Peshawar, across the border in Pakistan. These commanders and political groups shared
the goal of ousting the Soviet Union and the government it supported in Kabul, but
they had varying other agendas, usually based on the needs of the ethnic or tribal
groups they represented. In 1985 the seven parties in Pakistan formed a united front,
the Islamic Alliance of Afghanistan Mujahidin, which helped attract international aid
for their cause but disintegrated after the Soviets withdrew.
According to most analysts, the mujahidin fell into two broad groups: Islamic fun-
damentalists (or Islamists) and traditionalists. The Islamists embraced a religious
agenda—a jihad(or holy war) to drive out the infidel invader. Most of these fighters
were native Afghans, but hundreds of Muslims from other countries joined the fight
against the communist “infidels” in Afghanistan, a pattern that would be repeated in
later conflicts in the Balkans, Chechnya, and Iraq. The term traditionalistscovered an
array of conservative forces in Afghanistan, all of whom were Muslim and most of
whom simply wanted to force the Soviet army from their territory in favor of tradi-
tional tribal or ethnic rule.
Early on, following the Soviet invasion, China, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Ara-
bia, and the United States provided limited amounts of military aid to the mujahidin.
Most of this aid they funneled through Interservices Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani
intelligence agency run by the military as a virtual government within a government,
bypassing civilian leaders in Islamabad.
In March 1985 the administration of Ronald Reagan decided to escalate U.S. mil-
itary support for the mujahidin, by increasing the quantity of weapons it supplied. In
another step, in 1986, the United States began providing portable high-tech antiair-
craft Stinger missiles to the Afghan fighters. These missiles deprived the Soviet air force
of air superiority, and just as important, made Soviet pilots more cautious, thus reduc-
ing their effectiveness in combat. The United States gave the mujahidin several hun-
dred, possibly as many as nine hundred, Stinger missiles in 1986 and 1987.
According to information compiled by Barnett Rubin, a U.S. scholar on
Afghanistan, U.S. aid to the mujahidin began in 1980 at $30 million, rose to $80 mil-
lion in 1983, jumped to $470 million in 1986, and reached $630 million annually
for 1987 and 1988. The Washington Postreported in 1992 that covert U.S. aid totaled
more than $2 billion during the 1980s, and was matched by funds provided by Saudi
Arabia through ISI. China also provided substantial quantities of weapons to the
mujahidin, as did Iran.
The mujahidin carried out thousands of classic guerrilla hit-and-run attacks against
the Soviet army and a small Afghan army loyal to the Kabul government. At its peak
in 1987, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan stood at just under 120,000 troops, with
another 30,000 or so providing support from Uzbekistan, across the border. The
mujahidin never inflicted a major military defeat on the Soviet army, but their con-
stant attacks prevented the Soviets from establishing long-term control over more than
a small fraction of Afghan territory.
Prolonged Negotiations
For nearly six years, between June 1982 and April 1988, United Nations diplomat
Diego Cordovez mediated a series of negotiating sessions that eventually produced an
agreement giving the Kremlin a degree of diplomatic cover for a withdrawal from
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