During the Soviet–Afghan War, there was a large amount of foreign involvement. The Afghan mujahidin were backed primarily by Pakistan, the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom making it a Cold War proxy war. Pakistani forces trained the mujahidin rebels and fought alongside them while the U.S. and Saudi Arabia offered the greatest financial support. However, private donors and religious charities throughout the Muslim world—particularly in the Persian Gulf—raised considerably more funds for the Afghan rebels than any foreign government;According to Milton Bearden, former CIA chief in charge of the Afghan department, "The Saudi dollar-for-dollar match with the US taxpayer was fundamental to the success [of the ten-year engagement in Afghanistan]" (from Milton Bearden Interview. PBS Frontline.) Jason Burke recounts that "as little as 25 per cent of the money for the Afghan jihad was actually supplied directly by states." Saudi Arabia was heavily involved in the war effort and matched the United States' contributions dollar-for-dollar in public funds. Saudi Arabia also gathered an enormous amount of money for the Afghan mujahidin in private donations that amounted to about $20 million per month at their peak. Other countries that supported the Mujahideen were Egypt, West Germany, France, Turkey and Japan. Iran on the other hand only supported the Shia Mujahideen, namely the Persian speaking Shiite Hazaras in a limited way. One of these groups was the Tehran Eight, a political union of Afghan Shi'a.Ruttig, T. Islamists, Leftists – and a Void in the Center. Afghanistan's Political Parties and where they come from (1902–2006) They were supplied predominately by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but Iran's support for the Hazaras nevertheless frustrated efforts for a united Mujahidin front.
On the other hand, the Soviets were supported with military personnel from Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Vietnam throughout the war, according to a report. Prior to invasion, the Warsaw Pact member states were not consulted. Eastern European troops neither participated in the initial invasion nor, aside from limited advisory missions, took a direct role in the hostilities. In the end, the Soviets would have nothing more than limited political support from the Warsaw Pact countries. Romania went further and broke with its Warsaw Pact allies and abstained when the UN General Assembly voted on a resolution calling for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops. North Korea also refused to endorse the invasion partly because China was supporting the Mujahideen, so they had to create a fine political balance between them and the Soviets. The allies of the Soviet Union that gave support to the intervention were Angola, East Germany, Vietnam and India.
Pro-Mujahideen
+ Major arms exporters to the Mujahideen, SIPRI data 1980–1990 Supplier 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 Total 1980–1990 United States 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 16 40 8 0 67 China 0 0 0 0 0 4 4 10 10 9 9 45 Egypt 0 0 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 16 United Kingdom 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 7 0 0 8
No arms transfers are recorded from Pakistan, Israel or Saudi Arabia. Figures are in millions of SIPRI trend-indicator values (TIVs). Figures may not add up to stated totals due to the conventions of rounding. For the method used for the SIPRI TIV see <https://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers/sources-and-methods>. Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (c) SIPRI. Data generated: 6 Oct 2026 4:38:34 PM.
Pakistan
Shortly after the invasion, Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq chaired a meeting of his military government. At this meeting, Zia asked the Chief of Army Staff General Khalid Mahmud Arif and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Muhammad Shariff to lead a specialized civil-military team to formulate a geo-strategy to counter the Soviet aggression. At this meeting, the Director-General of the ISI at that time, Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdur Rahman advocated for an idea of covert operation in Afghanistan by arming the Islamic extremist. As for Pakistan, the Soviet war with the Islamist mujahideen was viewed as retaliation for the Soviet Union's long unconditional support of regional rival, India, notably during the 1965 and the 1971 wars, which led to the loss of Pakistani territory to the new state of Bangladesh.
After the Soviet deployment, Pakistan's military ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq started accepting financial aid from the Western powers to aid the Mujahideen, despite Leonid Brezhnev's opposition. In 1981, following the election of US President Ronald Reagan, aid for the Mujahidin through Zia's Pakistan significantly increased, mostly due to the efforts of Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson and CIA officer Gust Avrakotos.
The Pakistan Navy were involved in the covert war coordinating foreign weapons being funnelled into Afghanistan. Some of the navy's high-ranking admirals were responsible for storing those weapons in their depots.
