How Pakistan and Saudi Arabia Played America and Gave Birth to Global Terrorism
Written by: Ajmal Shah
For forty five years the world has been told a comforting fairy tale. A superpower, bruised by Vietnam, teamed up with plucky Muslim warriors to slay the Soviet bear in Afghanistan. The press called them Freedom Fighters and glorified them by publishing their heroic photographs of Stinger missiles on bearded shoulders. It was a typical David versus Goliath script written by the CIA. The bear bled out in the Hindu Kush and the wall came down in Berlin. The US declared victory and down came the curtain. The curtain really never fell, it caught fire. And from the burning cloth crawled a monster that has been eating the world ever since: bombings in Madrid and London, beheadings in Raqqa and Paris, anarchy in Kabul, slaughter in Kashmir, children blown apart in Manchester concerts and Peshawar classrooms. The monster had three fathers and only one of them was naive. The United States created the cash and the cover, Pakistan supplied the camps and the double game, Saudi Arabia poured the ideological gasoline and struck the match. Together they midwifed global jihad, then spent decades pretending the creature was someone else’s child.
The operation had a codename, Cyclone, and a price tag that still makes accountants blink. Between 1979 and 1992 the CIA funnelled at least six billion dollars through Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Directorate, with Congress secretly authorising matching funds that pushed the total past twenty billion when private donations were counted. Every American dollar was doubled by Riyadh, riyal for dollar, wire transfer for wire transfer. Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki-al-Faisal sat in the same Rawalpindi safe houses as CIA station chiefs, signing the same ledgers. The money bought Stinger missiles, British Blowpipe launchers, Egyptian mines, Chinese rockets and something far deadlier: legitimacy. Washington called the recipients freedom fighters, Riyadh called them soldiers of Sunni supremacy and Islamabad called them strategic assets. The men in the camps called themselves Mujahideen and learned that the infidel superpower would pay for their war against another infidel superpower, then look the other way when the war turned sectarian, then regional, then global.
And in those same safe houses the CIA taught the ISI something even more lethal than weapons: the art of propaganda. How to sell a proxy war to the world, how to turn bearded guerrillas into global heroes, how to stage victories for Western cameras, how to leak atrocity stories to the right journalists and how to create a narrative so powerful that Congress would keep signing cheques and the American public would keep cheering. The CIA wrote the original Mujahideen Playbook: “David versus Goliath, holy warriors against godless empire, freedom fighters who only want their homeland back”. They gave the ISI the master copy. The ISI did not just read it; they memorised it, translated it into Urdu and Pashto, then rewrote the cast list. The Soviets became Indians. The freedom fighters became Kashmiri separatists. The homeland became Srinagar. Operation Tupac was nothing less than the Mujahideen Playbook photocopied, rebranded and unleashed on Jammu and Kashmir. The same staged videos, the same selective atrocities, the same global PR machine that once sold Stinger wielding saints to Washington now sold AK wielding martyrs to the ummah and to the world. The CIA had taught the world’s most immoral intelligence agency how to legitimise proxy war and the ISI became its most dangerous graduate.
Pakistan never saw the Soviet invasion as the main event. From day one the ISI treated Afghanistan as a giant forward base against India and a laboratory for tactics it would later perfect in Kashmir. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar received six hundred million dollars precisely because he was the most brutal, the most unreliable and the most useful for bleeding neighbours later. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989 the CIA packed up and declared victory. The ISI did not. It repurposed the camps, the smuggling routes, the hawala networks and the graduates. Operation Tupac was born in 1988, the same year Al-Qaeda was founded in Peshawar. The syllabus was identical: infiltration, subversion and terror. The target changed from Kabul to Srinagar. The death toll in Jammu and Kashmir crossed one hundred thousand. In 1990, came the first proof of concept, the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits. Ten years later, the same fighters who posed with Stingers for American photographers posed with severed heads for Pakistani television.
Saudi Arabia’s stake was older than the Cold War and colder than any glacier in the Hindu Kush. The House of Saud had been exporting Wahhabi puritanism since the 1960s to counter Nasser’s pan-Arabism, but the Iranian Revolution of 1979 turned the export drive into an existential war. Khomeini declared monarchy un-Islamic and Shia empowerment divine. Riyadh answered with a simple equation: more Sunni jihad equalled less Shia influence. The Afghan jihad became the perfect laundering machine. Saudi textbooks teaching that Shia were polytheists were shipped to Pakistani madrassas by the container load. Saudi clerics toured the frontier preaching that killing Soviet soldiers was good but killing Shia heretics was obligatory. Private Saudi princes wrote cheques that bought entire brigades. When the Taliban erupted from those same madrassas in 1994, their first act was to drag former communist president Najibullah from a UN compound, castrate him and hang him from a traffic light. Their second act was to massacre thousands of Shia Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif. Riyadh celebrated both equally.
