America’s low-intensity proxy-war tactics created the very jihadis later used against it.

Evidence

The internationalization of the war on terror affected countries in every part of the world. The United States brought nations on side with a combination of incentives and threats, rewards and sanctions. Yet the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—with their huge loss of life and inconclusive outcomes—were only the public face of a tentacular set of connections that involved the co-optation of military and security forces from across the globe as client actors. In fact, these tactics can be set in a much longer context, from the Vietnam War through “proxy wars” in countries such as Angola and Mozambique, where the United States financed and trained anti-Communist elements, to the Contras in Nicaragua and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Mahmood Mamdani describes the attraction of this form of distanced “low-intensity conflict”: “it offered the prospect of waging war without declaring it, without a draft, with few soldiers deployed, and with even fewer returning home in body bags.” U.S. strategic interests in the 1980s, specifically the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, were pursued through networks of trained fighters: those jihadis whose tactics are now employed often against Western targets. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 381

Categorization

• XREF: The boomerang of training mujahideen who later turn on Western targets connects to the CIA-created-armed-groups theme that runs through post-9/11 fiction like The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s backdrop of American global meddling.