established several madrasas in northwest Pakistan and one (ironically enough in a town called Panjpir, or five pirs) in Kunar province of Afghanistan. The Afghan Ahl-i Hadith movement later brought Salafi fighters and money from the Gulf to join the jihad there.27
Once the communists seized power and, later, the Soviets invaded, a far broader section of the Afghan population supported jihad, whereas under the old regime the Islamists had been a tiny isolated group. Nonetheless, the more mainstream nationalist and traditionalist groups failed to form equally effective groups in the jihad, partly because of the opposition to them by Pakistan (Afghan nationalists had irredentist claims against Pakistan), and partly because aid to the resistance primarily mobilized the international networks described above with which the Islamists were already articulated. All of these Islamic networks combined with U.S., Pakistani, and Saudi intelligence agencies to form the network that supported the mujahidin. Arab Islamist volunteers played an important role in this system; they were not merely incidental or members of a parallel system.
Of course, just as support for the Afghan resistance crossed the political spectrum in the United States (as shown by the unanimous congressional votes approving aid to the mujahidin), so support for the jihad crossed the Islamic spectrum in the Middle East. Nonetheless, among U.S. personnel involved directly with the Afghan war effort as volunteers (rather than officials), one could note a disproportionate number of right-wingers, ranging from extreme conservatives to a few genuine nut cases. These were the people in the United States who responded most viscerally to an armed struggle against the Red Army. Similarly, among the Arabs and other Muslims who provided various forms of aid to the Afghans, a disproportionate number came from extreme groups who longed for armed jihad and found it in Afghanistan. Both President Anwar al-Sadat and Shaikh Umar Abd al-Rahman supported the mujahidin, but it was the latter who said, “When the Afghans rose and declared a jihad—and jihad had been dead for the longest time—I can’t tell you how proud I was.”28
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan violated basic norms of international conduct and law, appeared (if deceptively) to pose a threat to the oil resources of the Gulf, and placed the first Muslim state to join the modern state system under the occupation of an avowedly atheist power. The West (led by the United States), the Islamic world (led by Saudi Arabia), and China gave substantial and growing support to the Pakistani effort to aid the mujahidin. Various agencies of the Iranian government also aided Shia mujahidin parties who followed the line of Khomeini.
The Pakistani ISI, which administered the distribution of the aid, insisted on controlling and directing the military operations of the mujahidin. The ISI tried to control military operations through a form of brokerage based on the distribution of weapons to parties and small groups of fighters. This means of control favored those commanders who conformed to Pakistan’s military and political goals.29
To implement this system of brokerage, the ISI distributed weapons not only for use in operations but also (and in greater quantity) as the reward for carrying them out. For instance, for each plane confirmed downed by a Stinger, the commander responsible received two more missiles.30 Hence, downing a Soviet plane took at least three missiles: one that was fired and two that were delivered as a reward. And Stingers were the most closely held and strictly controlled weapon. This tactic is the traditional one used in the “tribal” policies of governments; it both corresponded to and stimulated the tribal norm of competing for influence by obtaining resources from external patrons. Together with the equally profligate Soviet aid, this program made Afghanistan into probably the world’s largest recipient of personal weapons during the late 1980s and left it by 1992 with more such weapons than India (the world’s largest arms importer during the same period) and Pakistan combined.31
U.S. aid grew from $30 million in 1980 to more than $600 million per year by 1986–1989. Saudi and other Arab aid matched or slightly exceeded the U.S. share.32 The Chinese mainly sold weapons to the CIA. The agencies that managed this immense flow of money and arms were the CIA, the ISI, and the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (Riyasat al-Istakhbarah al-Ammah). The Afghan operation became the single largest program of each of these agencies.
In Saudi Arabia, besides the “official” aid overseen by Istakhbarah (headed by Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Saud), there were several other major aid sources. The Rabita funded many schools and madrasas for refugees, especially those of Hizb-i Islami, for which it supplied many of the educational materials. The Afghanistan support committee headed by Prince Salman bin Abd al-Aziz, governor of Riyadh, funded the Arab volunteers recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood who worked for Sayyaf’s party and other groups and went to fight alongside the mujahidin in Afghanistan. Prince Salman’s committee may well have funded the volunteers who later blew up the training center in the city he governed. The Islamic Salvation Foundation, created by Usama Bin Laden, who had made billions in construction in Saudi Arabia, provided aid to favored Afghan groups as well as to Arab volunteers. Until breaking with the Saudi royal family over its invitation to U.S. troops in the first Gulf War, Bin Laden worked closely with Prince Turki.33
Besides the Saudi sources, other Arabs also gave money. The Salafis in Kuwait were a particularly important source of contributions, either to Sayyaf or to various support committees. The Muslim Brotherhood in its various offices also collected funds, as did many other offices, such as the now notorious Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn. The Arab volunteers and the Muslim Brotherhood workers coordinated their activities through several offices. The NGOs working with refugees and in cross-border civilian projects formed the Islamic Coordination Council in Peshawar, headed by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was assassinated with two of his sons by a car bomb in Peshawar on November 24, 1989. Abdullah Azzam was also described as a “guide to hundreds of Arab Mujahedeen in Afghanistan.”34
After Abdullah Azzam’s assassination, Hizb-i Islami published the following biography as part of his obituary:
Born in a Palestinian village, Sella Haressiyya, in 1941, Abdullah Azzam completed his early education at his native village. He graduated in theology from Damascus University in 1966 and then joined Al-Azhar University in Cairo to get his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He joined the well-known Islamic movement operating throughout the Arab world, Al-Ikhwanul Muslimoon, took part in the struggle against Zionist hegemony, and participated in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
After the war he emigrated from the West Bank to Jordan. At the Jordanian University in Amman, he started his professional career as a lecturer of theology. Abdullah Azzam’s difficulties increased with every passing day. He became disappointed in his profession, in the political setup of his country, in the Palestinian leadership for their secular attitudes, and in the narrowness of his platform for addressing the Muslim Ummah. In view of this, he may have been relieved rather than grieved when, after one of his usual fights with the authorities, he was dismissed from his University position. He knew it was useless to protest or to try to reverse the decision, as it enjoyed the blessings of higher circles. So he packed up his belongings and departed for Saudi Arabia where he hoped to fare better in his search for a suitable climate for his ideology.
