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Pakistan recognised seven Sunni exile groups to whom it distributed cash and arms from American and Saudi money and to whom all field commanders had to affiliate in order to get aid. Three of them were traditionalists or "moderates" who favoured a return to the pre-Daoud status quo, which usually included a return of the king. Four of them were "fundamentalist" or "Islamist". They did not want the re-establishment of the monarchy but an Islamic state. The Islamist groups - especially Hekmatyar's Hezb - got the lion’s share of the money. As a direct result, the fortunes of the royalist and traditionalist groups in Afghanistan declined and the Islamists became stronger.
The foreign Jihadists who came to fight with the mujahedin allied themselves to the Islamists. The initiative to use non-Afghan volunteers came not from the Afghans themselves but was "a joint venture between the Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the [Pakistani Islamist] Jamaat- e- Islami, put together by the ISI" (Olivier Roy), and enthusiastically supported by the CIA. Some 35,000 foreign Jihadists would fight alongside the mujahedin, mostly after the departure of the Soviet troops, and many more came to study and actively support them. Osama bin Laden was the main Saudi organiser in Peshawar.
Foreign friends
The Afghan war was a war by proxy between the superpowers. By the early 1980s between 100,000 and 150,000 Soviet troops were stationed in Afghanistan, far outnumbering the Afghan army, which never amounted to much more than 30,000. Thousands of Soviet political and military advisers ran the government and the army, sometimes assisted by Iranian Tudeh party members. By the early 1980s the war was costing the Soviet Union an estimated $5 billion a year. US support for the mujahedin rose dramatically from $30m per year to a peak of $600 million dollars a year in the mid 80s, which the Saudis doubled.
Soviet aid to Afghanistan flowed directly to the party and the state. American aid was more indirect. One the one hand the distribution of American financial aid was sub-contracted to Pakistan. On the other hand Saudi Arabia agreed to match US aid dollar for dollar, had its own networks of distribution and organised the sending of foreign volunteers. Both of these regimes had their own agendas, which were to impact on Afghanistan, and the beneficiaries of both were the Pashtun Islamists.
