Soviet defeat in Afghanistan depended on American technology, Saudi money, and Muslim demographics.

Evidence

American dollars and missiles were indispensable to the defeat of the Soviets. Also indispensable, however, was the collective effort of Islam, in which a wide variety of governments and groups competed with each other in attempting to defeat the Soviets and to produce a victory that would serve their interests. Muslim financial support for the war came primarily from Saudi Arabia. Between 1984 and 1986 the Saudis gave 525 million to the resistance; in 1989 they agreed to supply 61 percent of a total of 715 million, or 436 million, with the remainder coming from the United States. In 1993 they provided 193 million to the Afghan government. The total amount they contributed during the course of the war was at least as much as and probably more than the 3 billion to 3.3 billion spent by the United States. During the war about 25,000 volunteers from other Islamic, primarily Arab, countries participated in the war. Recruited in large part in Jordan, these volunteers were trained by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency. Pakistan also provided the indispensable external base for the resistance as well as logistical and other support. In addition, Pakistan was the agent and the conduit for the disbursement of American money, and it purposefully directed 75 percent of those funds to the more fundamentalist Islamist groups with 50 percent of the total going to the most extreme Sunni fundamentalist faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Although fighting the Soviets, the Arab participants in the war were overwhelmingly anti-Western and denounced Western humanitarian aid agencies as immoral and subversive of Islam. In the end, the Soviets were defeated by three factors they could not effectively equal or counter: American technology, Saudi money, and Muslim demographics and zeal. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 682

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Pakistan’s ISI direction of 75% of US funds to fundamentalist factions — relevant to later US blowback narratives and to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ infrastructure thread via the overlooked role of foreign conduits in shaping outcomes.
• SEED: The detail that Pakistan purposefully directed 75% of American funds to the most extreme Islamist factions is a striking case study of how great-power funding gets warped by intermediary agendas — an essay on the principal-agent problem in foreign aid.