Michael Sheehan, the State Department's Counterterrorism Coordinator, has made a big deal about a "geographic shift" in terrorist activity from the Middle East to South Asia. Sheehan attributes the shift to the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s: "This war destroyed the government and civil society of Afghanistan, at the same time bringing arms, fighters from around the world, and narcotics traffickers to the region."
Sheehan eliminates any trace of human involvement--"this war" brought arms, fighters, and narco-traffickers to Afghanistan, destroying civil society.
What Washington tends to conveniently ignore is that bin Laden and the rest of the extremist terrorists empowered to fight in Afghanistan were taught "the logic of terrorism" by our own Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA assembled a terror network that remains a cause of misery worldwide. CIA Director William Casey called it "the kind of thing we should be doing." According to standard sources, aid to extremist groups in Afghanistan was a response to the Soviet invasion. The truth is that President Carter gave the green light for covert support to the Mujaheddin six months before the December 1979 invasion.
In the words of then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a major architect of Carter's policy, they were "drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap." The US supported seven fundamentalist extremist groups throughout the 1980s and into the early 90s with cash, sophisticated weapons, and training to the tune of $5 billion--according to official figures.
The secret Black Budget of the CIA reportedly quadrupled to $36 billion per year when Reagan became president in 1980, and some of this money went to support secret operations in Afghanistan.
Some of the earliest training exercises took place inside the US, including rifle shooting at the High Rock gun club in Naugtuck, Connecticut. More technical training took place at the CIA's Camp Peary, nicknamed "The Farm," northeast of Williamsburg, Virginia.
Among the topics covered by training sessions were surveillance and countersurveillance, counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and paramilitary operations.
Around the same time, a source of private funding was sought for the war. Osama bin Laden, a man with "impeccable Saudi credentials" (his father's construction company had just been awarded a contract to rebuild and restore the holy sites in Mecca and Medina) was given "free rein in Afghanistan" by the CIA.
Using his share of his family's business empire, he built training camps and airplane landing strips, and carved underground bunkers in the mountains of Afghanistan, all with Washington's approval.
Just across the border, bin Laden's base in Pakistan was the Binoori mosque in Karachi. The prayer leader at this mosque was one Mullah Mohammed Omar, now "supreme leader" of the Taliban.