America, Britain, Pakistan, Oil, Islamism, and the Betrayal of the Secular World
America did not create Islamic fundamentalism from nothing. That claim would be too simple, and too easy to refute. Islamic fundamentalism had its own roots, theologians, institutions, resentments, ambitions, and history. But America, Britain, and their allies did something almost as consequential: they repeatedly empowered it, financed it, armed it, protected it, legitimized it, and used it. They did not invent the idea, but they gave the idea geopolitical force. They did not write the doctrine, but they built the conditions under which the doctrine became a weapon. Then, when the weapon turned against them, they called it a mystery. This is the central accusation of this essay: in the name of fighting Russia, communism, secular nationalism, Arab socialism, independent oil sovereignty, and anti-colonial politics, the West repeatedly strengthened the forces most hostile to secularism, pluralism, constitutional liberty, and modern citizenship.
Robert Dreyfuss’s Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam gives this argument one of its clearest historical foundations. Dreyfuss does not argue merely that America made one mistake in Afghanistan. His argument is larger and more disturbing: for decades, Western governments — above all the United States and Britain — treated Islamic fundamentalism as a serviceable instrument against left-wing, secular, nationalist, and Soviet-aligned forces across the Muslim world [1]. This is why the book matters and why it must be taken seriously rather than argued around. It does not treat Afghanistan as an isolated accident. It treats Afghanistan as the most dramatic explosion of a much older policy logic. The West looked at political Islam and asked not whether it was compatible with constitutional freedom, but whether it could be useful against a greater enemy. That greater enemy was sometimes Moscow, sometimes socialism, sometimes Arab nationalism, sometimes oil nationalism, and sometimes simply any government that demanded independence from Western control.
This is the contradiction at the heart of Western foreign policy. The United States Constitution is secular, pluralistic, and anti-theocratic in structure. It establishes no national church, declares no holy book supreme, and makes citizenship contingent on no religious identity. At its best, the American constitutional order protects the believer and the unbeliever equally, sheltering the dissenter, the convert, the critic, and the freethinker. But American foreign policy did not consistently defend this principle abroad. Across the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia, the United States and its allies supported monarchies, clerics, intelligence services, religious parties, and armed movements whose values were systematically hostile to secular citizenship. America defended religious liberty at home while subsidizing religious reaction abroad whenever that reaction served American strategy. That is not merely hypocrisy. That is civilizational betrayal.
The West repeatedly claimed to defend freedom while supporting forces hostile to freedom. It claimed to defend democracy while protecting monarchies and military dictatorships. It claimed to defend women’s rights while arming regimes that treated women as legal minors. It claimed to oppose fanaticism while using fanaticism as a weapon against communism. It claimed to defend secular modernity while methodically weakening secular modernizers. The result was not an accident of history. It was a strategic pattern. The West feared communism more than clerical reaction, Russia more than religious totalitarianism, and secular nationalism more than medieval theology. Every choice left a scar.
Iran: The First Great Betrayal
Mohammad Mossadegh was not an Islamic fundamentalist. He was a constitutional nationalist who wanted Iran’s oil wealth to serve Iran rather than the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the imperial arrangements behind it. His government threatened British oil interests and, caught in Cold War triangulation, became a target of American anxiety. The 1953 coup against Mossadegh — backed by the CIA and MI6 — destroyed one of the most consequential secular-democratic possibilities in the modern Middle East [2]. What replaced Mossadegh was the Shah: a pro-Western autocrat whose secret police, SAVAK, became synonymous with torture. In the short term, the West secured its oil and its influence. In the long term, it discredited secular liberal nationalism and validated the argument that the West understood only force and extracted only resources.
The Iranian case establishes the pattern before Afghanistan was even a Cold War theater. The West did not merely oppose communism; it opposed independent secular nationalism when that nationalism threatened oil and strategic control. Mossadegh’s crime was not religious extremism. His crime was sovereignty. He challenged the imperial structure of oil, and the West punished him for it. The moral absurdity is complete: the same West that later complained about the Iranian Revolution had helped destroy the secular nationalist path that might have forestalled that revolution. The 1979 Revolution did not descend from the sky. It emerged from twenty-five years of dictatorship, foreign-backed repression, modernization without democracy, and the systematic suffocation of secular alternatives. When secular politics are strangled by a foreign-installed autocrat, the mosque becomes a political sanctuary. When constitutional nationalism is crushed by a CIA operation, religious revolution becomes thinkable.
