Ghost Wars (20 page)

Colonial and religious warfare during the nineteenth century infused the country’s isolated valleys with more austere Islamic creeds. Muslim theologians based in Deoband, India, whose ideas echoed Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis, established
madrassas
and gained influence among Afghan Pashtun tribes. To galvanize popular support against invading Sikhs, an early-nineteenth-century Afghan king named Dost Mohammed appointed himself Amir-ul-Momineen, or commander of the faithful, and declared his cause a religious war. British imperialists seeking breathing space from an encroaching Russia later invaded Afghanistan twice, singing their Christian hymns and preaching of their superior civilization. Revolting Afghan tribesmen fired by Islamic zeal slaughtered them by the thousands, along with their trains of elephants, and forced an inglorious retreat. Abdur Rahman, the “Iron Emir” covertly supported in Kabul by the chastened British in the late nineteenth century, attempted to coerce the Afghans into “one grand community under one law and one rule.” Across a hundred years all these events created new strains of xenophobia in Afghanistan and revived Islam as a national political and war-fighting doctrine. Still, even the country’s most radical Islamists did not contemplate a war of civilizations or the proclamation of jihad in distant lands.

The country staggered into the twentieth century in peaceful but impoverished isolation, ruled by a succession of cautious kings in Kabul who increasingly relied on outside aid to govern, and whose writ in the provinces was weak. At the local level, by far the most important sphere, political and Islamic authorities accommodated one another.

It was during the 1960s, and then largely in the city of Kabul—on its tree-shaded university campuses and in its army barracks—that radical doctrines carried in from outside the country set the stage for cataclysm. As the KGB-sponsored Marxists formed their cabals and recruited followers, equally militant Afghan Islamists rose up to oppose them. Every university student now confronted a choice: communism or radical Islam. The contest was increasingly raucous. Each side’s members staged demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, paraded flags, and carried bullhorns in case of a spontaneous roadside debate. In the space of just a few years during the late 1960s and early 1970s, what little there was of the center in Afghan politics melted away in Kabul under the friction of these confrontational, imported ideologies.
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The Egyptian texts carried to Kabul’s universities were sharply focused on politics. The tracts sprang from the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the transnational spiritual and political network founded during the 1920s by an Egyptian schoolteacher, Hassan al-Banna, as a protest movement against British colonial rule in Egypt. (Jamaat-e-Islami was, in effect, the Pakistani branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.) Muslim Brotherhood members believed that the only way to return the Islamic world to its rightful place of economic and political power was through a rigid adherence to core Islamic principles. Initiated brothers pledged to work secretly to create a pure Islamic society modeled on what they saw as the lost and triumphant Islamic civilizations founded in the seventh century. (One French scholar likened the brothers to the conservative, elite lay Catholic organizations in the West such as Opus Dei.
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Throughout his life CIA director William Casey was attracted to these secretive lay Catholic groups.) As the movement’s distinctive green flag with crossed white swords and a red Koran spread across Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s numbers swelled to half a million by 1949. British colonialists grew fed up and repressed the brothers violently. Some members, known as the Special Order Group, carried out guerrilla strikes, bombing British installations and murdering British soldiers and civilians.
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When Egyptian military leaders known as the Free Officers seized power during the 1950s under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser, they continued the British pattern of trying to co-opt the Muslim Brotherhood and, when that failed, repressing them. In Egyptian prisons, “The brutal treadmill of torture broke bones, stripped out skins, shocked nerves, and killed souls,” recalled Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian medical doctor who spent time in the jails and later became Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant.
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During one of the Egyptian government crackdowns, an imprisoned radical named Sayyed Qutb, who had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Nasser, wrote from a jail cell a manifesto titled
Signposts,
which argued for a new Leninist approach to Islamic revolution. Qutb justified violence against nonbelievers and urged radical action to seize political power. His opinions had taken shape, at least in part, during a yearlong visit to the United States in 1948. The Egyptian government had sent him to Northern Colorado Teachers College in Greeley to learn about the American educational system, but he found the United States repugnant. America was materialistic, obsessed with sex, prejudiced against Arabs, and sympathetic to Israel. “Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations!” Qutb wrote upon his return.

