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The shift of the Cold War to Africa provided the perfect opportunity for the United States to experiment with its new strategy of proxy war, using the Apartheid regime in South Africa to fight the MPLA in Angola and to fund Renamo in Mozambique.

It was, however, with the advent of the Reagan administration in 1981 that the US strategy of fighting proxy wars, or “low intensity conflicts,” as a way of containing both the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism reached its full-blown state.

The Reagan administration fought two proxy wars in the 1980s, in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. In Nicaragua, the Contras received covert funding from the US government and were hailed as “freedom fighters” by Reagan in their ultimately successful attempt to destabilize and overthrow the Sandinista regime. But it was in Afghanistan that the US strategy of covertly funding terrorists truly blossomed, and a whole new generation of Muslim fundamentalists was groomed into fighting a Jihad.

The war in Afghanistan represented the high point of the Cold War, Mamdani argues, in which the US aim was not to reach accommodation with either the Soviet Union or with Afghan nationalists, but to create the Soviet’s “own Vietnam.”

In 1985, Reagan appeared on television outside the White House with a group of Afghan men, all from the mujahideen. “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers” Reagan announced. The stage was thus set for a decade of brutal conflict in Afghanistan, in which covertly funded Muslim fundamentalists were the US weapon of choice.

The United States and its allies had long had an ambivalent relationship with political Islam. Prepared to fund it on occasion – Hamas, for example, was initially encouraged by Israel and played off against the PLO – it was nonetheless only tolerated when it suited the US’s wider regional interests. Hence, because the Islamist regime that came to power in Iran after the 1979 revolution was also nationalist, it was considered a threat to US interests and was relentlessly opposed. This was the context in which Saddam Hussein was recruited as a US ally, to fight a proxy war against the Iranians. Saddam’s troops, trained and armed (including with chemical weapons) by the United States, invaded Iran in 1980.

While the Iran-Iraq war helped solidify the perception that Shiite Muslims were revolutionary and Sunni Muslims moderate, it was ironically a fundamentalist form of political Islam that the United States encouraged as a means of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

In its proxy war with the Soviet Union, the United States provided Afghanistan’s Islamist mujahideen with money and logistical support (including weapons), channeled primarily through Pakistan. In return for its help in the Afghan war effort, Pakistan was granted massive amounts of US aid throughout the 1980s despite its appalling human rights record, and again in 2001, with the US invasion of Afghanistan.

A massive propaganda and fund-raising machine targeted the worldwide Muslim population, so that the mobilization of recruits occurred through a range of Islamic institutions. The ideas of Jihad were developed at these training centers, ideas that were hitherto marginal within the Islamic tradition. It has been estimated that over 80,000 men were trained militarily within Pakistan from 1982 to 1992, and that a total of $3 billion in covert US funds were funneled to the mujahideen, through banks such as BCCI – “the bankers of Jihad,” as Mamdani puts it.