In 1980 while in Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Azzam had the opportunity of meeting a delegation of Afghani Mujahideen who had come to perform Haj. He soon found himself attracted to their circles and wanted to know more about the Afghan Jihad. When the story of the Afghan Jihad was unfolded to Abdullah Azzam, he felt that it was this cause of the Afghan people for which he had been searching for so long. He arranged visits to Afghanistan where his impressions about the Afghan Mujahideen were confirmed beyond doubt. He shifted to Pakistan and started delivering lectures at the Islamic University, Islamabad [this university, where Ramzi Ahmad Yusuf, charged with planning the bombing of the World Trade Center, had a network of contacts, was run by Jamaat-i Islami and funded by Rabita]. He later decided to devote himself fully to the cause of the Afghan people, and settled in Peshawar….
He has participated in Jihad and has helped others to participate with either their services or their financial contributions. He has established the Islamic Coordination Council which includes nearly 20 Islamic organizations working in support of the Afghan Jihad, offering services inside and outside Afghanistan in the fields of education, health, relief, social care, and the like, administered by efficient staff stationed in numerous places in the liberated areas and refugee camps….
Dr. Azzam left behind … a Mujahida wife…. She has her own Jihad activities in the refugee camps in Pakistan—ten schools and a nursery and a sewing and training center for widows and sisters of Shaheed [martyrs].35
With his connections to the Ikhwan, Saudi Arabia, Rabita, and Jamaat-i Islami, Abdullah Azzam embodied the Islamist networks supporting the mujahidin.36
These networks were fully incorporated into the aid effort. In 1978, when the Saudis first wanted to resume aid to Afghan opponents of the new communist regime, they approached the Jamaat for guidance and used it as their channel. The military officers who ran the arms pipeline in the ISI and who dominated the Pakistan refugee administration at least in the early years of the war were largely (although not all) militants of Jamaat and supporters of Hizb-Hikmatyar. Throughout the war, Saudi government funds were vital to the purchase of weapons, and private Arab funds became vital for that purpose when the U.S. Congress began cutting back the U.S. contribution after the Soviet withdrawal. From the beginning, private Arab funds (like those from Bin Laden) and Arab volunteers were essential to keeping the system for transporting arms running.
The arms pipeline consisted of three parts.37 First, the CIA (using Saudi and U.S. funds) bought weapons from China, Egypt, Israel, and elsewhere.38 Second, once the weapons had arrived in Pakistan, the ISI took custody. They trucked the weapons to the depots controlled by the mujahidin groups in the border region. The CIA paid for these transport expenses through monthly deposits into special accounts in Pakistan.39 In addition to weapons, the mujahidin needed food, clothing, and other supplies, also paid for from the CIA accounts.
These funds frequently ran short, and only “Arab money saved the system.”40 This money, however, benefited only the Islamist groups integrated into the international networks, not the more nationalist and traditionalist groups who arrived only after the communist coup in April 1978.
Third, it was the responsibility of the parties to distribute the weapons to commanders and oversee their transport into Afghanistan. Transport was left to the private sector.41 Attempts to build up a centralized supply network would have interfered with the flourishing businesses of both Afghans and Pakistani Pashtuns from the tribal territories who had converted their previous smuggling and trucking operations into far more profitable ones related to the transport of weapons and drugs. The transport of weapons was extremely expensive; in 1986, it cost $15 to $20 per kilogram to move supplies from Pakistan to north Afghanistan, amounting to $1,100 for one mortar or $65 for one bomb. Total transport costs ran to $1.5 million per month.42 To pay these costs, the Saudi Red Crescent maintained offices in the border regions funded by the Saudi Afghanistan Support Committee. These offices were staffed by Arab volunteers. They gave the Afghan Islamist parties 100 percent of estimated transport costs plus an extra 5 percent for contingencies, while they gave the traditionalist-nationalist parties only about 15 percent of total costs.43
The volunteers seemed to have considerable discretion over whom to fund. In the fall of 1986, when Rabbani took time out from leading a mujahidin delegation to the UN General Assembly to meet President Reagan (which Hikmatyar had refused to do the previous year), the volunteers cut off funding for Jamiat’s transport for several weeks. They also tried to pressure Jamiat to expel female European medical personnel working in north Afghanistan.
The aid went disproportionately to those parties favored by the Islamist network, and these parties (in particular those of Hikmatyar and Sayyaf) provided training for Islamist militants. To guard against Pashtun nationalism, Pakistan insisted that only religiously oriented parties and leaders could operate on its soil. The Saudis largely treated Afghanistan as a religious issue and deferred to their own religious establishment, which preferred the Islamists, and particularly the Salafis among them. Aid to the Afghan jihad both helped to legitimate the Saudi regime at home and in the Islamic world, and it provided a diversion for activist Islamists who might otherwise have focused their energies on their own country, as, indeed, they later did.
In addition to weapons, the ISI also provided training. Brigadier Yousaf claims that eighty thousand mujahidin passed through courses between 1983, when the program was expanded, and 1987.44 According to some reports, these training camps also included members of Jamaat and some of the Arab volunteers. Some of the mujahidin parties also set up their own training camps in the border area; both Hikmatyar and Sayyaf commanders appear to have trained Arab, Kashmiri, and other volunteers.
