US-sponsored anti-Soviet jihad fed Zia’s Islamization and armed Pakistan’s arms market

Evidence

The militarization of the tribal areas along the porous Afghan–Pakistan border and these areas’ position at the fulcrum of international power politics for the past thirty years are themes that unite The Wasted Vigil and Burnt Shadows. Both novelists trace, through plot and character, the phases of American meddling in the region. They also remark on its international dimension. In her essay for Index on Censorship, entitled Offence: The Muslim Case, Kamila Shamsie offers a potted history of Pakistan from its inception to the present, noting how the Islamist tenor of the U.S.-prompted anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan fed incestuously on the ruthless Islamization program undertaken by Zia in Pakistan in the 1980s. She describes how in the decade after the Soviet invasion “Pakistan was the U.S.’s most necessary ally in the cold war [sic] and … the conduit through which arms and finances passed into the hands of the mujahideen.… [But [t]he Afghan war brought ‘the Kalashnikov culture’ to Pakistan as the country became ‘the world’s largest open market in arms.’ ” The CIA worked closely with Pakistan’s own Inter-Services Intelligence to run a proxy war through third-party militias composed of Muslims drawn from around the globe. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 417

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the CIA-ISI proxy war history that contextualizes Changez’s trajectory in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the geopolitics in Naqvi’s Home Boy.
• DEFINE: Establishes the historical ‘proxy war through third-party militias’ framework Morey will use to read both novels’ worlding.

Related

• Cold War policies that Western powers drove cultivated Islamophobia globally. (similarity 0.79)
• The United States backed Zia’s dictatorship as an anti-Soviet ally (similarity 0.78)