Qutb argued that all impure governments must be overthrown. All true Muslims should join the “Party of God” (Hezbollah). Qutb linked a political revolution to coercive changes in social values, much as Lenin had done.
Signposts
attacked nominally Muslim leaders who governed through non-Islamic systems such as capitalism or communism. Those leaders, Qutb wrote, should be declared unbelievers and become the targets of revolutionary jihad.
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Qutb was executed in 1966, but his manifesto gradually emerged as a blueprint for Islamic radicals from Morocco to Indonesia. It was later taught at King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda in classes attended by Osama bin Laden. Qutb’s ideas attracted excited adherents on the campus of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. (In 1971, Prince Turki’s father, King Faisal, pledged $100 million to Al-Azhar’s rector to aid the intellectual struggle of Islam against communism.
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) This was the context in which Sayyaf, Rabbani, and other junior professors carried Qutb’s ideas to Kabul University’s classrooms.

Rabbani translated
Signposts
into Dari, the Afghan language of learning. The returning Afghan professors adapted Qutb’s Leninist model of a revolutionary party to the local tradition of Sufi brotherhoods. In 1973, at their first meeting as the leadership council of the Muslim Youth Organization, the group elected Rabbani its chairman and Sayyaf vice chairman.
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Gulbuddin Hekmatyar did not make it to the inaugural meeting of the Muslim Youth Organization that night in 1973. He was in jail for ordering the murder of a Maoist student. But the group selected him as its political director anyway because in his short time as a student in Kabul University’s elite engineering school, Hekmatyar had already earned a reputation as a committed radical. He was willing, it seemed, to protest anything. When the university tried to raise the passing grade from fifty to sixty, Hekmatyar cursed the school’s administrators and stood on the front lines of mass demonstrations. He shook his fist at the government’s un-Islamic ways and was rumored to spray acid in the faces of young women who dared set foot in public without donning a veil.
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Massoud kept his distance from Hekmatyar, but Rabbani’s teachings appealed to him. Just to hear Rabbani speak, he frequently hiked around the hill from the institute to Kabul University’s Sharia faculty, a 1950s-era brick and flagstone building resembling an American middle school that nestled in a shaded vale near Ali Abad Mountain.

By the time King Zahir Shah’s cousin, Mohammed Daoud, drawing on some communist support, seized national power in a coup on July 17, 1973, Massoud was a full-fledged member of the Muslim Youth Organization.

“Some of our brothers deem armed struggle necessary to topple this criminal government,” Rabbani declared at one meeting at the Faculty of Islamic Law a few months later. They acquired weapons and built connections in the Afghan army, but they lacked a path to power.When Daoud cracked down on the Islamists a year later, Massoud, Hekmatyar, Rabbani, and the rest of the organization’s members fled to Pakistan.

The Pakistani government embraced them. Daoud’s nascent communist support had the Pakistani army worried. The exiled Islamists offered the army a way to pursue influence in Afghanistan. Massoud, Hekmatyar, and about five thousand other young exiles began secret military training under the direction of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Afghan affairs adviser, Brigadier General Naseerullah Babar.
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Babar and Hekmatyar, both ethnic Pashtuns, soon became confidants, and together they hatched a plan for an uprising against Daoud in 1975. They drafted Massoud to sneak back into the Panjshir and start the revolt from there. He did so reluctantly, and the episode ended badly. Massoud fled to Pakistan for the second time in two years.
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The failed uprising exacerbated a split among the Afghan exiles, with bad blood all around. Hekmatyar created his own organization, Hezb-e-Islami (Islamic Party), composed primarily of ethnic Pashtuns, and he forged close relations with ISI. Massoud stuck by Rabbani in Jamaat-e-Islami (Islamic Society), which was made up mostly of ethnic Tajiks. When Massoud secretly returned to the Panjshir Valley once again in 1978, however, he did so on his own. He no longer trusted the other Afghan leaders, and he had no faith in Pakistan. He simply showed up in the Panjshir with thirty supporters, seventeen rifles, the equivalent of $130 in cash, and a letter asking the local people to declare jihad against their Soviet-backed government.
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BY HIS THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY Massoud had fended off six direct assaults by the world’s largest conventional army.