Once the Soviets were gone, many of the less ideological mujahidin considered that jihad was over; they became more concerned with their local rivals and with making money through smuggling, the drug trade, and other activities. They also began to reach accommodation with cotribals or coethnics in the government.45 Especially after the failed attack on the city of Jalalabad in March–June 1989, they resisted efforts by the ISI and CIA to get them to attack targets in their area. The more “conventional” army of Hikmatyar raised in the refugee camps, especially from the Arab-funded Hizb schools, and the Arab volunteers whose only goal in Afghanistan was to perform jihad, had no such distractions. According to former Pakistan ambassador to the United States Abida Hussein, by the time of the November 1991 offensive against Gardez, Paktia, the vast majority of the “mujahidin” taking part were Arab and other non-Afghan volunteers.46
Early in the 1980s, Sayyaf’s party was the main one favored by private Arab donors and volunteers. This organization was linked to virtually no social networks in Afghanistan, but its leader spoke excellent Arabic, supported Salafi Islam, and proved adept at raising millions of dollars in the Gulf. Sayyaf had too few commanders for them to figure significantly in any of the available datasets on commanders from the mid-1980s, but the head of the ISI’s Afghanistan operation during 1983–1987 claimed that Sayyaf received 17–18 percent of the weapons distributed among the seven parties in 1987. Arabs affiliated with his party distributed large amounts of cash to commanders who would join them.47 As an opponent of nationalism and supporter of pan-Islamic ideals, Sayyaf strongly supported the participation in the resistance of Arab and other Islamic volunteers, who swelled his ranks and created considerable friction with the Afghan mujahidin. Only the Arab-funded commanders of Sayyaf and, later, the Salafi organization Jamaat al-Dawa paid wages to the mujahidin.48
Arab Islamist money was also behind the role of Sayyaf and his party members in mujahidin “interim governments” supported by Pakistan and the United States. When under ISI and U.S. pressure the seven leaders agreed to an “interim government” in June 1988, the list showed considerable deference to Saudi sensitivities, as Saudi princes agreed to pay the “government” $1 million per month.49 The prime minister was a “Wahhabi,” a member of Sayyaf’s party. Again, when a Pakistani-convened shura appointed by the seven parties met to choose the Islamic Interim Government of Afghanistan (IIGA) in February 1989, the government it chose resulted from ISI and Saudi manipulation of the shura’s electoral process. On the first day of the shura, when the chairman tried to push through a resolution making Sayyaf’s deputy the president, the body rose in protest, claiming they did not want a “Wahhabi” president.50 According to U.S. diplomats, the Saudi intelligence service ultimately spent $26 million during the shura. Others claim that each of the 519 delegates received at least $25,000.51 Sayyaf finally became prime minister in deference to the Saudis, who promised to fund a conventional “Islamic army” for the government if their sect were adequately represented.52 For several years afterward, U.S. policy insisted on treating the IIGA as the “most representative group of Afghans,” despite the well-known circumstances of its creation.53
In the summer of 1989, however, the global strategic situation was changing. As the Soviet threat receded, the U.S. State Department began to challenge the large share of aid that went to Hikmatyar and Sayyaf as well as the sole use of the Peshawar parties as conduits for assistance. In the fall of 1989, a new decision defined the goal of U.S. policy not only as “self-determination” for Afghanistan but as seeking a negotiated political settlement that would lead to the “sidelining of extremists,” including Najibullah, Hikmatyar, and Sayyaf. The United States engaged in a two-track policy, beginning a diplomatic dialogue with the USSR on a UN-sponsored political settlement, while trying to improve the military performance of the mujahidin.54 In an attempt to keep the two tracks from contradicting each other, the United States also decided that no weapons paid for by its funds would be given to Hikmatyar or Sayyaf, who opposed such a settlement. They would mainly go to regional or local military shuras inside Afghanistan.55 Saudi and other Arab funds, however, took up the slack in aid to the mujahidin “extremists,” so this policy made little if any difference on the ground. The operations wing of the CIA, which maintained close links with the ISI and the Saudi Istakhbarah, looked with skepticism if not hostility on the new policy. In practice, the continued U.S. maintenance of the arms pipeline continued to strengthen the Afghan groups that U.S. policy was allegedly aimed at weakening.
During this period, political “unity” of some sort among the mujahidin groups was a major goal of U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi policy. Arab supporters of jihad gained a new role as promoters of unity, especially between the feuding Islamists, Hizb and Jamiat. In July 1989, in the so-called Farkhar Valley or Takhar incident, a Hikmatyar commander captured and killed a group of Massoud’s commanders as they were returning from a key strategy meeting. Massoud later captured the commander responsible and hanged him and his brother after a trial by ulama.
