an irony of history

I heard a startling story from Micheal Hodges, author of AK-47, the Story of the People's Gun, on the radio just now. He told of seeing stacks of AK-47s stacked in a park in an Israeli city in 1982, evidence of the victory over the Palestinians in Lebanon. After some research, Hodges found that those captured weapons were shipped by the CIA to "our" jihadis in Peshawar, Pakistan. It is very likely, he said, that Osama Bin Laden's encounter with the AK-47 occurred with a gun shipped in by the CIA.

Mahmood Mandani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, gives an excellent account of the United States' role in creating non-state terrorism as a tactic of the late Cold War.