The monster grew too large for any single father to control. In 1996 Osama bin Laden, once the golden boy of Saudi intelligence, declared war on the House of Saud itself. In 1998 Al-Qaeda bombed American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers carried Saudi passports. Washington finally noticed the creature had teeth. Riyadh’s response was theatrical: public arrests of low level donors and private planes for high level ones. Islamabad’s response was masterful: it designated Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed “terrorist” on paper while their leaders addressed public rallies under army escort. The 2008 Mumbai attacks killed one hundred sixty six. The 2019 Pulwama bombing killed forty Indian paramilitary personnel. Both masterminds remain free men in Pakistan. Both organisations still recruit in the same madrassas built with Cyclone money.
The mutation continued. In Iraq, Saudi donors funded Abu Musab-al-Zarqawi’s beheading videos targeting Shia civilians. In Syria, Saudi backed Jaish-al-Islam fired rockets at Damascus neighbourhoods because they were Alawite. In Yemen, Saudi warplanes bombed Shia Houthis while quietly tolerating Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Islamic State declared its caliphate in 2014 using weapons looted from American trained Iraqi units and ideology distilled from Saudi textbooks. Its soldiers filmed themselves burning Shia prisoners alive and posted the videos with Saudi hashtags. The monster had come full circle: the ideology Riyadh weaponised against Tehran was now devouring Riyadh’s own cities.
That same Mujahideen Playbook, photocopied by the ISI and annotated with Saudi footnotes, still forms the operating manual for every major terrorist organisation on earth. ISIS recruitment videos are shot with the same cinematic grammar the CIA taught in the 1980s: slow motion drone shots of fighters praying at dawn and voice over about defending the Ummah, cut to explosions. Al-Shabaab in Somalia releases hostage videos with the same ransom script once used against Soviet prisoners. Boko Haram in Nigeria kidnaps schoolgirls and posts the same “we are the new mujahideen” manifesto. Ansar-al-Sharia in Libya, AQAP in Yemen, Jaish-e-Mohammed in Kashmir, the Manchester Arena bomber, the Bataclan shooters, all use the identical template: “We are the new mujahideen, the infidels have invaded our lands, join the caravan of martyrs”. The call to “kill the infidels wherever you find them” is not a Quranic innovation; it is a marketing slogan refined in Langley, translated in Riyadh and weaponised in Rawalpindi. From Paris nightclubs to Mogadishu hotels, from Kabul weddings to Srinagar checkpoints, the playbook never went out of print. It just went viral.
America paid the highest direct price: three thousand dead on 9/11, seven thousand soldiers lost in the forever wars and eight trillion dollars vanished into the desert. Yet the indirect price is incalculable. Every European capital has tasted jihadist blood. Every South Asian city lives with the possibility of the next Mumbai or the next Pulwama. Afghanistan is once again a Taliban fiefdom where girls are banned from breathing outside their homes. The monster’s fathers meet annually in Washington, Riyadh and Islamabad, issuing joint statements about combating extremism while the creature grows new heads.
The tragedy is not that America was deceived. The tragedy is that America chose to be deceived because the deception was useful. Pakistan offered bases and plausible deniability and Saudi Arabia offered oil and silence about Israel. Both offered the same promise: we will fight your enemies if you ignore ours. The promise was kept until the enemies became indistinguishable.
There is only one way to starve a monster that has tasted five continents: stop feeding it. Destroy the hawala pipelines that still carry Gulf money to radical madrassas, bomb the camps that train tomorrow’s suicide bombers under Pakistani protection and end the diplomatic immunity that lets state sponsors of terror sit on United Nations Human Rights committees. Demand reparations measured not in dollars but in dismantled networks, shuttered madrassas and extradited masterminds. Anything less is just another chapter in the fairy tale.
The monster had three fathers, but only one still believes it can control the creature. The other two have learned to sleep with the lights on. The rest of us live in the dark it created, waiting for the next knock on the door, the next explosion in the marketplace, the next child who will never come home from school. The Soviet Union lost a war in Afghanistan, the world lost its future and the monster, fattened on American dollars, Pakistani camps and Saudi hate, laughs in a thousand languages while it sharpens its claws for the next feast.
The Author is an advocate at Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court. Writes on National Security, CICT, Politics, Geopolitics.