ISI allocated the highest percentage of covert aid to warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami faction. This was based on his record as an effective anti-Soviet military commander in Afghanistan. Further, Hekmatyar and his men had "almost no grassroots support and no military base inside Afghanistan", and thus were more "dependent on Zia-ul-Haq's protection and financial largesse" than other Mujahiden factions. In retaliation for Pakistan's assistance to the insurgents, the KHAD Afghan security service, under leader Mohammad Najibullah, carried out (according to the Mitrokhin Archives and other sources) a large number of operations against Pakistan. In 1987, 127 incidents resulted in 234 deaths in Pakistan. In April 1988, an ammunition depot outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad was blown up, killing 100 and injuring more than 1000 people. The KHAD and KGB were suspected of perpetrating these acts. Soviet fighters and Democratic Republic of Afghanistan Air Force bombers occasionally bombed Pakistani villages along the Pakistani-Afghan border. The target of Soviet and Afghan fighters and bombers were Afghan refugee camps on Pakistan side of the border. These attacks are known to have caused at least 300 civilian deaths and extensive damage. Soviet and Afghan forces were also involved in dogfights with responding Pakistani jets.
Pakistan actively trained the mujahedin rebels, which resulted in Afghan communist leaders ordering airstrikes in Pakistan at rebel targets. Many secular Pakistanis outside of the government were worried about fundamentalists guerrillas in Afghanistan, such as Hekmatyar, receiving such a high amount of aid, leading to the bolstering of conservative Islamic forces in Pakistan and its military.
Pakistan also provided volunteers who went to Afghanistan in order to fight, their numbers estimated at around 40,000 by General Mirza Aslam Beg, a former chief of the Pakistan Army.
Pakistan took in millions of Afghan refugees (mostly Pashtun) fleeing the Soviet occupation. Although the refugees were concentrated within Pakistan's largest province, Balochistan, at the time under martial law under General Rahimuddin Khan, the influx of so many refugees – believed to be the largest refugee population in the world – spread into several other regions.
All of this had a heavy impact on Pakistan and its effects continue to this day. Pakistan, through its support for the Mujahidin, played a significant role in the eventual withdrawal of Soviet military personnel from Afghanistan.
Italy Italian state-owned industry Valsella Meccanotecnica sold land mines to the Afghan mujahideen, which were used against the Soviet Armed Forces and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
Afghan Arabs
United States
In the late 1970s, Pakistani intelligence officials began privately lobbying the U.S. and its allies to send material assistance to the Islamist rebels. Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's ties with the U.S. had been strained during Jimmy Carter's presidency due to Pakistan's nuclear program. Carter told National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance as early as January 1979 that it was vital to "repair our relationships with Pakistan" in light of the unrest in Iran.
Carter insisted that this "Soviet aggression" could not be viewed as an isolated event of limited geographical importance but had to be contested as a potential threat to US influence in the Persian Gulf region. The U.S. was also worried about the USSR gaining access to the Indian Ocean by coming to an arrangement with Pakistan. The Soviet air base outside of Kandahar was only thirty minutes flying time by strike aircraft or naval bomber to the Persian Gulf. It "became the heart of the southernmost concentration of Soviet soldier" in the 300-year history of Russian expansion in central Asia.
Brzezinski, known for his hardline policies on the Soviet Union, became convinced by mid-1979 that the Soviets were going to invade Afghanistan regardless of U.S. policy due to the Carter administration's failure to respond aggressively to Soviet activity in Africa. Despite the risk of unintended consequences, support for the Mujahiden could be an effective way to prevent Soviet aggression beyond Afghanistan (particularly in Brzezinski's native Poland). In July 1979, Carter signed two presidential findings permitting the CIA to spend $695,000 on non-military assistance (e.g., "cash, medical equipment, and radio transmitters") and on a propaganda campaign targeting the Soviet-backed leadership of the DRA, which (in the words of Steve Coll) "seemed at the time a small beginning." Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was used as an intermediary for most of these activities to disguise the sources of support for the resistance in a program called Operation Cyclone.U.S. Analysis of the Soviet War in Afghanistan: Declassified, from the National Security Archive, edited by John Prados (9 October 2001)
The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Stansfield Turner and the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) contemplated sending lethal arms from U.S. stocks to the mujahidin as early as late August 1979, but this idea was ultimately not implemented until after the Soviet invasion in December. The first shipment of U.S. weapons intended for the Mujahidin reached Pakistan on 10 January 1980.