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The al-Sauds were but one militia among many until they forged a fateful alliance with an austere and martial desert preacher, Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab.
The Saudi spy service’s murky mix of alliance and rivalry with the kingdom’s Islamic ulama (scholars of Islamic law) became a defining feature of the Afghan jihad as it swelled during the 1980s.
Casey saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the “realistic counter-strategy” of covert action he was forging at the CIA to thwart Soviet imperialism.
“No one should have had any illusions about these people coming together politically—before or after a Soviet defeat.”
The Afghans whom Yousaf trained uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers— from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks.
“Terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead.”
“Terrorism is theater.”
Ten years later the vast training infrastructure that Yousaf and his colleagues built with the enormous budgets endorsed by NSDD-166—the specialized camps, the sabotage training manuals, the electronic bomb detonators, and so on—would be referred to routinely in America as “terrorist infrastructure.”
Outside the Pakistan army itself, less than ten years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, ISI had been transformed by CIA and Saudi subsidies into Pakistan’s most powerful institution.
The Arab pointed his gun directly at the two CIA officers. They were infidels and had no business in Afghanistan, he said.
Hekmatyar and Massoud both agreed that communist and capitalist systems were both corrupt because they were rooted mjahiliyya, the state of primitive barbarism that prevailed before Islam lit the world with truth. In this sense the Soviet Union and the United States were equally evil.
The Saudis inevitably saw Massoud and his northern coalition through the prism of language: Massoud’s followers predominantly spoke Farsi, or Persian, the language of Iran, and while Massoud and his Panjshiri group were Sunnis, there were Shias in their northern territory.
Pakistan. Inspired by their success against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officers announced to Bhutto that they were prepared to use the same methods of covert jihad to drive India out of Kashmir.
“We have a common task—Afghanistan, the U.S.A., and the civilized world—to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism,” Najibullah told reporters in his palace office as the mujahedin closed to within rocketing distance. “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.”
Should the United States encourage democratic elections even in countries such as Algeria or Egypt where the Islamists might win? How could Washington be sure that Islamists would continue with a democratic system after they won power?
Yasser Arafat and the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization grew equally alarmed by the rise of these Muslim Brotherhood—inspired networks. As it embraced peace negotiations with Israel, the PLO faced a rising challenge from Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Four Arab veterans of the Afghan war tried to kill bin Laden during 1994. They apparently believed that his interpretation of Islam was not pure or radical enough.
Haqqannia’s curriculum blended transnational Islamist politics with a theology known as Deobandism, named for a town in India that houses a centuries-old madrassa. During the nineteenth century the Deobandis led a conservative reform movement among Indian Muslims. Many Muslim scholars updated Islam’s tenets to adapt to changing societies. The Deobandis rejected this approach. They argued that Muslims were obliged to live exactly as the earliest followers of the Prophet Mohammed had done.
ISI had even deeper interests at stake than Hekmatyar’s fate. By 1994, Pakistani intelligence relied on the Islamist training camps in Hekmatyar-controlled Afghan territory to support its new covert jihad in Indian-held Kashmir. The political-religious networks around Hekmatyar trained and shipped foreign volunteers to Kashmir. Bhutto recalled that during this period, Pakistani intelligence officers repeatedly told her they could not fight the clandestine Kashmir war with Kashmiris alone; there just weren’t enough effective native guerrillas to bleed Indian troops. They needed Afghan and Arab
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Rafsanjani alleged that Pakistan’s army sent disguised troops into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. Taken aback, Bhutto denied this, but later, when she heard that Massoud held Pakistani officers in his prisoner of war camps, she wondered about what she had not been told.
THE TALIBAN SWEPT into Mazar-i-Sharif that May. The bearded, turbaned Pashtun and Pakistani madrassa graduates who poured into the city center in pickup trucks were as foreign an invasion force as the blue-eyed Russian conscripts who’d
The reported liaison involved Pakistan’s regional agenda: bleeding Indian forces in Kashmir and helping the Taliban defeat Massoud’s Northern Alliance.
“There was frustration: Why didn’t everybody else share their view on things?”
soil. Al Qaeda harbored and trained anti-Shiite fanatics who mounted assassinations and touched off riots in Pakistani cities. All of this was tolerated by Pakistan’s generals in the name of “strategic depth” against India. But what depth had they really won?
Even worse, the Taliban had taken to issuing threats against Musharraf. Omar wrote the Pakistani leader a private letter on January 16, 2001, urging him to “enforce Islamic law… step by step” in order to appease Pakistan’s religious parties. Otherwise, there could be “instability” in the country. “This is our advice and message based on Islamic ideology,” Omar warned. “Otherwise you had better know how to deal with it.”
Yet even these liberals acknowledged readily by early 2001 that two decades of official clandestine support for regional jihadist militias had changed Pakistan. Thousands of young men in Quetta, Peshawar, and Karachi had now been inculcated in the tenets of suicide warfare. The country’s main religious parties—harmless debating societies and social service agencies in the first decades after partition—had become permanent boards of directors for covert jihadist wars. They were inflamed by ambition, enriched with charity funds, and influenced by radical ideologies imported from the Middle East.
