How the Right Armed Islamists Against the Left—Then Called Them the Enemy
Ronald Reagan welcomed Afghan resistance delegates into the Oval Office on February 2, 1983. He called them “freedom fighters.” Behind that photo stood an expanding U.S. operation to arm the anti-Soviet insurgency through Pakistan, with Saudi Arabia helping finance the war. The American right now warns of militant political Islam as a civilizational threat. It spent the Cold War helping some of its fighters win.
This was never principally about secularism or democracy. It was about defeating communists, Soviet allies and secular nationalist movements—sometimes by empowering the religious right.
Washington’s holy warriors
U.S. involvement began before the Soviet invasion. In July 1979, President Jimmy Carter authorized covert assistance to Afghan insurgents. By November, a CIA memorandum was discussing Pakistani and Saudi intelligence cooperation. After Soviet troops entered Afghanistan that December, the operation grew into a major proxy war under Reagan.
Pakistan's military intelligence distributed weapons and other support to Afghan mujahideen factions, including Islamist groups hostile to the Soviet-backed Kabul government. Saudi Arabia provided funding and helped sustain the broader religious networks behind the insurgency. The immediate objective was clear: bleed the Soviet Union and break its Afghan ally.
Reagan's 1983 visitors were Afghan resistance representatives, not members of the Taliban, which emerged as an organized force in 1994. The distinction matters. So does the continuity: the Taliban rose from the wreckage of the anti-Soviet war and subsequent civil conflict, with major backing from Pakistan. The movement returned to power in 2021, after another twenty years of war.
The monarchies were allies, not enemies
Washington's partnership with Saudi Arabia was older and deeper than Afghanistan. Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz in 1945; the alliance eventually joined American security power to Saudi oil wealth and monarchical rule. When Riyadh financed conservative religious activity abroad, that did not prevent it from being treated as an indispensable Western partner.
The contrast was stark: socialist and nationalist governments faced Washington's demands for political reform, while an absolute monarchy remained central to U.S. regional strategy. In Afghanistan, the monarchy's money and America's anti-communist priorities converged.
Turkey belonged to the same strategic map, though in a different way. It joined NATO in 1952 as a secular republic because of its position on the Soviet Union's southern flank. Later, NATO accommodated Turkey under Erdoğan's religious-conservative rule. Geography and military usefulness counted for more than Western rhetoric about political Islam.
Israel's wager against the secular Palestinian movement
Israel made a parallel calculation in occupied Palestine. In 1987, the Washington Post described a longstanding Israeli policy of encouraging Islamist organizations as a conservative counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism, especially the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israeli authorities had recognized Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's Mujama al-Islamiya as an association in 1979 and allowed its social institutions to expand in Gaza.
Hamas emerged from that political and religious milieu during the First Intifada in 1987. Israeli policy did not simply manufacture Hamas's later armed operations. It did, however, help strengthen a rival to the secular PLO—the movement Israel was then trying to contain.
The logic resurfaced under Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2018 Israel approved the transfer of $15 million in Qatari money to pay Gaza civil servants. Israeli officials said the money was for humanitarian stability, not Hamas itself. Politically, keeping Hamas-governed Gaza apart from the Palestinian Authority also weakened the prospect of unified Palestinian leadership. Critics accused Netanyahu of benefiting from precisely that division.
The hypocrisy is the policy
There is no single Islamist movement with a single foreign sponsor. But Western governments repeatedly distinguished between Islamist forces that threatened their interests and those that helped undermine an enemy. In Afghanistan, anti-communist militants could be celebrated in the White House. In Gaza, Islamist organizers could be tolerated as a counterweight to secular nationalism.
The consequences were borne by Afghans and Palestinians, not by the officials who made those calculations. Religious militants did not become dangerous only when Washington or Israel changed its mind. The scandal is that Western power helped some of them grow when their violence or political influence served a strategic purpose—and later demanded the public forget that history.
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