Quotes About Mujahideen

The war against Syria was "one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the CIA," the New York Times revealed. The CIA invested more than $1 billion in Operation Timber Sycamore, "one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency's program arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

We approached the post at dawn from the high ground to the north. Our contact led us inside. Most of the soldiers were asleep and we wanted to capture them. However, some of our Mujahideen were not very quiet and the detail woke up and started fighting us. We

As a CIA deputy director in the 1980s, Gates had helped oversee the arming of the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation of their country. The experience of watching that loosely organized insurgency bleed the mighty Red Army into retreat—only to have elements of that same insurgency later evolve into al-Qaeda—had made Gates mindful of the unintended consequences that could result from rash actions.

Al Qaeda" didn't translate to "the base," as most Western media outlets had so ignorantly reported, but rather, "the database." It referred to the original computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with the help of the CIA to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

The list of American grievances is long: Pakistan developed nuclear weapons while promising the United States that it would not; the United States helped arm and train Mujahideen against the Soviets during the 1980s, but Pakistan chose to keep these militants well armed and sufficiently funded even after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989; and, from the American perspective, Pakistan's crackdown on terrorist groups, particularly after 9/11, has been halfhearted at best.

The United States made no secret of its desire to have the House of Saud bankroll Osama bin Laden's Afghan war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, and Riyadh and Washington together contributed an estimated $3.5 billion to the mujahideen.5 However, U.S. and Saudi participation went far beyond this.