US sponsorship of Afghan Mujahideen created extremists later framed as an external Islamic threat.

Evidence

For in the past decade there has arisen a new cadre of such dubious experts, whose appeal to an understandably anxious public — the World Trade Center bombing was indeed a frightening episode, and a tiny handful of extremist Muslims were indeed the culprits, although Emerson does not directly connect their leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a veteran of United States-sponsored Mujahideen in Afghanistan, with a calculated United States policy in that country to breed groups of such extremists as fighters against the Soviet Union — in the name of counter-terrorism, expertise on terrorism, knowledge of the Islamic threat and the like, has given them an easy prominence in the sensationalist media. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 220

Categorization

• XREF: The blowback pattern — a state arming groups that later turn against it — echoes the Afghanistan and later Iraq dynamics that produce the very threat used to justify more intervention. Recalls the US-created mujahideen angle also noted in other security reading.
• QUESTION: Compare this 1995 analysis with the post-9/11 consolidation of exactly this ‘expertise on terror’ class — did the pattern hold or sharpen?

Related

• CIA-trained Afghan mujahideen produced the terrorist attacks against America (similarity 0.84)
• US-trained Afghan militants produced blowback against America as imperial power (similarity 0.81)
• US aid created the mujahideen it later designated terrorists. (similarity 0.81)
• The US trained the mujahideen from which al-Qaeda later emerged (similarity 0.80)
• US support for the mujahideen inadvertently seeded the creation of al-Qaeda (similarity 0.80)
• America’s low-intensity proxy-war tactics created the very jihadis later used against it. (similarity 0.79)
• Islamic fundamentalism is a modern by-product of Cold War ideological clashes, not ancient tradition. (similarity 0.79)
• The US supplied billions to mujahideen who later became its top enemies (similarity 0.78)