U.S.-Led Recruitment and Aid for Afghan Mujahideen

U.S.-Led Recruitment and Aid for Afghan Mujahideen was a covert, American-backed campaign to organize, train, and arm radical Islamist fighters for war in Afghanistan against Soviet forces. Noam Chomsky presents it as both a strategic intervention, begun in 1979 in an effort to draw the Soviet Union into an Afghan “trap,” and the origin of a far-reaching network of mercenaries whose members later fought in other conflicts and, in some cases, turned against the United States. The campaign’s significance lies in that reversal: the forces assembled to serve a geopolitical purpose did not remain under the control of the governments that helped create them.

Origins and Strategic Purpose

Chomsky traces the organization of the armed forces to 1979, citing Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, who said covert support for mujahideen fighting Afghanistan’s government began around the middle of that year. Brzezinski described the aim as drawing the Russians into what he called the “Afghan trap.” Chomsky notes that this account might have been self-congratulatory boasting, but says Brzezinski took pride in the outcome: six months after the covert support began, Soviet forces entered Afghanistan to support its government.

The distinction between aiding resistance to a foreign invasion and helping provoke that invasion is central to Chomsky’s moral argument. He contrasts support for resistance after the Soviet invasion in December 1979 with Brzezinski’s claim that he had helped induce the invasion. In Chomsky’s view, recruiting a force of Islamist militants to advance that strategy cannot be treated as equivalent to assisting a resistance movement once the invasion had begun.

Recruitment, Training, and Scale

The campaign was not described as a purely American undertaking. Chomsky identifies the CIA as working with Pakistan’s intelligence services and partners including Saudi Arabia and Britain to recruit, train, and arm the most extreme Islamist fundamentalists available for a “holy war” against the Soviet occupiers. Elsewhere he gives a broader list of participants in the organization of these forces: the CIA, Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, and Saudi funding, among others. His account thus stresses a network of state and intelligence actors rather than a single sponsor.

The fighters were gathered from militant constituencies across borders. Chomsky estimates that the United States and its allies assembled a mercenary army of perhaps 100,000 men or more, recruited from the most militant sectors they could find. Many were not from Afghanistan. They were called “Afghans,” but Chomsky emphasizes that the label did not describe their origins; Osama bin Laden, whom he names as one example, was not Afghan.

The effort was framed by its sponsors as a holy war against Soviet forces. Chomsky also places it in a broader pattern of official language and political justification: the name given to an intervention, war, or armed campaign can conceal the interests and consequences behind it. In this case, the immediate strategic purpose was to inflict maximum damage on the Soviets in Afghanistan; the scale and composition of the recruited force, however, gave the campaign consequences beyond that battlefield.

The Afghan War and the Network’s Afterlife

Osama bin Laden joined the forces during the 1980s and became involved in financial networks that Chomsky says probably still existed at the time of the interview. The forces fought the Soviet occupiers, committed acts of terrorism on Russian territory, and won the Afghan war; Soviet forces were eventually expelled. Chomsky’s account therefore distinguishes the campaign’s military success from the wider activities and relationships of the armed network it helped assemble.

The network’s activities were not confined to Afghanistan even during the period of its formation. Chomsky says that in 1981 elements relying on these same groups assassinated Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who had played a key role in setting them up. In 1983, a suicide attack that may have been connected to the same forces was a decisive factor in the American withdrawal from Lebanon. He presents these episodes as indications that the armed groups and their associates were already involved in a broader field of violence, not simply fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

After the Afghan war ended, members of the network directed their attention elsewhere. Chomsky names Chechnya and Bosnia as examples, and says the fighters received at least tacit American support and were welcomed by governments in those regions. In Bosnia, many Islamic volunteers obtained citizenship in recognition of their military service. The fighters’ subsequent movements and shifting reception underscore the limits of treating them as a force with a single, stable purpose: they could be useful to governments in one conflict and become adversaries in another.

Reversal and Political Consequences

The sharpest reversal in Chomsky’s account follows the establishment of a permanent American military presence in Saudi Arabia. In 1989, the forces had prevailed in Afghanistan; afterward, bin Laden and his associates described the American presence in Saudi Arabia as comparable to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and turned their weapons against the United States. Chomsky notes that this was not the first time the group’s hostility had shifted toward an American military presence: a similar reversal had occurred in 1983, when the United States was militarily present in Lebanon.

The change in orientation did not mean that the network’s aims were simply anti-American. Chomsky describes Saudi Arabia and Egypt as principal enemies of bin Laden’s network. Its members sought to overthrow what they regarded as non-Islamic governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other Middle Eastern states, and North Africa. The contrast is consequential: a force initially organized with multiple governments’ help against Soviet power later opposed governments in the region, including American partners, as well as American military deployments.

Chomsky characterizes the September 11 attacks as not a direct consequence of American policy, but as an indirect one. He argues that their perpetrators appear to have come from a terrorist network rooted in the mercenary forces organized, trained, and armed by the CIA and other state actors. That claim makes the campaign part of the attacks’ historical background without presenting the sequence as a simple, direct chain of causation. In his interpretation, the policy’s legacy is a cycle of political blowback: a force built for strategic use acquired its own networks, purposes, and targets.

Legacy, Power, and Naming

Chomsky uses the campaign to question what counts as a “noble end” when governments recruit and arm militants to pursue their own objectives. The Afghan case, in his formulation, cannot be separated from the method of deliberately encouraging a Soviet intervention and then building a large force of radical Islamist fighters to fight it. The argument is not that every later action by those fighters was directly ordered by their earlier sponsors, but that the sponsors helped create the organization, military capacity, and financial connections from which later activity emerged.

The case also complicates the division between terrorism attributed to non-state actors and violence carried out or supported by states. Chomsky’s account moves from covert sponsorship and recruitment to the fighters’ subsequent attacks, regional campaigns, and eventual hostility toward the United States. He argues more broadly that political labels can obscure responsibility when the same tactics are described differently depending on who uses them. The history of the Afghan force therefore matters not only as an episode in the Soviet–Afghan war, but as an example of how power politics can produce armed networks that outlive their original purpose and redirect their violence.

Later military strategy forms another part of the legacy Chomsky draws around the Afghan campaign. He describes the establishment of major American military bases in Central Asia after the later war in Afghanistan as a first for the United States, and connects them to a contemporary “Great Game,” control of the region’s resources, and the surrounding of the world’s major energy resources in the Gulf. Before that war, he says, the safest base in the American system targeting the Gulf was Diego Garcia; Central Asian bases made intervention easier. This later strategic geography is distinct from the original recruitment effort, but it reinforces Chomsky’s larger account of Afghanistan as a place where military action, regional influence, and great-power objectives converged.

The episode’s enduring force in Chomsky’s analysis comes from its sequence of intended utility and unintended persistence. Governments recruited fighters to damage Soviet power; the Afghan war ended in victory for those forces; their networks and activities continued across other conflicts; and a later American military presence became one of the targets they invoked. The account does not reduce that history to a single cause or decision. Instead, it presents the campaign as a lasting demonstration of how states can help construct a force for immediate strategic ends without controlling where its capacities and political commitments will lead.