US backing for Zia’s Islamist dictatorship crushed Pakistani opposition capacity

Evidence

One was the solidifi of the military die, tatorship of Zia ul..Haq ( 1977-1988), who, while using Islam to buttress his brutal hold on power, turned Pakistan into a frontline state for the United States’s proxy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The military and monetary advantage that this alignment bestowed on Zia ul.. Haq’s regime made any effective organized opposition to it infeasible. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 18

Categorization

• XREF: US proxy-war funding insulating an Islamist dictator from domestic opposition connects to the CIA patronage dynamics discussed in The Defeat of the Spanish Armada re: foreign backing, and echoes the Reagan-era framing in Home Boy.