The Genie and Its Masters

Holy war is the cheapest weapon a statesman can buy and the only one that cannot be put back in the armory. It will fight your enemy for a season at almost no cost. Then it will look around for the next unbeliever, and find you.

The Speech at the Khyber Pass

In February 1980 a helicopter set down near the Khyber Pass, on the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a lean man in a business suit climbed out. He was Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to the President of the United States.

Six weeks earlier the Soviet army had invaded Afghanistan. Washington saw in the invasion a chance to give Moscow its own Vietnam, and Brzezinski had come to look at the instrument: the Afghan fighters and refugees gathered in camps along the border. Someone handed him a rifle, and he was photographed sighting along it toward the mountains.

Then he spoke to a crowd of bearded men, and the cameras recorded what he said. That land over there, he told them, pointing, was theirs. They would go back to it one day, because their fight would prevail. They would have their homes and their mosques again. Because your cause is right, said the adviser to the leader of the free world, and God is on your side.

The crowd roared.

Over the next decade the United States sent the Afghan resistance billions of dollars in money and arms. Saudi Arabia matched the sum. Pakistan's military intelligence distributed it, and favored the most rigid religious factions. The war was preached from pulpits across the Muslim world as a jihad, and tens of thousands of volunteers came from Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, and the Gulf to join it.

It worked. The Soviet army withdrew in 1989, and two years later the Soviet Union itself was gone.

The volunteers did not go home and take up farming. They had learned that a superpower could be beaten by men with faith and rifles. One of them, a rich young Saudi who had spent the war building roads and raising funds, drew the natural conclusion. If God had given them victory over one godless empire, there was another still standing.