Read Online Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton - Free Book Online Page A

ragged edge looking east, on the opposite side of the Durand Line from where they began peddling money and influence to fight the Russians almost two decades ago.
    During the Soviet war against Afghanistan, the Pakistani ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence bureau, specifically endorsed secretly supporting the Afghan side with money, arms, ammunition, training, operational advice, and safe haven, while maintaining a policy of plausible deniability. A war by proxy or even “a thousand cuts” was the preferred form of aggression. Direct attacks by the Pakistanis, the Americans, or others would have provoked worldwide outrage and possible Soviet retribution, but blaming violence on locally based jihadi groups bolstered the idea that a grassroots movement was fighting back against injustice or persecution.
    The Pakistanis created a paramilitary army under a variety of religious-sounding names, supported seven political groups in Peshawar, and laid the tracks for the CIA and Saudi funding train to turn Afghanistan into one of the most expensive covert proxy wars in America’s history. The Americans and Saudis funneled an estimated $6 billion in weapons and aid to the jihadi groups in their efforts to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan. To do this, the ISI created an internal Afghan bureau charged with setting up secret training camps, moving weapons and supplies through Pakistan to the border, and making sure the thousands of volunteers were fed, housed, clothed, trained, and bundled off to jihad with nary a ripple in the pond of international relations.
    The Islamic world sent their angry and idealistic young men, who quickly absorbed the cultlike desire to find purpose through martyrdom and self-sacrifice. Paramount in the cult of jihad was not only the concept of death as the ultimate sacrifice, but also the idea that great princes would serve alongside simple peasants. If one could not actually fight, then supporting these almost saintly men was considered a sufficient fulfillment of doctrinally required jihad. Saudi Arabia had pledged to match U.S. contributions to the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad dollar for dollar, and numerous private Gulf businessmen independently supported the efforts of well-traveled and convincing middle men like Abdullah Azzam and his eager young cohort, Osama bin Laden.
    Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-born radical Islamist firebrand, worked tirelessly to encourage Muslims to travel from around the world to fight jihad in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, Azzam’s protégé and former student from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdul Aziz University, came to Peshawar to assist in managing the Arab-speaking volunteers and funneling Saudi money toward radical groups. Together they established the “Services Bureau,” Maktab al-Khadamat, to coordinate the recruitment and training of the non-Afghan fighters for jihad against the Soviets, an organization viewed as the forerunner to al-Qaeda. During this period, bin Laden made the contacts and won the supporters he uses today as sanctuary and support.
    Bin Laden was reputed to be a pious, intelligent, and generous man who supported the Wahhabist, or more orthodox, groups by arranging funding, transport, and training for thousands of Saudis and Arab-speaking volunteers. Bin Laden had no association with, nor did he have any need of, the CIA to run his organization out of its little guesthouse in Peshawar. Azzam and bin Laden had ample funding from Muslim individuals and charities, so they had no use of income tainted by the infidels’ touch.
    In order to keep track of the hundreds of fighters who came to train and fight, and in order to notify relatives of their martyrdom, the group kept a close accounting of the volunteer jihadis who came and went. This bookkeeping, with its copious list of dedicated Islamist fighters from around the world, soon became a great resource for what is now referred to as al-Qaeda—an old-boys network that has