This does not mean the United States and Britain caused the Iranian Revolution in the simple sense. Iran had its own clerical institutions, its own class conflicts, its own theological traditions, and its own political actors with their own ambitions. But Western policy shaped the battlefield on which those forces operated. It strengthened the Shah while destroying secular constitutional trust. It associated Western liberal rhetoric with dictatorship and extraction. It taught generations of Iranians that foreign powers would tolerate no real sovereignty. Before the West asked why Iran became an Islamic republic, it should have asked why it worked so systematically to prevent Iran from becoming a secular one.
Egypt and the Logic of Useful Reaction
Gamal Abdel Nasser was not a Western liberal, and his regime was authoritarian in important ways. But Nasser represented secular Arab nationalism, anti-colonialism, and the aspiration of postcolonial states to control their own resources. To British and American strategists, Nasser was dangerous not because he was a tyrant — many Western allies were tyrants — but because he was a defiant one. He challenged imperial influence, nationalized the Suez Canal, and refused to behave as a client. In that context, Islamist opposition to secular Arab nationalism became strategically interesting. Dreyfuss documents that Islamist currents, including the Muslim Brotherhood, were viewed by Western intelligence circles as useful counterweights to Nasserism, Arab socialism, and Soviet-aligned nationalism [1]. The West did not control every Islamist movement or invent every Islamist idea. It did something subtler and more dangerous: it repeatedly treated religious reaction as a possible antidote to secular revolution.
Nasser’s offense was not simply authoritarianism. Many Western allies were forgiven far worse. His offense was independence. He wanted Egypt to speak for Egypt and Arabs to control Arab resources. That made him intolerable to an imperial order built on bases, oil routes, compliant elites, and anti-Soviet alignments. The Suez Crisis of 1956 exposed this plainly. Britain and France launched a military invasion to retake a canal nationalized by a sovereign state, and while the United States ultimately opposed the invasion, the deeper Western hostility to independent secular Arab nationalism never relented [3]. The West did not fear dictatorship. It feared defiance. That distinction explains a great deal of what followed across the next seven decades.
Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Protected Engine of Reaction
Saudi Arabia occupies a central place in this catastrophe. The U.S.-Saudi relationship fused oil, arms, anti-communism, religious conservatism, and regional strategy into a single arrangement of mutual moral corruption. Saudi Arabia was not treated as an enemy of freedom because it was useful: it sold oil, bought American weapons, opposed communism, anchored a Western-friendly oil order, and became an indispensable financial conduit for the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan. Yet Saudi Arabia simultaneously represented a form of monarchy at profound odds with Western constitutional liberalism. It exported Wahhabi ideology, funded religious institutions across continents, and treated political dissent as a threat to divine-royal authority. America spoke of liberty while embracing theocratic monarchy. It spoke of democracy while protecting absolute hereditary power. It spoke of fighting extremism while tolerating — and protecting — the ideological nursery in which extremism grew [15].
Wahhabism must be understood as more than a local Saudi theological tendency. It became globally significant because oil wealth gave it planetary reach. Without petrodollars, Saudi religious conservatism might have remained powerful within Arabia but inconsequential elsewhere. With petrodollars, it could finance mosques, madrasas, charities, publishing houses, clerical networks, and ideological missions across Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the West itself. The United States did not author Wahhabism, but American protection of the Saudi state preserved the geopolitical conditions under which Wahhabi influence expanded to global scale. This is a form of indirect responsibility that cannot be argued away: the West did not write the theology, but it guarded the throne that paid for the theology’s propagation.
Oil transformed the entire moral structure of the relationship. Before the 1973 embargo, oil prices were historically low by modern standards — the Federal Reserve records that oil rose from approximately $2.90 per barrel before the embargo to $11.65 by January 1974 [4]. The State Department notes that prices first doubled, then quadrupled, with cascading global economic consequences [5]. This transfer of wealth was not merely economic. It was geopolitical. Western industrial civilization had built itself on energy flows it did not politically control, and in 1973 Arab oil producers demonstrated precisely what that dependency meant. From that moment, Middle Eastern oil was not merely a commodity. It was a lever. The United States wanted cheap oil, military access, anti-Soviet allies, and political obedience. The Gulf monarchies wanted protection, arms, legitimacy, and survival. Both sides got what they wanted in the short term. The world paid the long-term price.