Abdullah Azzam traveled to the north after this incident in an attempt to make peace between the two: “He believed that one of the most serious designs of the enemies of Jihad was the conflict between the Hizbi-Islami and the Jamiat-i-Islami resulting in the Takhar incident.” He brokered an agreement between Rabbani and Hikmatyar that “was concluded in the night before his assassination.”56 In 1990, after the assassination of Abdullah Azzam, Abd al-Rahman was invited to Peshawar, where his host was Khalid al-lslambouli, brother of one of the assassins of Sadat. Two of Abd al-Rahman’s sons participated in a three-hundred-man detachment of the Egyptian al-Jamaat Islamiyyah that fought in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. On this trip, reportedly paid for by the CIA, Abd al-Rahman preached to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime.57
Before the Soviet withdrawal, even though the role of the Arab volunteers in humanitarian aid was common knowledge, and a little investigation revealed how key they were to the logistics svstem, one heard very little about their actual fighting. Usama Bin Laden in an interview said that the Afghans originally told him that they needed only financial assistance, not volunteers. He ascribed his decision to join the fighting to personal religious and political concerns, not the needs of the Afghan effort. He emphasized (as did many of the mujahidin) the personal obligation (fard al-‘ain) of every Muslim to participate in jihad as well as the need to prepare himself to defend Mecca and Madina from the “Jews.”58
By the late 1980s, however, hundreds, then thousands, of Arab youths, largely recruited from the extremist fringes of the Islamic movement, came to Afghanistan to perform jihad. The ISI used Saudi funds to construct a large base for one Sayyaf commander, Mawlawi Arsala Rahmani, near Urgun, Paktika.59 Hundreds of Arab “mujahidin” trained there.
The Arab volunteers also set up their own training programs and camps in eastern Afghanistan. One, in Jaji, Paktia province, was named Maasadat al-Ansar. It was constructed with the help of Usama Bin Laden and hosted several hundred volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, Libya, and Morocco in 1988. The Arabs were described as working with Hikmatyar and Sayyaf.60
In 1989, after the Soviet withdrawal, as mujahidin forces in eastern Afghanistan concentrated in provincial centers and other towns abandoned by the Soviet and regime troops, both foreigners and Afghans became more aware of the presence of Arab fighters. Some stories came from Kunar province, where mullahs trained at the Saudi-funded Ahl-i Hadith madrasa at Panjpir controlled several districts. Northern Nuristan came under the control of Mawlawi Afzal, who founded the Dawlat-i Inqilabi-yi Islami-yi Nuristan (Islamic Revolutionary State of Nuristan), generally called the Dawlat (state). The Dawlat received direct financial support from some Salafi religious groups in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. There had been no government presence in the area since 1978, however, so the opportunities for becoming either ghazi (a killer of unbelievers in jihad) or shahid (a martyr in jihad) were slim; few if any Arab fighters joined Mawlawi Afzal.
The first widely circulated reports of Arab fighters came from the Kunar River valley in the southern part of the province, which had been the scene of many heavy offensives as the Soviets tried to relieve the isolated garrisons along the Pakistan border, which were supplied by air. Jamil al-Rahman, another Panjpir-educated mullah, from the Safi tribe of Pashtuns, had originally joined Hikmatyar. He left Hizb-Hikmatyar in 1985 to form a strict Salafi party, the Jamaat al-Dawa ila al-Quran wa Ahl al-Hadith.61 This group was hardly known outside of Kunar until the government evacuated several areas, including the provincial center (Asadabad, known as Chaghasarai in Pashto), which were then overrun by mujahidin in the fall of 1988.
These mujahidin included several hundred Arabs fighting with Jamaat al-Dawa, which Afghans generally referred to as “the Wahhabis.” Jamaat al-Dawa set up its own shura, separate from the seven parties; in the summer of 1989, it allied with Hizb, when the latter suspended participation in the IIGA over the conflict with Massoud. JuD took over the principal mosque in the city, where worship was thenceforth conducted according to the rite of Ahl-i Hadith, which differed from the Hanafi traditions.62 Most notoriously, mujahidin reported that Jamaat al-Dawa applied a version of the takfir doctrine: they treated Afghans living in government-controlled areas as unbelievers to whom Muslims should apply the laws of futuhat (conquest), including execution of adult males who resisted and enslavement of women and children.63 Stories circulated of videotaped executions of captured members of tribal militia, of rapes, and of captured women being sold in Peshawar and sent to the Middle East. To some extent, Afghans may have been trying to blame offenses committed by a variety of groups on this deviant one, and particularly on the Arab foreigners. Jamaat al-Dawa also opposed accepting aid from non-Muslims64; its mujahidin attacked Western journalists and relief workers, including some traveling under the protection of commanders of Hizb-i islami. Isolating the mujahidin and Afghanistan from any Western contact was a goal they shared with the Arab volunteers.
With extensive support from Saudi and Kuwaiti private sources, Jamaat al-Dawa grew to be even more powerful in the area than the seven parties. Increasing numbers of Arabs came to fight in its ranks. Nonetheless, it soon retreated into preaching orthodoxy rather than pursuing a political strategy—that is, it retreated from “Islamism” to “neofundamentalism.”65 Its militants spent their time knocking down flags and monuments erected over tombs and opposing other “non-Islamic” Afghan customs, often connected with Sufism.
The money supporting this group largely came from the Saudi Afghanistan support committee, but it seems that Prince Salman was not necessarily more aware of where the money was going than Dan Rather was of the tactics of some of his cameramen in Afghanistan. Some Saudis who were concerned that this group was detracting from jihad tried to convince Prince Salman to stop funding it and give the money he collected to Hikmatyar or Rabbani.
