On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were murdered in coordinated attacks that brought down the Twin Towers, struck the Pentagon, and crashed a fourth airliner in Pennsylvania. The perpetrators belonged to al-Qaeda, an organisation led by Osama bin Laden.
The conventional story treats this as the eruption of a new, free-standing Islamist threat. A closer look at the preceding two decades reveals a more uncomfortable lineage: the network that struck America was, in significant measure, the product of earlier Western policy choices in Afghanistan.
In the late 1970s Afghanistan was a Soviet-aligned state. The United States, seeking to impose costs on its Cold War adversary, pursued a strategy of destabilisation. Covert support flowed to anti-government elements. The communist leadership in Kabul and Moscow responded by escalating, culminating in the Soviet invasion of December 1979. What might have remained a localised contest was transformed into a global cause.
Washington and its allies framed the Soviet presence as an assault on Islam itself. Through Pakistan’s Army, its Inter-Services Intelligence and extensive CIA funding under Operation Cyclone, tens of thousands of volunteers from across the Muslim world were encouraged, financed, trained and armed to wage jihad against the Red Army.
The call was effective. Among those who answered it was a 32-year-old Saudi, Osama bin Laden. Western media and official circles often portrayed such figures in romantic terms. A 1993 The Independent profile headlined “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace” was typical of the tone.
The practical result was the creation of a transnational cadre of experienced, ideologically motivated fighters and the infrastructure — training camps, financial networks, and propaganda channels — that later became al-Qaeda. When Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, they left behind the secular, relatively capable government of President Mohammad Najibullah. That government was systematically undermined. Western policy and regional proxies continued to back the mujahideen factions. In 1996 the Taliban, who had emerged from the chaos and enjoyed indirect external facilitation, seized Kabul, executed Najibullah and hung his body from a traffic post.
The jihadis drew a different lesson from the Soviet departure. They concluded that they, not the United States and its partners, had defeated the second superpower. If the Red Army could be bled into retreat, the same methods could be turned against the remaining superpower. That conviction, forged in the camps and battlefields of the 1980s, matured into the planning for 9/11.
The attacks were carried out by a terrorist organisation whose origins lay in a Western-backed proxy war. The point was later crystallised, albeit in a different context, by Hillary Clinton’s observation about Pakistan: “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours.” Bin Laden and the network around him had been nourished as useful instruments against the Soviets. Once that utility ended, the snakes did not remain confined.
The strategic moral is straightforward and repeatedly ignored at high cost. Arming ideologues because they share a temporary enemy is not cost-free. The weapons, the training, the mythology of successful jihad, and the organisational habits created against one adversary can, and often do, reappear as a more durable threat to their original sponsors.
Blowback is not an abstraction. On September 11, 2001 it arrived in American cities, carried by men whose path to violence had been cleared, funded and celebrated in the previous generation’s great game.
The writer is a defence journalist specialising in military affairs, security policy and defence technology. He reports extensively on operation strategies, defence manufacturing initiatives and geopolitical developments across the Indo-Pacific region. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily carry the views of Raksha Anirveda
