So i've (rightly or wrongly) read that Al-Qaeda was formed as a defence unit against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As far as i'm aware, the Soviet-Afghan war could be considered a proxy conflict of the cold war.
I've read that an insurrection (inspired/led by/i'm not sure that's why i'm on this sub) involving the US creating some sort of insurgency against the (communist influenced?) regime. With the US supplying said insurgents with weapons to fight the Soviets.
Sorry if this question is convoluted/my current knowledge is entirely wrong. I'm here to learn!
The short answer: yes, but no, but yes. The force that would ultimately become al-Qaeda was formed to protect the Islamic world from the perceived aggression of the atheistic Soviets. However, it was not formed in Afghanistan nor by Afghans for this purpose.
But first, a diversion to briefly explain why and how the Soviets were involved.
There's a common misconception, that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to put a Communist government in the place of a fundamentalist Muslim government. But in fact, when they entered in significant numbers in December 1979 it was in nominal support of a Communist government in Kabul! This government, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, was not popular in much of Afghanistan. This was in part because of its hamhanded approach to managing religious matters - the dominant factions within the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan took a rigid Marxist-Leninist approach, aiming to root out Islam as a barrier to Afghanistan's progression through the stages of a socialist revolution. However, it was also a matter of ethnic & regional politics and pragmatic factors, such as concerns among rural farmers that their way of life was being uprooted without their having a say. This is where the modern meaning of the term 'mujahedeen' takes relevance. Those in the Afghan population who took up arms against the DRA became termed mujahedeen, 'those who make/undertake jihad'. This is where the Soviets begin to become involved.
The government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had spent the better part of 1978 and 1979 petitioning the Soviet embassy in Afghanistan for military equipment (which they got, although less than they wanted) and Soviet Army maneuver units (which they did not get), to make up for pro-mujahedeen defections in the Afghan military. The internal political situation within the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan deteriorated significantly in the latter half of 1979, and the KGB station in Kabul became increasingly concerned that the Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin was plotting a coup against the President, Nur Taraki. The prospect of a coup or even a total collapse of the DRA, right on the southern border of the USSR, was viewed with some alarm in Moscow - having a government which they were on decent terms with was preferable to a religious movement which Moscow feared would be used as a weapon by the Americans.^(1) A great many events which are beyond the scope of this answer transpired, and so it came about that despite Moscow's many reservations, the USSR became entangled in Afghanistan for a decade, fighting a loose collection of Islamist, traditionalist, and anti-DRA forces.
Beginning in 1981 and picking up steam significantly in 1984, some of these forces received arms from the Pakistani intelligence services. These arms, or sometimes just the funding to buy them from a third party, often originated with the CIA or the Saudi intelligence services. The full nature of this effort, called Operation Cyclone, is not superbly documented in the open-source world, but we know rough budget numbers and we have some firsthand accounts. Suffice to say it was a tremendously significant effort, consuming somewhere north of $200 million per year between 1984 and 1988. I am not prepared to say how decisive it was in the eventual Soviet withdrawal, but it is certainly arguable that absent the infusion of arms and supplies, the mujahedeen could never have mounted enough combat power to keep themselves from being worn down by Soviet superiority in artillery, armor, and of course airpower. In any case, there's pretty strong evidence that many of Cyclone's backers in Washington explicitly viewed the program as a means to bleed the Soviets white and inflict real strategic problems on them. So, yes, it was absolutely a proxy war from the US perspective, though the Soviets did not themselves think they were fighting US interests so much as simply defending their own interests.
So where do Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda fit in here? Osama was emphatically not part of the Afghan mujahedeen despite his best efforts and later propaganda claims to the contrary. As is painstakingly documented in Lawrence Wright's *The Looming Tower***^(3) Osama was a complete outsider in the Afghan mujahedeen and his efforts to help them were often rebuffed or politely deflected. He did accrue a smallish band of "Arab Afghans" under the header of "Maktab al-Khidamat" through his recruiting and financing efforts both in the Arab world - and remember, Afghanistan is not the Arab world! - as well as work in refugee camps in Pakistan. MAK and the Arab Afghans did go on to form the early core of al-Qaeda, but by most accounts they were minimally involved in the Afghan mujahedeen's conflict with the DRA & USSR. It seems that their camps were bombed once or twice by the Soviets, but there's no indication from Soviet reporting that they were aware of the existence of a separate Arab contingent within the mujahedeen.^(4) There is also no indication that I've seen that the CIA funded the Arab Afghans, despite the persistence of this meme in American understanding. The bin Laden family were fairly influential within Saudi Arabia, however, and even as the Saudi government's patience began to wear thin with some of Osama's behavior, he was still on cordial terms with members of Saudi intelligence. Despite this connection, it does not appear as though any resources were funneled either intentionally or by happenstance from the CIA through the Saudi government to Osama.
In any case, Osama and his compatriots including future AQ leaders like Ayman al-Zawahiri did see MAK as a pan-Islamic bulwark against anti-Islamic secular forces, and without the existence of MAK, al-Qaeda would not have existed. The best guess I've seen for when exactly AQ was formed is sometime in August of 1988, during a series of meetings between bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. But by this time, it is generally believed, bin Laden was splitting his time between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, having grown generally disillusioned with the conflict in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda would only move to Afghanistan in late 1996, long after the Soviet withdrawal, as the Taliban offered a fairly hospitable government for AQ's increasingly hunted leadership.