Jihad's American Midwife: The Cold War Gamble That Changed the World

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On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet soldier crossed the Amu Darya River, marking the end of a nearly decade-long occupation of Afghanistan. It was a moment of triumph for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had funneled billions of dollars into arming and training the Afghan mujahideen. 

The guerilla fighters, backed by U.S. intelligence and Pakistani military logistics, claimed the lives of roughly 28,000 Soviet soldiers and ultimately forced Moscow’s withdrawal. That day, the CIA station in Islamabad sent a terse but triumphant message to headquarters in Washington: “We won.”

Pakistan’s military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq openly credited the CIA with engineering the Soviet retreat. But among the Afghan mujahideen and the Islamic theocrats across South Asia and the Middle East, the sentiment was markedly different. They saw the victory not as a product of American strategy, but as an act of divine intervention. For them, Allah—not America—had delivered the triumph.

In hindsight, the Reagan administration’s support for the mujahideen was shortsighted. Washington viewed the conflict through a Cold War lens, seeing it as a battleground for defeating communism and containing Soviet influence. What it failed to grasp was the transnational ambition of the Islamist groups it was empowering. The U.S. strategy of using Pakistan as a launchpad for jihadist insurgency in Afghanistan unwittingly sowed the seeds of a much larger threat: the rise of global jihadist terrorism.

Had the Soviet-backed regime remained in control, there was a possibility—however uncertain—that Afghanistan and even parts of Pakistan could have followed a path of secular modernization under communist influence. Instead, the American-led victory created a political vacuum. Into that space poured hardline Islamic ideologies, eventually transforming Afghanistan into a fertile breeding ground for extremism.

The irony became painfully clear after the September 11 attacks. For nearly a decade, the CIA had collaborated with the mujahideen, training them in guerrilla tactics and urban warfare. That covert partnership—born of strategic convenience—led to the emergence of Al-Qaeda, the very force that would later orchestrate 9/11. In its zeal to defeat the Soviets, Washington had unwittingly midwifed a new global menace.

The events that followed—terrorist attacks in the West, the rise of jihadist groups across the Middle East, and the insurgency in Kashmir—were not isolated developments. They were the downstream effects of U.S. foreign policy choices in the 1980s. What began as a proxy war ended as a geopolitical boomerang, one that would haunt the world for decades.