From Yesterday’s Freedom Fighters to Today’s Terrorists: Afghan War

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. List of eferences “Interview with Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski”. (1997, June 13). Archived from the original on August 29, 2000. Retrieved May 25, 2016. Bell, K. (2013). Usama bin Ladin’s “Father Sheikh”: Yunus Khalis and the Return of al- Qa`ida’s Leadership to Afghanistan. Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep05633.6 Coll, S. & Penguin. (2004). Ghost Wars. Amsterdam University Press. Fitzgerald, P., & Gould, E. (2009, October 27). A history of failed press coverage of Afghanistan. NiemanWatchdog. http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=4 11

Galster, S. (1991). Afghanistan: The Makings OF U.S. Policy, 1973–1990. Chadwyck-HealeyIncorporated.
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