The way we remember the Afghan War today is as a kind of prologue. We care that the United States (along with, far more importantly, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) helped fund jihadists because those insurgents would later turn against the United States, serving as the ultimate indictment of Reaganite Cold War politics. We care that the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan because that failure foreshadowed the Afghan quagmire of today. We care about the Afghan War because it spawned Osama bin Laden. [...]
But this conflict over the future of “Pashtunistan” and the Afghan presence along the line became an ideological conflict as well. As they had done for decades, Afghan leaders appealed to socialist values and internationalist goals to pressure the Soviet Union into maintaining its support for Kabul, while Saudi financing (coming in part from the windfall generated by the 1970s oil crisis) turned the southern insurgency into a worldwide Islamist project. [...]
The legacy of opposition to the Vietnam War combined with the lack of revolutionary progress in the West produced a new kind of ethos among European leftists. Solidarity with suffering people targeted by state repression, whether in right-wing Nigeria during the Biafran War or in newly communist Vietnam during the “Boat People” crisis, came to take precedence over grudging support for either Soviet or Chinese-aligned governments. This was the moment that gave birth to Doctors Without Borders in France and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan in Sweden.
Both groups opposed Soviet intervention as imperialist and, eventually, supported the Islamist insurgency as a genuine expression of the popular will. Their powerful lobbying in their home countries and the United Nations meshed neatly with US foreign policy priorities, expressed most concisely in Carter national security adviser Zbygnew Brzezinski’s words, “we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.” But the NGOs also helped the mujahidin directly, providing them with industrial equipment and embedding with them to spread their message to sympathetic Western audiences.
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