Afghanistan: US ’war on terror’ really began in 1945 | Middle East Eye
▻https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/afghanistan-US-war-terror-really-began-1945
In January 1957, President Eisenhower announced the Eisenhower Doctrine and declared that the US would come to the aid of any country in the Middle East threatened by communism. In private meetings with the CIA’s Frank Wisner and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower insisted that the Arabs should obtain inspiration from their religion to fight communism and that “we should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect”.
Eisenhower was keen on propping up the Saudis as a counterweight to then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eisenhower’s plan was that the Saudi king “could be built up, possibly, as a spiritual leader. Once this were accomplished we might begin to urge his right to political leadership.”
To that end, Saudi Crown Prince Faisal organised an international Islamic conference in Mecca in 1962 to combat the popularity of Arab nationalism, socialism, and “secularism”, and launched the World Muslim League. The conference declared: “Those who disavow Islam and distort its call under the guise of nationalism are actually the most bitter enemies of the Arabs, whose glories are entwined with the glories of Islam."
In response to Faisal’s attempt to replace Arab unity with Islamic unity, Nasser accused the new Islamic alliance of being an “American-British conspiracy aimed at dividing the Arab world and undermining Arab hopes for unity.”
The participation of right-wing Indonesian Muslim groups in the massacre of close to a million communists and alleged communists in 1965 Indonesia after a US-sponsored and financed coup was celebrated by an editorial in the Chicago Tribune: “We must say it’s refreshing to read of young Muslims burning down Communist Party headquarters, for a change and shout ‘Long Live America.’”
Once the counterrevolutionary Suharto consolidated his rule in Jakarta, he reined in the Islamist groups, though some of the more extreme among them would be maintained as an anti-communist force. They would join the anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s.
By the late 1970s, the US was, in partnership with the Saudis as well as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and his successor Hosni Mubarak, already recruiting, financing and training Islamists from Afghanistan to Pakistan, the Arab world, Europe and the United States readying them for the final battle against the Soviets.
Whereas US and CIA involvement in Afghanistan goes back to the 1960s, the western press began after 1978 to report in most sympathetic terms about “fiercely anti-communist Moslem insurgents” in Afghanistan and in training camps in Pakistan in need of more weapons.