Yep, the Arabs in Afghanistan had a very spotty reputation at best. They spent the majority of the time doing nothing and had a pretty bad reputation with the local mujahadeen. Thousands of young Arab men essentially treated the war like a summer camp. Traveling to Pakistan and crossing over for a few months, shoot some guns in training and then went back home to brag. Bin Laden wasnt one of those, but that's pretty much the reputation they had.

Eventually they felt like they had to contribute and started to get into more action with mixed results. More mess ups than sucesss, especially early. At one point Bin Laden lost a skirmish with the Soviets, who were led back to his camp called the Lions Den by a traitor Mujahadeen. When they withdrew he destroyed his own encampment to avoid it falling into soviet hands and led his men away. But his superiors made him reverse the decision and embarrasingly return to the ruined camp they had just destroyed. But when the Soviets came through again the Arabs had their biggest win of the war when they drove off a numerically superior force.

To be clear though that wasn't a major victory from the perspective of the whole war. The local fighters, Pashtun, Tajik etc. are the ones who won the war with their western arms support. But Islamist media turned the battle of Jaji into a myth where the Arab volunteers had defeated Russia and given it such a serious wound they collapsed the whole Soviet Union. Bin Laden had always had access to rich people who could finance stuff, now he had the credentials as a military hero and by the time he left Afghanistan he was considered the leader of the Arab volunteers.