The Gulf monarchies also expose the labor dimension of this contradiction. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates became fabulously wealthy inside a geopolitical system underwritten by Western military power. That wealth was built on millions of migrant workers from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa laboring under the kafala sponsorship system — a structure documented by Human Rights Watch for enabling wage theft, passport confiscation, recruitment debt bondage, and severe restrictions on worker mobility [6]. The Council on Foreign Relations describes the kafala system as governing tens of millions of migrant laborers and as widely condemned for human rights abuses [7]. The West punishes some enemies in the name of human rights while selling weapons to regimes whose labor systems constitute systematic exploitation. It condemns forced labor in one country and finances semi-bondage in another. It speaks of labor dignity while tolerating structures that strip workers of elementary autonomy. This is not inconsistency. This is imperial morality: principles reserved for enemies, excuses manufactured for allies.
Afghanistan: The Catastrophe in Full
Afghanistan became the most catastrophic expression of this entire policy architecture. In 1979, before the full Soviet invasion, a presidential finding authorized CIA support for Afghan insurgents: cash, non-military supplies, and propaganda operations [8]. After the Soviet invasion, that support expanded into one of the largest covert operations in American history [9]. The mujahideen were not a monolithic force, and individual fighters were not identical. But the broad strategic logic was unambiguous: Islamic resistance to Soviet occupation became a Western asset. Religion became ammunition. Jihad became geopolitics. The operational chain — American money, Saudi religious funding, Pakistani ISI management, and Afghan militancy — was a machine for producing historical catastrophe, and everyone who built it knew what they were building.
Here is where the moral language of the West collapsed completely. The same America that claimed to defend secular constitutional values helped arm and glorify religious forces whose vision of social order was hostile to everything a secular constitution represents. American policymakers did not ask whether the long-term result would be women’s education, free expression, religious pluralism, or constitutional citizenship. They asked whether the policy would damage Moscow. That was the obsession. The Soviet Union had to be bled. If militant Islam could serve that purpose, militant Islam was useful. In this calculus, the enemy of the enemy became an ally, even when that ally was the enemy of everything the Constitution claimed to defend.
The destruction of secularism in Afghanistan must be placed at the center of this indictment. Afghanistan before the mujahideen victory was not a liberal paradise, and the PDPA government was authoritarian, coercive, and dependent on Soviet power. But it also represented a secularizing project that challenged feudal authority, clerical dominance, forced marriage, and the exclusion of women from public life. Its reforms included land redistribution, literacy campaigns, and women’s education [16, 17]. These reforms were often imposed with brutality, and they provoked fierce resistance in conservative rural areas. But the Western-backed opposition was not a democratic secular alternative. It was overwhelmingly religious, tribal, patriarchal, and committed to the reversal of every secularizing gain. Instead of helping Afghanistan develop a humane modernity, America and its allies armed the forces most determined to prevent it.
This is one of the great crimes of Cold War policy. America did not merely oppose Soviet tanks. It empowered the social forces that despised women’s education, secular law, land reform, and modern citizenship. It looked at Afghanistan and saw a chessboard. It did not see Afghan women who would lose their schools. It did not see Afghan workers who would lose nascent rights. It did not see the Afghan secularists, socialists, teachers, doctors, and students who would be crushed between Soviet authoritarianism and Islamist reaction. It did not ask whether mujahideen victory would produce liberty. It asked whether the war would bleed Russia. That was the moral accounting, and it was morally bankrupt.
Pakistan: The Proxy, the Arsenal, and the Double Standard
No account of Afghanistan is complete without Pakistan, because Pakistan was not merely a neighboring country during the Afghan war. Pakistan was the pipeline. The ISI became the indispensable instrument through which American, Saudi, and broader foreign support flowed into Afghanistan. Washington did not want direct military engagement with the Soviet Union, so it used Pakistan as its proxy manager. Pakistan selected, shaped, favored, armed, and empowered Afghan Islamist factions that later tore Afghanistan apart and provided the organizational substrate for global jihadist networks. This gave America the appearance of strategic distance while it enjoyed the strategic results. It was a textbook imperial arrangement: American money, Saudi theology, Pakistani intelligence, and Afghan blood [19].
Pakistan was the proxy. Afghanistan was the battlefield. Secularism was the victim. Islamic fundamentalism was the weapon. America called it strategy. History calls it blowback.
