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At the end of December, a few days before the Mecca siege ended, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Muslim world was infuriated by the invasion, and within weeks, the Saudis were calling on Islamic nations to unify their efforts to support the country’s Muslim freedom fighters, known as the mujahideen.

From the Saudi perspective, the invasion couldn’t have come at a better moment. For years, the Saudis had bought into their own mythology, coming to see the kingdom as a perfected Islamic state where crime, radicalism, and evil in general could hold no sway.

That assumption had been undermined in the most dramatic way possible, with an assault on the country’s most precious asset—its religious credibility. The Saudis were not merely the masters of the Grand Mosque; they were its protectors, and they had failed spectacularly.

In the aftermath, the leaders of the security apparatus took a hard look at what they had wrought and began to worry that it could happen again. One possible solution would have been to steer their religious program into a more moderate zone. Instead, they took a quicker and easier route: if the kingdom was plagued with angry, religiously fervent young men, the kingdom would simply send them away … to Afghanistan.

The Saudi decision to support the Afghan mujahideen was based on a complex stew of foreign and domestic concerns and was supported by both the political and religious establishments. The American decision to do the same was a much simpler Cold War calculation. As National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told President Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”18

Cold warrior Ronald Reagan would up the ante. Calling the mujahideen “freedom fighters,” he embarked on a campaign of support that included covert arms and training. The State Department’s United States Information Agency produced hours of propaganda films promoting the mujahideen and their struggle, which the videos sometimes referred to as “jihad.” The videos even showed mujahideen operations against the Russians, a style of presentation that jihadists would soon emulate.

One American government video showed Afghan children in school being indoctrinated into the jihadist lifestyle. Ironically, those children would reach prime fighting age just in time for U.S. forces to arrive twenty years later, and they would remember the lessons that the United States had forgotten.

VOICEOVER: In the towns and the camps of the 3 million [Afghan refugees] is a generation born with this national holy war burning in their hearts and minds. Their own number is in the hundreds of thousands, and they all learn one thing more important to them than these word drills. The Afghan has never been conquered. Afghanistan can be destroyed, but the Afghan will never submit.

CHILD: Right now, of ten brothers, only two brothers are left. And they have gone to jihad.

VOICEOVER: How many sisters?

CHILD: I had three sisters, and all three are dead.

VOICEOVER: When you grow up, what will you do?

CHILD: I will go on jihad.19

The Reagan administration also turned a blind eye to a parade of fire-breathing Islamic clerics and Afghan fighters who toured the United States seeking support from Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The Virginia-based World Anti-Communist League, a right-wing organization, sponsored mujahideen leaders on tours of the United States and helped provide money and aid supplies.20 Delegates from the Anti-Communist League met with top officials from the Muslim World League at a summit in Malaysia just one month after the Soviet invasion and agreed on a “joint effort … to combat all atheistic cults and movements.”21

The fight against communism made for strange bedfellows. Mujahideen leaders would sometimes share the podium with Nicaraguan contras at WACL events, cheered on by the future leaders of right-wing, antigovernment militia groups.22

Support from the American Muslim community ultimately