Unholy Wars

• 1. Introduction

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  Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism asks a question that still hangs over global affairs: how did United States policy in the Middle East, across the decade from 1979 to 1989, help bring a form of terrorism into being? That is the central argument of John K. Cooley, a news correspondent who spent decades on the ground in the region. His book is not a think-tank paper written from a comfortable distance. It draws on his direct encounters with administrators, diplomats, politicians, and ordinary people. Cooley places eleven very specific figures and forces at the heart of his account, from heads of state to the bankers who moved money, to the poppy fields that funded much of what followed. The reception the book received, however, would prove as contested as the events it described.

• 2. The Decade Under Scrutiny

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  Cooley anchors his account in the period from 1979 to 1989, a span that opens with two leaders on opposite sides of the Cold War: Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev. The book's first chapter places them both in what Cooley calls "the Valley of Decision," a framing that signals the gravity he attaches to the choices made in that moment. Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Zia al-Haq of Pakistan each earn their own dedicated chapters, as does Deng Xiaoping of China, a reminder that the conflict drew in powers well beyond Washington and Moscow. Cooley's argument is that the flaws and gaps in how the United States handled these relationships were not incidental. They were structural, and they fed directly into the emergence of a terrorism that would go on to affect multiple regions of the world.

• 3. Mercenaries, Money, and Narcotics

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  Three chapters of Unholy Wars move away from heads of state entirely and focus on the human machinery of the conflict. Cooley gives extended attention to the recruiters, trainers, trainees, and what he calls "assorted spooks" who built and ran the networks of fighters. A separate chapter examines the donors, bankers, and profiteers who supplied the financial architecture. A third turns to the poppy fields and the drug lords who operated alongside, and sometimes in support of, the war effort. Cooley described what he saw as the CIA's reliance on Muslim mercenaries, citing a figure of upwards of 2,000 Algerians as part of the Afghanistan operation. It is in this claim, and the chapters built around it, that the book's most consequential and contested arguments reside. Journalist Peter Bergen noted that Cooley did not present evidence to support those specific claims.

• 4. The Contagion and Its Critics

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  Cooley's final two chapters share a title: "The Contagion Spreads." One tracks the spread of violence into Egypt and the Maghreb. The other traces what he calls the assault on America itself, a framing that positions the United States not merely as a bystander but as a destination for the forces it helped unleash. Norwegian researcher Thomas Hegghammer concluded that Unholy Wars did more than any other single work to propagate the view that the CIA trained the Afghan Arabs. That influence on public and scholarly debate was real and measurable. Historian Odd Arne Westad offered a sharper judgment: drawing on material from Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin, Westad concluded that the book "obviously originates in Soviet disinformation from the 1980s." That assessment places Cooley's account not as a corrective to official narratives, but as a product of a rival propaganda effort, a finding that has continued to shadow the book's reputation.