Pakistan also exposes one of the most glaring double standards in American foreign policy: the treatment of nuclear proliferation. The United States condemns Iran’s nuclear ambitions with pathological intensity — sanctions, isolation, threats, and incessant rhetorical emergency. Yet to Iran’s east sits Pakistan: an Islamic republic with a real nuclear arsenal, not a hypothetical one. Serious estimates place Pakistan’s stockpile at approximately 170 warheads, with projections suggesting it could approach 200 by the late 2020s [10]. America does not speak about Pakistan with the hysteria it applies to Tehran. Why? Because Pakistan has been useful. It was useful in the anti-Soviet war. It remains useful as an intelligence partner, a military corridor, and a strategic instrument.
This is the heart of the nuclear double standard: Iran is condemned for what it might become; Pakistan is excused for what it already is. Iran is treated as a permanent civilizational emergency; Pakistan is managed as a difficult client. Iran is called fanatical; Pakistan’s long operational relationship with jihadist militancy is treated as a regrettable but manageable complexity. The difference is not morality. The difference is utility. American foreign policy does not oppose nuclear danger consistently. It opposes nuclear danger when the danger belongs to an enemy.
Pakistan’s Islamization deepens the indictment. Founded as a Muslim homeland and progressively Islamized — especially under General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship — Pakistan became, during the Afghan jihad, the ideal Washington partner: anti-communist, religiously legitimized, intelligence-capable, and militarily servile. America rewarded this arrangement precisely as Pakistan was becoming most ideologically dangerous. Madrasa networks expanded. Militant groups gained state legitimacy. Afghanistan was flooded with religious war. The concept of an “Islamic bomb” was celebrated by some Pakistani nationalists not merely as a national deterrent but as a civilizational symbol — a weapon for the entire Muslim world [18]. This should have alarmed the secular West more acutely than anything Iran has done. It did not, because Pakistan was useful, and usefulness eclipsed alarm every time.
The Secular State as Collateral Damage
The destruction or systematic weakening of secular states is among the great crimes of this entire history. Secular states in the Middle East were not perfect, and most were authoritarian in significant ways. But secularism, even in imperfect and coercive form, created social spaces that religious fundamentalism intended to abolish. Secular republics could educate women, regulate clerical power, build national identity beyond sectarian lines, and place citizenship above religious law. When the West undermined secular nationalist states, invaded secular dictatorships, or armed religious opposition, it repeatedly dismantled the structures that had contained sectarianism.
Iraq is the most devastating twenty-first-century example. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. Iraq was also a secular state in structure. The 2003 invasion destroyed the Iraqi state apparatus, unleashed sectarian forces that had been suppressed, empowered Iran-aligned militias, energized jihadist currents, and produced the conditions from which ISIS emerged [12]. The West confused regime change with progress. It assumed that removing a ruler would generate liberal order. What it generated instead was state collapse, sectarian revenge, slave markets, and a jihadist proto-state. This is not a defense of Saddam Hussein. It is an indictment of a policy that destroyed a secular state without building anything secular in its place — which is not liberation but vandalism, and expensive vandalism at that.
Libya followed the same logic with the same consequences. Syria illustrated the same failure from a different angle. Destroying states in societies with deep sectarian, tribal, and regional tensions does not produce constitutional democracy. It produces armed factions competing in the ruins. The West repeatedly failed to grasp — or refused to grasp — that the choice was often not between a secular dictator and a liberal democracy, but between a secular dictator and something considerably worse. Choosing the worse outcome and calling it freedom is not a foreign policy error. It is a moral catastrophe.
The Cold War Logic and Its Pathological Core
The alliance with Communist China against the Soviet Union belongs in the same analytical universe. The United States normalized relations with China not because China was democratic but because China could be leveraged against Moscow. America opposed communists in Cuba and Vietnam while cooperating with communists in Beijing when Beijing served anti-Soviet strategy [14]. This proves that American foreign policy was never simply anti-communist in any principled sense. It was anti-enemy — which is a different thing entirely. It opposed some dictators and embraced others. It condemned some ideologies and weaponized others. The test was never freedom. The test was advantage.
