subset as allies in the war against independence movements and progressive (anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist) social movements. When I was there (1970-71) it was clear that Afghanistan was being contested. US built half of the one paved road in the country; USSR built the other half better. A few years later the progressive side (women's liberation and education and such) gradually became stronger. Eventually the leftists controlled the whole of the national government, and, as is often true, tried using the military to push their agenda and thus increased resistance.
A complex history (see the Wiki for more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan ), but to imagine that the US/CIA had suddenly lost all interest or involvement in Afghanistan once the progressives began gaining strength, well, you are informed and smart enough to know that is quite improbable. Instead, as agents of corporate imperial expansionism, they would use their long-established practice of supporting and strengthening the Crazies who were in opposition to progress and change. (See the parallel to the US today?)
The following history is all from:
http://links.org.au/node/88 With few exceptions (most notably the Shiites in Iran), organising, arming, training and funding Islamist groups as a reactionary weapon against the rising tide of mass upsurge and social revolution became a cornerstone of us foreign policy. This was especially so after the defeat of the British and French imperialists in the Suez Canal dispute of 1956. The plethora of fundamentalist offshoots from the main Islamist organisations, in particular, were the perfect tool for the low-intensity combat the US's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) uses.
The first and most consistently pro-imperialist Islamic state was established by the Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia, with the backing of the British, amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Wahhabi cleric Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud unified warring tribes, crowned himself king in the 1920s and imposed the Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law, which includes stoning women adulterers, amputating limbs of thieves and public beheadings for other crimes, laws which remain in place today.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the support of the CIA, Saudi Arabia organised an "Islamic front" to build a more effective capitalist political alternative to pan-Arab nationalism and socialism. This network included the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Syria, Sarekat-e-Islam in Indonesia, the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS) in Algeria and Jama'at Islami in Pakistan.
Finding it difficult to build a mass base as wave after wave of left-wing currents swept across their countries, many of the Islamist groups, despite their anti-imperialist rhetoric, fell into the lap of imperialism for their survival. This brought them into alliance with most of the regimes in the region, which were heavily dependent on help from the US to crush the mass revolts they faced. The Islamic fundamentalists' vigilante groups became a major tool of reaction and counter-revolution for the right-wing states in connivance with imperialism.
In Indonesia, Sarekat-e-Islam provided many of the foot soldiers in the coup against the left nationalist President Sukarno, wiping out the Communist Party and murdering as many as two million leftists.
In Egypt and Syria, Islamist organisations like Akhwan-ul-Muslimeen were used to destabilise left-wing regimes. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat protected the radical Islamists in the 1970s to neutralise the left-leaning Nasserites and the Communists, and later to recruit to the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.
Jordan's King Hussein, backed by the US, often relied on Islamists' support in combating left opponents, and Yemen's President Abdallah Saleh was supported by Islamists in clashes with Marxists in South Yemen.
In Bangladesh (then East Bengal), during the 1971 independence war, the Jama'at-e-Islam, Al-Shams and Al-Badar groups played a similar role in league with the Pakistani army, murdering hundreds of thousands of leftists leading the mass upsurge there.
In Pakistan, during the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, Jama'at-e-Islami was the main tool of imperialism and the Pakistani state to curb anti-dictatorship leftists.
The process reached its peak during the 1980s, when thousands of Islamists were trained and sent to Afghanistan to try to overthrow the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government, which took power after the 1978 revolution there. Afghanistan is estimated to be the largest covert CIA operation involving Islamic fundamentalists (in 1987, US military assistance to the mujaheddin reached $700 million—more than Pakistan received—much of it sent via Saudi Arabia to keep the extent of US support hidden).7
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