The more politically minded Arab mujahidin formed their own groups in eastern Afghanistan or fought with Hikmatyar or Sayyaf groups. Their number at the time of the fall of the Najibullah government in 1992 is usually given as about five thousand. Whereas the Arabs in the Salafi groups seemed largely to come from the Gulf countries, those with Hikmatyar came from the countries with more politicized Islamic movements, including Algerians, Palestinians, Sudanese, and Egyptians. Some came for long periods of time, others for short stints. Some travel agents organized two- or three-week jihad tours, and students could spend their school vacations participating in jihad in Afghanistan. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi reported in 1988:
“Visiting” Mujahedeen include students and employees who arrive during their summer or annual vacations. More than 500 youths have so far come here as “visitors” from Saudi Arabia and they stayed for two or three weeks, during last mid-year school break. Military training programs are arranged for these visitors in camps like Sada along the Afghan border. After training they move to camps like Maasada and Meeran Shah and usually take part in the night watch and reconnaissance in the company of highly trained personnel.66
The conflict in the Islamic world over the approaching Gulf War in late 1990 and early 1991 temporarily weakened the financial support for the Arab volunteers and their sponsors. Open conflict broke out between those groups, such as Jamaat al-Dawa, who were close to Saudi and Kuwaiti Salafis, and those allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist takfir groups. The Salafis supported Saudi Arabia, whose invitation to U.S. and other Western forces was opposed by the radical elements of the Afghan mujahidin, in particular Hikmatyar and Sayyaf, the Jamaat-i Islami of Pakistan, key mujahidin supporters in the Pakistani military and ISI, and the other Arab volunteers.67 As is now widely known, this issue led Usama Bin Laden to turn against the Saudi royal family. The civilian government of Pakistan, along with the nationalists and moderates among the mujahidin, supported the U.S.-Saudi position. The Saudis had made arrangements to transport two thousand Afghan mujahidin to Saudi Arabia to offer symbolic support to the U.S.-led coalition, but the project was repeatedly held up by objections from radical mujahidin groups and Pakistani military officers, including the chief of army staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg. The Saudis at least temporarily cut off funding to Hikmatyar and some other groups, though they started funding them again a few months later. At the local level, the Gulf War broke the alliance in Kunar between Hikmatyar and Jamil al-Rahman. A battle in the summer of 1991 ended in August when an Egyptian gunman assassinated Jamil al-Rahman.
Bin Laden and other leaders of the Arab mujahidin left the region temporarily after the Soviet withdrawal, but some Arab fighters stayed. They came to international attention once again after the security belt around Kabul had been breached during the fall of Najibullah in April 1992. Massoud, Hikmatyar, and other mujahidin started to flow into Kabul, set up checkpoints, and engage in looting. These guerrillas included Arab Islamists. They made even more difficult the problem of negotiating over power sharing with the newly mobilized Shia population of Kabul. During the spring and summer of 1992, Shia mujahidin armed by Iran, who controlled about one-fourth of Kabul city, repeatedly clashed with Sayyaf and other Salafi mujahidin aided by Arab volunteers. By October, hundreds of civilian hostages taken in these clashes in June were still missing.68
Until Hikmatyar fled before the new movement of the Taliban (Islamic students) in February 1995, reports continued to circulate of Arabs fighting for him in the battle for Kabul. Sayyaf’s group switched sides and allied with Rabbani in January 1993, when Hikmatyar signed an agreement with Hizb-i Wahdat, the unified Shia party sponsored by Iran. Massoud’s forces in Kabul repeatedly captured Arabs and Pakistanis fighting for Hikmatyar. In 1993 Massoud circulated videotapes of two Algerian prisoners. In February 1995, his forces captured a nineteen-year-old Palestinian who said he had been recruited by Hizb-i Islami in Saudi Arabia. His original group of recruits included three men from Yemen and two from Saudi Arabia. They all received three months of military training.69
The support for these efforts seemed no longer to come from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan (not to mention the United States). Saudi Arabia ended official funding of these networks during the Gulf crisis. After the bombing of the World Trade Center, pressure on Pakistan to shut down the networks intensified. By some reports, the unwillingness of the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to arrest and deport some of the Arabs was one of the factors leading to his dismissal by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan in April 1993. (Nawaz Sharif was politically allied with the Jamaat at that time, and his director of ISI was a sympathizer of the Islamists.) In early 1994, Saudi Arabia confiscated the assets and revoked the citizenship of Usama Bin Laden, who had settled in Khartoum.
But the networks established under the aegis of these states during the war, now nourished by private donations and the drug trade, continue to function. Veterans of the war in Afghanistan appear to form the core of the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria (the group responsible for the most assassinations), as well as the armed groups of the most extreme Islamists in Jordan, Yemen, Egypt, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. One of the units of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Group is now named after Abdullah Azzam.
Besides fighting, Arab NGOs associated with the Islamic Coordination Council are active in relief and reconstruction efforts in many parts of Afghanistan, especially in Jalalabad and Kunduz, where activists are also providing military aid and training to refugees from the Tajik civil war. Their attempts to exclude Western organizations from Afghanistan have led to a number of clashes. Some charge that Arab Islamist extremists were responsible for the killing of two UN expatriates and two Afghan UN employees near Jalalabad and of two UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expatriate staff near Kunduz in February 1993.
The Arab activity in Kunduz is particularly important, though it does not seem to involve a large number of people. About half of the estimated sixty thousand refugees from Tajikistan who remained in northern Afghanistan by summer 1993 were in the Kunduz area.70 The Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP) established its exile headquarters in Taluqan, the administrative center of neighboring Takhar province and of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Supervisory Council of the North.71
Kunduz has been nominally under the control of a shura dominated by Jamiat and Sayyaf commanders. The governor of Kunduz, Haji Rahmatullah, a member of Jamiat, exercises little real power. The administrative center of the province, Kunduz city, was controlled by Amir Chughai, a commander of Sayyaf’s party until his death in fighting during the summer of 1995. Since November 1993, however, control of the city changed hands several times, as the former communist general turned Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, repeatedly attacked it. Russia and Uzbekistan were anxious to wipe out this base of support for the Tajikistan Islamic resistance.
According to reports in early 1994, the most powerful people in Kunduz were a small group of Arabs who set up an office of the Islamic Coordination Council. They derived their power from the fact that they are the only source of aid for the Tajik refugees and the shura. Those whose nationalities could be identified (by their Arabic accent and dialect) seem to be Algerian, probably members of the Armed Islamic Group.72 In early 1996, their influence seemed to have diminished, as they had far less money to distribute, apparently because of a crackdown on their fundraising in their homelands.