This is the meaning of what might be called the West’s pathological orientation toward Russia — the pattern, visible across decades, of treating Russia or the Soviet Union as so absolute an enemy that almost any anti-Russian force became an acceptable ally. This orientation produced grotesque alliances. Islamist fighters in Afghanistan. Gulf monarchies with medieval social structures. Pakistani military dictators deepening their country’s Islamization. Secular nationalist governments were undermined for suspected Soviet sympathy. The pattern was not a defense of liberty. It was an obsession with power balance dressed in the language of civilization — and it produced, predictably, uncivilized results.
Britain’s role in building this architecture must not be subordinated to America’s. Britain had a century of experience manipulating religious, ethnic, tribal, and dynastic forces across the Middle East and South Asia. British imperial policy characteristically preferred indirect control through kings, sheikhs, and conservative elites over genuine democratic independence. In Iran, British oil interests were central to the conflict with Mossadegh and central to the decision to remove him [2]. In the Gulf, British power shaped the political landscape in which small oil monarchies survived as strategic dependencies. America inherited and extended an imperial architecture that Britain had designed. The American empire wore new clothes, but the old British instincts were unmistakable: divide, manage, arm, protect, extract, and call the result stability.
Europe, Migration, and the Consequences of Imperial Cowardice
Europe is now living with part of the consequence. For decades, European states accepted migration from former colonies, conflict zones, labor-exporting societies, and regions destabilized by war, dictatorship, and Western intervention. Migration itself is not the pathology. Millions of Muslims in Europe are peaceful citizens, workers, and contributors to secular societies. The problem is that Europe imported populations from societies where secular integration had often been undermined by the very geopolitical games Europe and America had played for generations — and then failed to assimilate those communities into a confident secular citizenship. It tolerated separatist religious enclaves in the name of multiculturalism, then expressed bewilderment when fundamentalist currents appeared within them. It wanted labor without cultural friction, diversity without philosophical backbone, and tolerance without the courage to defend secularism against its internal critics. Now Europe objects to consequences that empire, war, oil dependence, labor demand, and intellectual cowardice helped produce.
This argument must be stated with precision. It does not blame Muslim people as a human group. That would be false, morally repugnant, and intellectually dishonest. Many Muslims are secular, liberal, reformist, or simply ordinary people with no appetite for theocratic politics. The target is Islamic fundamentalism as a political ideology, and Western foreign policy as a historical enabler of that ideology. This distinction is what makes the argument strong: it allows one to condemn theocratic politics without attacking human beings for birth or ancestry. The West’s betrayal is not that it engaged with Muslim-majority societies. The betrayal is that it consistently empowered the most reactionary forces within those societies while ignoring or actively suppressing secular, liberal, socialist, feminist, and reformist alternatives.
The Philosophical Charge
The phrase “Islamic fundamentalism is the antithesis of secularism” must be understood as a precise philosophical claim, not a polemical slogan. The secular state holds that law belongs to citizens. Fundamentalism holds that law belongs to God as interpreted by clerics, movements, or scripture. The secular state holds that religion is protected but not sovereign. Fundamentalism holds that religion must command politics. The secular state allows multiple truths to coexist under common law. Fundamentalism seeks a final truth enforced through power. The secular state protects the right to doubt. Fundamentalism fears doubt because doubt corrodes authority. When America supports Islamic fundamentalism abroad, it is not merely making a foreign policy error. It is betraying the philosophical foundation of its own Constitution — and doing so with full awareness of what it is betraying.
This is why Dreyfuss’s title, Devil’s Game, is philosophically precise and not merely evocative. The game was not only military. It was metaphysical. The West believed it could deploy anti-modern forces to protect modern power. It believed it could use religious absolutism to defend liberal capitalism. It believed it could arm clerical reaction to defeat communist ideology, and then somehow return the world to secular normality once the operation concluded. But ideas do not evaporate when the operation ends. Militias do not become philosophers when the war is over. Madrasa networks do not become constitutional conventions because Washington changes policy. Once fanaticism is armed, funded, and glorified, it generates its own memory, mythology, martyrs, institutions, and ambitions. The West created a self-reproducing machine and then expressed surprise at its output.
The Indictment Restated
The defenders of American policy will argue that the Soviet Union was genuinely dangerous. True. They will argue that communist movements were often authoritarian. True. They will argue that secular nationalist leaders were not always democrats. Also true. None of these truths answers the central question. Why did the West so consistently choose religious reaction over secular reform? Why did it prefer monarchs to republicans, clerics to socialists, and armed Islamists to secular nationalists? Why did it treat anti-communism as more important than the secular citizenship its own Constitution enshrined? Why did it make no serious effort to understand the long-term consequences of empowering movements that despised the modern constitutional order?
