The Image of the Afghan Mujahidin in the American News Discourse during the Soviet-
In contemporary American news discourse, Afghan Mujahideen are routinely cast as
terrorists. Their uncompromising commitment to the enforcement of Sharia law across social
and political domains is frequently cited as justification for this designation. Yet this framing
represents a striking departure from earlier portrayals. During the Soviet–Afghan War, these
same militants were celebrated in U.S. political and media circles. They were extolled as “the
great heroes of recent times” in certain newspapers (Fair, 2/2002), lauded as “freedom
fighters” by officials and journalists alike (The Christian Science Monitor, 1/9/87), and even
described by President Ronald Reagan himself as America’s “brothers” and “freedom
fighters.”
This study seeks to recover a largely forgotten American discourse on the Afghan Mujahideen
during the 1980s, while also tracing the sharp rhetorical reversal that followed. The
metamorphosis—from “freedom fighters” to “misogynist terrorists”—did not stem from any
fundamental alteration in the Mujahideen’s objectives or practices, but rather from a shift in
their principal adversary: once the Soviet Union, later the United States. This raises pressing
questions about the semantics of “terrorism” and whether the term possesses any stable,
technical meaning independent of geopolitical context. The central contention advanced here
is that in American news discourse, “terrorism” has been politically instrumentalized to
denote those groups regarded as strategic antagonists of the United States.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 gave rise to a vast and heterogeneous resistance
movement collectively known as the Mujahideen. This coalition encompassed Islamists,
defectors from Marxist–Maoist factions, and more moderate actors. The most disciplined and
influential force, however, was the Islamist wing (Al-Hizb al-Islami al-Afghani), led by
figures such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—an uncompromising ideologue notorious for his
sanctioning of acid attacks on women (Gossman, 2017).
In the broader Cold War calculus, the United States quickly aligned itself with the
Mujahideen in an effort to contain Soviet expansion into the Middle East. As President Jimmy
Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later acknowledged (Conor, 2020):
"We engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British,
the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujahideen, from various sources… At
some point, we started buying arms for the Mujahideen from the Soviet army in Afghanistan,
because that army was increasingly corrupt."
Beyond material aid, the U.S. actively coordinated with regional allies such as Saudi Arabia
and Egypt to channel Arab Islamists into Afghanistan. These “Arab-Afghans”—among them
Ayman al-Zawahiri—would later form the nucleus of Al-Qaeda. For years, Washington’s
support for the Mujahideen remained steadfast (Hoodbhoy, 2005), and American media
coverage largely echoed this policy stance. During the war itself, the ideological orientation of
the CIA-backed fighters went largely unexamined (Galster, 1991); the dominant frame
emphasized their tactical utility against the Soviets, who were cast as America’s principal
geopolitical foe.
The post-Soviet civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the emergence of Al-Qaeda marked a
decisive shift in American perceptions. Suddenly, the same ideological
commitments—restrictions on women’s education, sectarian violence, and the imposition of
Sharia—were recast as intolerable. Following the 9/11 attacks, Washington declared war on
the Taliban and Al-Qaeda (Stewart, 2021), and the Mujahideen’s image in American
discourse shifted accordingly.
Although Al-Qaeda and the Taliban formally emerged after the Soviet withdrawal, it is
misleading to imagine the earlier Mujahideen as categorically distinct. Two considerations
underscore this continuity: first, many fighters trained by the CIA later joined Al-Qaeda or the
Taliban (Kaplan, 2008); second, their ideological commitments and human rights record bore
striking resemblance to those of their successors. A 1991 United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees report documented a persistent pattern of abuses—including kidnappings,
assassinations, extrajudicial killings, and systemic threats against women:
“Foreign relief programs targeted at women have received threats… In early September
1990, a fatwa… prohibited women from dressing in fitted clothing… wearing perfume or
cosmetics, going out without a husband’s permission… and attending school. Women were
declared unfit to learn modern technology and science, as only men were considered
responsible for supporting the family.”
Such abuses were not anomalies but expressions of the groups’ core ideologies, often
perpetrated under the watch of U.S. regional allies, and largely ignored by Washington.
Despite this, the American media of the 1980s portrayed the Mujahideen in overwhelmingly
favorable terms. In 1987, Ronald Reagan welcomed Mujahideen leaders—including Yunis
Khalis—into the White House, praising a “very moving discussion” with his delegation
(Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: 1987). Khalis himself was closely linked
to Osama bin Laden and notorious for marrying underage girls (Bell, 2013; Coll, 2004). Yet
such details were sidelined.
As Steven Galster observed (1991): “What coverage there was tended to be biased toward the
mujahidin… Western journalists relied heavily on U.S. officials for details of the war.”
Limited access to Afghanistan meant that U.S. outlets often recycled official talking points,
casting the Mujahideen in heroic, even mythologized terms. Dan Rather lauded their
resilience: “if it takes 100 years and the last man in Afghanistan, they will eventually expel
the infidels” (Unger, 1980). Journalists such as Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould later
critiqued this coverage as simplistic, uncritical, and overly “Ramboesque” in its framing
(Fitzgerald & Gould, 2009).
Archival materials provide striking examples of this romanticization:
Ronald Reagan: “You are a nation of heroes. God bless you.” (Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library and Museum: 1987)
The Christian Science Monitor: Celebrated Mujahideen guerrilla effectiveness with
U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles (Parenti, 2001).
The Christian Science Monitor: Highlighted Soviet failures as proof of Mujahideen
resilience (Pressley, 1984).
By contrast, the same outlet characterized Arab militants elsewhere as “young
terrorists” (Kidder, 1986).
For post-9/11 readers, such depictions are jarring, if not inconceivable.
The terrorist attacks of September 11 catalyzed a discursive revolution. President George W.
Bush’s declaration of a “War on Terror” inaugurated an era in which the term “terrorism”
saturated American news coverage. Reese and Lewis (2009) documented thousands of
instances in outlets such as USA Today and the Associated Press, noting how swiftly
journalists internalized the new framework of allies, borders, and existential threats. This
framing effectively erased historical context, divorcing contemporary terrorism from its Cold
War antecedents and obscuring U.S. complicity in the training and financing of the very
groups now cast as existential enemies.
The discursive arc is unmistakable: during the 1980s, U.S.-funded Mujahideen were lauded as
freedom fighters; after 2001, they were condemned as terrorists. This reversal underscores
that the term “terrorist” in American news discourse is not a neutral descriptor of tactics or
ideology but a label contingent upon shifting geopolitical alignments. Groups are celebrated
when aligned against America’s rivals and vilified when they challenge U.S. interests directly.
In this sense, “terrorism” functions less as an analytical category than as a rhetorical marker
of strategic enmity.
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