US support to the Mujahideen initiated during the Carter administration led to the pumping of "billions of dollars into the Afghan cause and thousands of Islamic zealots were given specialist training in the US and Britain." (Review of John Cooley’s Unholy Wars - Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism,
http://www.neue-einheit.com/mixed/terror/bookreview.htm ):
"In the United States they experienced tough courses in endurance, weapons use, sabotage, and killing techniques, communications and other skills. They were required to impart these skills to the scores of thousands of fighters who formed the centre and the base of the pyramid of holy war." (John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars - Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, London Pluto Press, 1999, p. 81.)
General Zia ul-Haq was a protégé of both the Carter and Reagan administrations. His government played a key role in the recruitment and training of the Mujahideen:
The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel and elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training by Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling probably more than a billion; pressuring and bribing Pakistan -- with whom recent American relations had been very poor -- to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary; putting the Pakistani Director of Military Operations, Brigadier Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation. (Phil Gasper, Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban International Socialist Review, November-December 2001,
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Afghanistan/Afghanistan_CIA_Taliban.html )