The Tajik refugees do not receive regular assistance from UNHCR, whose office in Kunduz is staffed only by local employees and occasional UN volunteers. UNHCR withdrew its international staff from Kunduz in early 1993, when guerrillas attacked a UNHCR convoy of refugees moving from Kunduz to rejoin family members in Camp Sakhi, and two staff members were killed. At around the same time, two UNHCR international contract employees and their Afghan driver and translator were assassinated near Jalalabad. UNHCR pulled virtually all international staff out of posts in Afghanistan at that time.
In March 1993, Kunduz shura leader Amir Chughai expelled the Afghan UNHCR team leader from Kunduz city. Thereafter the refugees received assistance only from representatives of Arab Islamist groups. They transported supplies to Kunduz from Peshawar. In early June 1993, one observer stated that the Arabs had not supplied food to the refugees in May, claiming that a new law in Saudi Arabia restricting donations to foreign organizations had dried up their resources. This law aimed at ending the donation of zakat to revolutionary Islamic groups not approved by the Saudi government and was adopted partly in response to the World Trade Center bombing.
Other reports from Kunduz, however, indicated that Arab donations for weapons and military trailing of IRP fighters continued. Perhaps three to five thousand members of the IRP were undergoing military training by Afghan mujahidin in different parts of Kunduz and Takhar. The Arab Islamists are still part of the same network as before, including some political forces in Pakistan. In March and April 1993, General (ret.) Hamid Gul, former chief of ISI, and Qazi Husain Ahmad, leader of the Jamaat-i Islami, visited the IRP headquarters in Taluqan. In 1994, the Russian-supported government of Tajikistan reported capturing a few Arab fighters participating in operations with the Tajik Islamic resistance movement.
The Arab Islamists and their Pakistani supporters also supplied the refugees with a hospital, medicines, housing, and food. They have resisted the intrusion of the UN and Western relief organizations into the area.
Nonetheless, subsequent incidents may hold out some lessons. In November 1993, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) returned to Kunduz with support from the Soros Foundation and the European Community Humanitarian Organization to aid Tajik refugees. The Afghan shura welcomed them, and the governor immediately authorized them to work. As soon as they arrived at the hospital, however, they were rudely expelled by an Arab NGO worker, apparently an Algerian from the Islamic Coordination Council. Repeated appeals to the shura were fruitless, as the Arabs were paying all the bills. The Tajik doctors, certainly no “fundamentalists” or Islamists, were also reluctant to work with the MSF staff, for fear that they would lose their Arab funding, which had proven much more dependable than the intermittent presence of Western organizations. After weeks of negotiations, however, Abbas, the Algerian head of the ICC office in Kunduz, agreed to allow MSF to work there after being assured that they would stay for six months and were sincerely trying to give aid, not undermine the Arabs politically. The new policies of the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia restricting the activities of these groups had placed them in some financial difficulties. There were rumors that they were unable to pay some debts to the bazaar.73 When I visited these same areas in 1996, Western visitors were more welcome, and the Tajik refugee leaders appealed for more external aid, from whatever source.
In this case, a combination of pressure, the offer of an alternative source of aid, and patient negotiation eventually led to an agreement on cooperation. Unfortunately, the main warring Islamist political groups in Afghanistan as well as the Taliban can still collect and use funds without obstacles, and the international community is not providing Afghans with any reliable alternative to the aid provided by the Arab Islamists. Under these circumstances, their influence will inevitably grow in Afghanistan, and perhaps beyond.
Do these groups constitute a threat of terrorism to the whole world? Of course, some of the returning “Afghanis” have been dissatisfied with the moderation of groups at home and have turned to violence.74 A few who returned to New York bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and planned other terrorist acts. Some of the returnees to Saudi Arabia bombed the training center in Riyadh and may be responsible for the attack on the U.S. barracks in Khobar in June 1996. The training these militants received in Afghanistan may have made them militarily more effective, though the car bombs used in the attacks were never used in Afghanistan, to the best of my knowledge. The violence in Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere is due mainly to the political and social blockage experienced by the youths of those countries, not a handful of activists returning from Afghanistan. The principal victims of the extremists among the Afghan Islamists and their Arab supporters remain the people of Afghanistan themselves. Afghans yearn to recover their country for themselves and to end the day when its territory is merely a field for the battles of others.
1. Much of this chapter has appeared in another form in Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
2. Afghan volunteers (ethnic Tajiks) have apparently fought with some Islamic guerrillas in Tajikistan. Hikmatyar also rented one thousand of his fighters from the Jalalabad area to the government of Azerbaijan to help it resist ethnic Armenian forces covertly backed by the Armenian government. In late 1994, Hikmatyar withdrew the fighters in protest when Baku permitted the opening of an Israeli diplomatic mission. Some of the Afghans reportedly joined the fighting in Chechnya rather than return home.
3. I heard this view expressed by government officials myself. For quotations from the late director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Casey, and U.S. Congressman Charles Wilson (D.-Tex.), see Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkins, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (London: Mark Cooper, 1992), 63, 79.
4. Jeri Laber and Barnett R. Rubin, A Nation Is Dying: Afghanistan Under the Soviets (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
5. The attempt to label Islamic movements “Wahhabi” has a history in late and post-Soviet Central Asia as well. The Tajikistan Islamic opposition is called Wahhabi by the same officials who accuse Iran of supporting it. In a May 13, 1993, interview, officials of the Tashkent municipal government regretted that they had accepted Russian scholars’ classification of Islamic movements as Wahhabi. On May 17, 1993, the deputy mufti of Kyrgyzstan, a Naqshbandi from Daghestan, told a U.S. delegation that Wahhabism was started by a British intelligence agent. This is a common theme in Iranian writing on Wahhabism (see Olivier Roy, L’Echec de L’lslam Politique, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992, 158). The career of “Wahhabism,” as a political label for international conspiracy deserves a study of its own. As the Afghan war shows, however, Western powers have indeed at times used militant Islam, including its Salafi varieties, against their opponents.
6. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 598.
7. Marvin G. Weinbaum, “Legal Elites in Afghan Society,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 12 (1980): 48.
8. Sayyed Musa Tawana, “Glimpses into the Historical Background of the Islamic Movement in Afghanistan: Memoirs of Dr. Tawana, Part 4,” AFGHANews 5 (May 15, 1989): 5ff. Tawana’s articles give the views of Jamiat-i Islami on the early years of the Islamic movement (though in a dispute with Rabbani he has since abandoned Jamiat and joined Abdul Rashid Dostum’s organization). For a brief summary of its rival Hizb-i Islami’s view, see Farshad Rastegar, “Education and Revolutionary Political Mobilization: Schooling Versus Uprootedness as Determinants of Islamic Political Activities Among Afghan Refugee Students in Pakistan” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), 112.
9. For a participant’s memoir of this period, also from the Jamiat viewpoint, see Mohammad Es’haq, “Evolution of Islamic Movement in Afghanistan, Part 1: Islamists Felt Need for a Party to Defend Islam,” AFGHANews 5 (January 1, 1989), 5, 8.
10. Ibid., 8; Sayyed Musa Tawana, “Glimpses into the Historical Background of the Islamic Movement in Afghanistan: Memoirs of Dr. Tawana, Part 1,” AFGHANews 5 (April 1, 1989), 6–7. This article contains a detailed account of the meeting.
11. “Ghulam Rasul,” meaning slave or worshipper of the Prophet, was Sayyaf’s given name, a common one in Afghanistan. In line with Salafi teachings, he later changed it to Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul, or “worshipper of the Master of the Prophet.”
12. Tawana, “Glimpses, Part 4,” 5, describes the choice of name. Hizb claims that “Jamiat” was the name only for the professors’ association, not the whole movement.
13. For details on the dataset and statistical tables, see Barnett R. Rubin, “Political Elites in Afghanistan: Rentier State Building, Rentier State Wrecking,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 77–99; or Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, chap. 4.
14. According to Tawana (ibid.), they chose the name Jamiyyat (or Jamiat) for the movement “because it resembled the word ‘Jamaat’ in the name of ‘Jamaat Ikhwan Muslemeen’ of Egypt and ‘Jamaat Islami’ of Pakistan but was also distinct from both.”
15. Roy, L’Echec de l’ Islam Politique, 141–45.
16. Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 70.
17. Mohammad Es’haq, “Evolution of the Islamic Movement in Afghanistan, Part 4: Life in Exile from 1975 to 1978,” AFGHANews 5 (February 15, 1989), 6; Roy, Islam and Resistance, 76–77.
18. For this use of the term jahiliyyah, see Fishurdah-yi hadaf va mariam-i Jamiyyat-i Islami-yi Afghanistan [A Summary of the Aims and Program of the Islamic Society of Afghanistan] (Peshawar? n.p., 1978 or 1979?), 8; Maram-i Hizbi Islami-yi Afghanistan [Program of the Islamic Party of Afghanistan] (Peshawar? n.p., 1986–87), vi.
19. Hamied N. Ansari, “The Islamic Militants in Egyptian Politics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16 (1984): 140. See also Roy, Islam and Resistance, 77–78.
20. As Roy argues more generally (L’Echec de l’Islam Politique, 138), “L’évolution de I’islamisme me relève pas seulement de facteurs idéologiques, mais s’inscrit aussi dans les jeux géostratégiques du monde musulman. Il est clair aujourd’hui que l’islamisme n’a pas modifié en profondeur ce contexte géostratégique, dominé par les strategies d’Etats et non par des mouvements idéologiques et transnationaux.”
21. Ibid., 148.
22. On these developments, see Gilles Kepel, Le Prophête et Pharaon: Aux Sources des Mouvements Islamistes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993).
23. Ibid.
24. Roy, L’Echec de L’Islam Politique, 142.
25. Stephen P. Cohen, The Pakistan Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 55–74.
26. Kepel, Le Prophète et Pharaon, describes the Egyptian ones in some detail.
27. Roy, L’Echec de L’Islam Politique, 152.
28. “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, January 10, 1994 (interview by Marianne Weaver). For a similar statement by Shaikh Abdullah Azzam, see Jamal Khashoggi, “Arab Mujahedeen in Afghanistan-II: Masada Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah,” Arab News, May 14, 1988, 9.
29. For a fuller description, see Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, 196–201.
30. Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, 177.
31. Ian Anthony, Agnes Courades Ailebeck, Gerd Hagmeyer-Gaverns, Paolo Miggiano, and Herbert Wulf, “The Trade in Major Conventional Weapons,” in SIPRI Yearbook 1991: World Armaments and Disarmament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 199, 208; Patrice Piquard, “Pourquoi le Chaos Afghan Peut Faire Exploser L’Asie Centrale.” 1’Evénement du Jeudi, January 13, 1993, 7.
32. Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, 77.
33. On Bin Laden, see Jamal Khashoggi, “Arab Youths Fight Shoulder to Shoulder with Mujahedeen,” Arab News, May 4, 1988, 9; and “Arab Veterans of Afghanistan Lead New Islamic Holy War,” Federal News Service, October 28, 1994. The former article includes a photograph of Bin Laden inside Afghanistan.