The answer is power. Not freedom. Not democracy. Not human rights. Power — oil power, military power, anti-Soviet power, imperial power, arms-market power, intelligence power, and financial power. The West did not consistently defend its own stated ideals because ideals were always subordinate to strategy. This is why the same government could condemn communism in Cuba while working with Communist China against Russia. This is why it could condemn terrorism after September 11 while tolerating Saudi ideological export for decades. This is why it could invade Iraq in the name of democracy while protecting Gulf monarchies. This is why it could speak of women’s rights while selling weapons to regimes that denied women elementary autonomy.
The tragedy extends deep into the Muslim world itself. Western support for reactionary forces did not merely hurt America and Europe. It devastated secular Muslims, liberal Muslims, leftist Muslims, feminist Muslims, religious minorities, atheists, workers, writers, and reformers across the Middle East and South Asia. When the West backed dictators, it discredited liberal language in the places where liberal language was most needed. When it bombed countries, it handed extremists their recruitment material. When it protected oil monarchies, it strengthened the financial base of religious conservatism. The victims of this policy were not only Americans killed by terrorism. They were also Muslims killed, silenced, veiled, imprisoned, exiled, censored, and betrayed by the very forces the West found useful.
The price is now fully visible. Afghanistan was surrendered to the Taliban — twice. Iraq was shattered and has not recovered. Iran became a theocratic republic after secular-democratic possibility was destroyed by a CIA coup and then strangled for twenty-five years by a Western-protected dictatorship. Saudi Arabia became a pillar of American strategy despite its global export of religious conservatism. The Gulf monarchies grew wealthy beyond computation while migrant workers bore the hidden human cost. Europe now struggles with integration failures, a crisis of secular confidence, and the political rise of anti-immigrant reaction. America carries debt measured in tens of trillions — U.S. Treasury data placed total public debt near $39.3 trillion in June 2026 [13] — accumulated partly through the military commitments, oil wars, and security architectures that its own strategic choices made necessary. The West spent decades feeding the fire. It has spent further decades fighting the flames. The arithmetic is not complicated.
A critic may ask: did America support every Islamist movement? No. Did the West control political Islam completely? No. Did Muslims have agency? Yes. Did Soviet policy, local dictatorship, poverty, colonial borders, theological tradition, and regional rivalries also matter? Unquestionably. A serious argument admits all of this without retreating from the central charge. The West was not the only cause. It was a major accelerant. It did not invent the fire. It poured fuel on it continuously, deliberately, and with full knowledge of what fire does. That is enough for indictment.
The Final Charge
The stronger thesis — the defensible and devastating one — is not that America created Islamic fundamentalism. The stronger thesis is this: America, Britain, and their allies repeatedly empowered Islamic fundamentalism when it served their interests against communism, Russia, secular nationalism, and independent control of oil. They betrayed secularism abroad while praising it at home. They protected monarchies while preaching democracy. They armed religious militants while claiming to defend modernity. They transferred wealth and legitimacy to regimes whose social values were the negation of every constitutional ideal the West claimed to represent. They tolerated Pakistan’s existing Islamic nuclear arsenal while treating Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a civilizational threat. They used Pakistan as an operational proxy while pretending that the consequences belonged only to Afghans and to history.
Then they called the consequences terrorism. Then they called it extremism. Then they called it a migration crisis. Then they called it a civilizational conflict. But the consequences had a history, and the West was inside that history — not as a bystander, but as an architect.
Reason in revolt must ask the questions plainly. If secularism is the foundation of Western freedom, why did the West finance anti-secular forces? If democracy is sacred, why did it protect absolute monarchies? If women’s rights are non-negotiable, why did it arm regimes that denied them? If labor dignity matters, why did it defend Gulf semi-bondage? If terrorism is evil, why were militants celebrated when they fought Russia? If religious absolutism is dangerous, why was it treated as a policy instrument? If Iran’s possible nuclear weapon is an existential threat, why is Pakistan’s actual Islamic nuclear arsenal a manageable inconvenience? If America believes in its Constitution, why did American foreign policy betray the Constitution’s principles abroad at every strategic opportunity?
These are not questions of left or right. They are questions of reason confronting power.
