DescentBB

During the 1970's, much of the Middle East, following the devastating Arab loss to Israel in the 1967 war and the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser - the erstwhile champion of a secular and united Arab world - embarked on an inexorable turn toward religion.
Secular pan-Arab nationalism had failed and religion emerged as the principal alternative source of identity and regional esteem. "It was like a huge vacuum, and nobody was able to fill this vacuum better than the rising Islamists," said Shafeeq Ghabra, a political scientist in Kuwait. There was through the region a sense of terrible loss; it was as if the Arabs had lost their one true chance to regain their footing, to finally join the modern world.

Then in 1979, two seismic events shook the Islamic world: A people's army of Islamists toppled the Shah of Iran and instituted an Islamic republic; and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and installed a puppet Communist government there. The two events fired imaginations throughout Islam. Politics and possibility were everywhere. Even without the pervassive media that blanket the west the news traveled quickly in the Arab world....

Even before the Soviet invasion, a civil war had been underway. The Soviet purpose was to change one puppet government for another, one they hoped would be more palatable to the Afghans yet still compliant to Moscow. Domestic opposition to the government - in particular, those who thought it lacked Islamic purity - had already begun establishing exile orginizations in Peshawar. After the invasion the number of those orginazations- not to mention exiles - mushroomed. In the begining most of those orginizations were under-funded or not funded at all, and survived mainly on what they could steal or conscript. But funding - more bountiful than anyone could possibly imagine - soon arrived. by the middle of the 1980's more than 1 billion a year was pouring into the resistance. Sorting out the varied Afghan opposition was an almost impossible task, but sorting out who would get the money was imperative. A hierarchy was constructed at the insitence of the chief sponsors, mainly the United States, Saudi Arabia and, especially, Pakistan. The Pakistani's who regarded themselves as the general staff of the war effort, designated six Afghan political parties to recieve money and later added a seventh. All were fundamentalist religious parties and all eventually fielded seperate armies.

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The United States was one of the main allies of the Afghan resistance.
President Jimmy Carter had earlier confronted the Soviet Union in his human rights campaign and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was eager to confront them with surrogates on the battlefield as well. Acting on Brzezinski's recommendation, Carter had approved american financial and military assistance even before the Soviet invasion. Brzezinski said the express intent of the secret assistance was to encourage Soviet intervention, which of course it did.
The Afghan resistance, Pakistan, Azzam, and the Americans were joined in their unlikely alliance by Saudi Arabia, which provided hard cash and volunteers.
"Muslim governments made it a religious issue, a way to reinvigorate Islam, to counter the Western cultural invasion, to counter Iran and the Shiite threat to Sunnis," said Waheed Hamza Hashim, a Saudi political scientist. "So here comes the Soviet invasion in the midst of this. The Arab world see's itself under siege. the governments main legitimacy derives from religious authority. They see this as an opportunity to strengthen their religious credentials, thereby strengthening their political authority. To defend against Iran, mobilize religiously. To defend against the Soviets, mobilize religiously. 'We're going to jihad. Want to come along?' When the mobilization took place it was not institutionalized; it was localized. Everyone was empowered, everyone took initiative."

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Each of the allies - the Afghan mujahideen, the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia - opposed the Soviets for it's own reasons: the Afghans, most obviously, wanted to reclaim control of their country; theAmericans, as theyhad been for thirty years, were principally focused on who they were fighting - the Soviets - not where; their concern was not Afghanastan but superpower realpolitik; the Saudi's were protecting their domestic base of power, which rested primarily on the governments alliance with religious authorities; and the Pakistani's wanted to control Afghanastan as both a buffer state to the Soviet threat from the north and a redoubt to attack India from the south. The Saudi government sent hundreds of missionaries and billions of dollars. The United States funneled arms through Pakistan and matched the Saudi's million for millions, most of it moving eventually through Peshawar.