Description
President Obama described veteran foreign fighters as ‘trained and battle-hardened.’ This is a sentiment widely shared among media, policymakers, and scholars. This paper seeks to provide clarity to this statement by drawing on the experiences and trajectories of foreign fighters from the Soviet-Afghan and Afghan Civil War. While it is often noted that foreign fighters had little to no impact on the actual outcomes during the Afghan conflicts, it is widely agreed that their participation in the conflict was transformative, leading to the emergence of its veterans as skilled conflict actors. However, among the narratives of foreign fighters themselves, the role of Afghanistan as a site of training and gaining the expertise of conflict is contested. Certainly, foreign fighters emerge with greater expertise in fighting than those armed group members with no conflict experience, but the isolation of the Afghan conflicts presented limited opportunities for concrete conflict experience. This chapter proposes that the two seemingly conflictual claims about expertise development can both be true. I argue that foreign fighters did overall gain a set of expertise—building training camps and gaining conflict skills—but that this expertise was limited. I also argue that expertise of foreign fighters in the Afghan conflicts was bound up within the mythology of participation and the victory of the Mujahideen, allowing those veterans to gain legitimacy in the Afghan Network and wider jihadist movement. Therefore, the conflict expertise of these foreign fighters was limited but reified by their membership to the Afghan Network. This paper helps understand how foreign fighters with limited conflict experience go on to gain senior positions and how this experience shapes these future organisations.