America did not create Islamic fundamentalism from nothing. But it repeatedly gave Islamic fundamentalism money, weapons, legitimacy, battlefields, intelligence channels, and global historical importance. Britain helped design the imperial architecture in which oil monarchies and conservative elites could endure indefinitely. Pakistan became the proxy through which jihad was operationally managed. Afghanistan became the battlefield on which secularism and socialist reform were crushed by an international alliance of reaction. Saudi Arabia became the protected engine of religious export. The Gulf monarchies became trillion-dollar monuments to Western hypocrisy. Europe became the destination of consequences it had helped to manufacture. The West called all of this strategy.
History calls it blowback.
Reason calls it self-inflicted civilizational damage.
Numbered Citations
[1] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss argues across multiple chapters that the United States and its allies repeatedly cultivated, tolerated, or instrumentalized Islamist forces as a counterweight to secular nationalism, socialism, communism, and Soviet influence — in Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.
[2] U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951–1954, Iran; and National Security Archive materials on the 1953 Iran coup. These records document British and American operational involvement in the planning and execution of the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh.
[3] U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “The Suez Crisis, 1956,” and related diplomatic histories covering Britain, France, Egypt, Israel, and the United States during the crisis that followed Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.
[4] Federal Reserve History, “Oil Shock of 1973–74,” documenting that oil rose from approximately $2.90 per barrel before the embargo to $11.65 per barrel by January 1974.
[5] U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Oil Embargo, 1973–1974,” noting that the embargo caused oil prices to first double and then quadruple, with severe global economic consequences.
[6] Human Rights Watch reports on migrant workers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, documenting patterns of wage theft, passport confiscation, recruitment debt bondage, and restrictions on worker mobility.
[7] Council on Foreign Relations, “What Is the Kafala System?” The CFR backgrounder identifies the kafala system as governing tens of millions of migrant laborers across the Middle East and notes extensive documentation of human rights abuses.
[8] U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Afghanistan, Document 76. This record reflects that a July 3, 1979 presidential finding authorized CIA covert support for Afghan insurgents through cash, non-military supplies, and propaganda operations — months before the Soviet invasion.
[9] National Security Archive, “Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War,” describing the Afghan covert operation as a multi-billion-dollar CIA effort to support anti-communist Afghan resistance fighters.
[10] Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, and Mackenzie Knight, “Pakistan Nuclear Weapons, 2025,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The authors estimate Pakistan’s nuclear weapons stockpile at approximately 170 warheads, with projections suggesting an approach toward 200 by the late 2020s.
[11] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Press, 2004). Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Coll provides a detailed and sourced account of CIA covert activity in Afghanistan and the broader intelligence environment that preceded September 11.
[12] Post-2003 analyses of the Iraqi state collapse, de-Baathification, sectarian mobilization, jihadist recruitment, and the organizational and territorial conditions from which ISIS emerged — including reporting from the International Crisis Group, RAND Corporation, and academic literature on state failure in Iraq.
[13] U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data, “Debt to the Penny,” reporting total public debt outstanding near $39.3 trillion as of June 2026.
[14] Historical accounts of U.S.-China rapprochement during the Nixon-Kissinger period, including the 1971 opening and 1972 visit, in which Communist China was normalized as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union despite its political system.
[15] Council on Foreign Relations and related historical summaries on the U.S.-Saudi relationship: oil, arms sales, royal security guarantees, and regional security cooperation from 1945 to the present.
[16] Afghanistan Analysts Network, “Between Reform and Repression: The 60th Anniversary of the PDPA,” discussing the PDPA’s secular-leftist modernization project, its authoritarian methods, its Soviet dependency, and its long-term consequences for Afghan politics.
[17] PBS, “Women in Afghanistan: Education,” documenting changes in Afghan women’s access to education under successive political regimes and the sharp contraction following mujahideen consolidation and Taliban rule.
[18] Federation of American Scientists, “Status of World Nuclear Forces,” providing comparative global nuclear stockpile estimates; supplemented by historical reporting on Pakistani nuclear nationalism and the “Islamic bomb” rhetoric associated with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and later Pakistani officials.
[19] Benedetto Zanchetta, “Arming the ‘Freedom Fighters’ in Afghanistan,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, discussing the structural reliance of the United States on Pakistani ISI intermediation in managing covert support to the Afghan resistance.
[20] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, for its broader treatment of U.S. relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and the general strategy of using Islamist anti-communism as a Cold War instrument.