How Western Intelligence Agencies Built the Global Jihadist Network

by Matt Agorist,The Free Thought Project:

(The Libertarian Institute) Americans have been fed a comforting fairy tale about Islamic terrorism. Radical jihadists attack the West simply because they despise freedom, democracy, and the American way of life. This narrative flatters domestic audiences while conveniently obscuring a far more troubling reality. For decades, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel have armed, financed, tolerated, and tapped into Sunni Islamist extremists as geopolitical tools to destabilize rivals. The evidence spans multiple theaters and rests on declassified documents, congressional investigations, and credible investigative journalism.

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The most thoroughly documented case is Operation Cyclone, the CIA program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen from 1979 to 1992. In a1998 interview withLe Nouvel Observateur, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski confirmed that the CIA began aiding mujahideen opponents of the pro-Soviet Kabul government six months before the Soviet invasion—a calculated provocation intended to draw Moscow into an unwinnable war. When asked if he regretted supporting Islamic fundamentalism that gave “arms and advice to future terrorists,” Brzezinski replied:

Multiple intelligence agencies participated in this operation. MI6 ran covert operations supporting hardline commanders. Pakistan’s ISI served as the critical financial and logistical conduit—operating under the direction of Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq, who controlled ISI policy throughout the war. Saudi Arabiaagreed to match CIA contributions dollar for dollar, a commitment secured when Brzezinski visited Riyadh in February 1980 and one that CIA officer Gust Avrakotos and congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX) wouldfly to Riyadh to enforcewhenever Saudi payments fell behind. Historian Steve Colldocumented inGhost Warsthat Osama bin Laden informally cooperated with ISI-run guerrilla training camps on behalf of newly arrived Arab jihadists, with intimate connections to CIA-backed commander Jalaluddin Haqqani. The global jihadist network that became al-Qaeda grew directly from this infrastructure.

The Afghan theater was not an isolated experiment but the opening chapter of a longer story. The same networks it created spread rapidly to the next front. The Chechen insurgency of the 1990s was joined by Arab and Central Asian jihadists who had cut their teeth in Afghanistan. The most prominent wasIbn Khattab, a Saudi-born mujahideen veteran born in 1969 inʿAr’ar, Saudi Arabia, who left for the Afghan jihad at age 18 before entering Chechnya in 1995. Saudi-backed organizations funneled funds, and Gulf state charities developed during the Afghan jihad maintained, in some cases wittingly and in others not, support for al-Qaeda-affiliated groups throughout the decade. Several of the future 9/11 conspirators—including Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh—originally sought to travel to Chechnya in 1999 before being redirected to al-Qaeda’s Afghan camps,per the 9/11 Commission.