34. Khashoggi, “Arab Mujahedeen-II.”
35. “Sheikh Abdullah Azzam Is Martyred,” Mujahideen Monthly 4 (January 1990): 10–11. Azzam told Khashoggi (“Arab Mujahedeen-II”) that it became too difficult to perform jihad in Palestine because of Israeli security measures: “I later searched for another place where I could perform this Ibadah (devotional service) of Jihad. I couldn’t find a better place than Afghanistan where the battle is apparently between Islam and atheism. No doubt about it.”
36. According to Roy (L’Echec de L’lsiam Politique, 150), Azzam considered Muhammad Abu al-Nasr, leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, as his “spiritual guide.”
37. Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, 97–112.
38. Both China and Egypt manufactured versions of the Kalashnikov rifle and the SAKR ground-to-ground missile. Israel had captured many Soviet-manufactured weapons in Lebanon in 1982.
39. Many of these accounts were in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
40. Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, 106.
41. Roy, Islam and Resistance, 163–64.
42. Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, 106.
43. Interview with logistics officer of a traditionalist-nationalist party, Khyber Agency, Pakistan, February 1989. According to a National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (Gailani) commander of Pashtuns in Kunduz province, “In NIFA party there is no transportation cost for mujahedin…. Usually weapons of NIFA and Professor Mojaddedi are sold because of this transportation cost” (files of Cash for Food Program, Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, Peshawar).
44. Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, 117.
45. For a detailed analysis, see Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, chap. 11.
46. Talk at Columbia University, December 1991.
47. In February 1989, in Nangarhar, I stayed one day with an Ahmadzai nomad commander of NIFA, who recounted how “Arabs” from Sayyaf’s party had offered him huge amounts of money to join. “I spit on their shoes,” he said. “They think jihad is a business.” Later I heard he had taken their money and joined Sayyaf for a while. He subsequently went back to Gailani.
48. In the summer of 1989, when the Kandahar commanders’ shura refused to carry out the ISI’s plan to attack the city, the ISI brought two commanders from Wardak (an area populated by different Pashtun tribes than those in Kandahar) to carry out the attack. According to one Kandahari, “They paid each of their mujahidin Rs. 500 per day, plus Rs. 50,000 in case of death and Rs. 20,000 in case of injury [Rs. 20 then equaled about $1]. This created a terrible reaction. It was not jihad but a mercenary war. People began to ask themselves, is this still jihad?” (interview, Arlington, VA, May 1990.)
49. The Independent, September 13, 1988.
50. Interview with several delegates at the shura.
51. Interview with U.S. diplomat in Riyadh, March 20, 1989; Richard Cronin, Afghanistan After the Soviet Withdrawal: Contenders for Power (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, May 1989), 7.
52. The Independent, February 2, 1989.
53. Assistant Secretary John Kelly, Testimony Before the Sub-Committees on Europe and the Middle East and Asia and the Pacific, Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, March 7, 1990.
54. For details, see Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Rubin, “Post-Cold-War State Disintegration: The Failure of International Conflict Resolution in Afghanistan,” Journal of International Affairs 46 (Winter 1993): 469–92.
55. Washington Post, September 9, 1989; New York Times, November 19, 1989.
56. “Sheikh Abdullah Azzam Is Martyred,” 11, 68
57. “Arab Veterans.”
58. Khashoggi, “Arab Youths Fight.”
59. Yousaf and Adkins, Bear Trap, 182.
60. Khashoggi, “Arab Youths Fight,” 9.
61. The name means “Group for the Call to the Quran and People of the Hadith.”
62. This created much bitterness among the local Afghan population, as if the Islam for which they had fought and died for more than a decade was not Islamic enough.
63. “Actions of the Pakistan Military with Respect to Afghanistan: Human Rights Concerns,” News from Asia Watch, February 27, 1989; this was based on my own reporting from Peshawar and Nangarhar.
64. Hikmatyar has taken this position verbally at times, but in view of the massive aid he received from the United States, Afghans did not take his statements on this subject too seriously.
65. Roy, L’Echec de I’lslam Politique.
66. Khashoggi, “Arab Youths Fight.”
67. Roy claims that Rabbani supported the Saudis (L’Echec de l’Islam Politique). This seems to have been the case when he talked to Saudis and Americans, but he also signed a document opposing the U.S.-led coalition that was issued by a Jamaat-convened international conference in Lahore. Rabbani explained to U.S. diplomats that he had to do so out of Islamic solidarity.
68. Guardian, October 14, 1992,
69. Reuters, Kabul, February 10, 1995.
70. The rest were near Mazar-i Sharif, in an area largely controlled by former communist Uzbek militia leader Abdul Rashid Dostum. On Tajikistan see Barnett R. Rubin, “The Fragmentation of Tajikistan,” Survival 35 (Winter 1993/94): 71–91; and Olivier Roy, The Civil War in Tajikistan: Causes and Implications: A Report of the Study Group on the Prospects for Conflict and Opportunities for Peacemaking in the Southern Tier of Former Soviet Republics (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, December 1993). I visited all of these camps (as well as one run by the Iranian Red Crescent Society) in North Afghanistan in January 1996.
71. Washington Post, April 29, 1993.
72. Khashoggi (“Arab Mujahedeen-II”) reported in 1988 that Massoud had an Algerian assistant. [Massoud’s assistant was Abdullah Anas, son-in-law of Abdullah Azam, who in 2013 was living in London and a prominent spokesman against al-Qaeda in Arab media. Abdullah Anas played a role in starting the Saudi Channel for dialogue with the Taliban in 2008.]
73. Interview with MSF doctor, February 28, 1994.
74. Roy, L’Echec de I’Islam Politique, 147.