The Politburo and the high command of the Soviet Fortieth Army had initially hoped that Soviet troops might play a supporting role in Afghanistan, backing up the communist-led Afghan army. Kremlin officials repeatedly assured themselves that the rebels were nothing more than
basmachi,
or bandits, the term used to describe Muslim rebels in Central Asia who unsuccessfully resisted Soviet authority following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. But desertions from Afghan army ranks only increased. Massive forcible conscription drives inflated the Afghan army’s reported size but did little to improve its effectiveness. Gradually Soviet units took the war on for themselves.
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Massoud and his Panjshiri rebels stood near the top of their target list. The Panjshir Valley contained only about eighty thousand residents in a country of 15 million, but for the Soviets the valley proved vital. Just to the east of the Panjshir, through a forbidding mountain range, the Salang Highway cut a path between Kabul and Termez, the Soviet transit city on the Afghan border beside the Amu Darya River. For the Soviets to retain their grip on Afghanistan, the Salang Highway had to remain open. There was no other reliable overland supply route between the USSR and Kabul. Food, uniforms, fuel, weapons, ammunition—everything the Red Army and the Afghan army required rumbled down the Salang’s treacherous, pitted, zigzag blacktop.

The Salang kept Massoud’s forces fed, clothed, and armed as well.When a Soviet convoy tried to pass along the highway, Massoud’s fighters streamed down from the mountains, unleashed a fusillade of gunfire, raided the convoy, and disappeared back into the shadows. They would then take apart whatever they had pilfered from the Soviets, be it an antitank missile or pieces of a tank, pack it onto the backs of horses, and trek to the Panjshir where mechanics reassembled them for the rebels’ future use. Because Massoud had access to the Salang from the Panjshir, Red Army soldiers were dying at the hands of Red Army weapons fired by mujahedin clothed in Red Army uniforms. “We do not regard an attack against a convoy successful, even if we destroy many trucks or tanks, unless we bring back supplies,” Massoud told a visiting journalist in 1981.
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Massoud, the Soviets decided, was one bandit they had to stop quickly.

In each of the first six Soviet assaults on the Panjshir between the spring of 1980 and the fall of 1982, Massoud hardly seemed to stand a chance. At the time of the first campaign he had barely one thousand fighters. Two years later, that number had doubled, but he was still grossly outgunned. With each invasion the Soviets brought more men and more firepower. For the fall 1982 offensive, the Soviets sent ten thousand of their own troops, four thousand Afghan army soldiers, and scores of tanks, attack helicopters, and fighter jets from Kabul. Not only aimed at securing the Salang, the assaults were part of a wider, unannounced military plan. The Soviets had decided that to hold Afghanistan for the long run they should “achieve a decisive victory in the northern zones bordering the Soviet Union first,” according to the KGB’s archives.
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Massoud had become a serious, deeply read student of Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and French revolutionary strategist Regis Debray. Following their precepts he did not try to face the Soviets and stop them. From the earliest days of the rebellion he maintained well-placed intelligence agents in the Afghan army and typically would find out days, weeks, or even months in advance that the Soviets were planning an attack. Just before the first aerial bombing runs began, Massoud’s forces would melt away into the intricate network of side valleys that spread out from the Panjshir like veins on a leaf.

After the bombs had fallen, the Soviet and Afghan army ground forces would enter the valley and find it populated by women, children, old men, and a smattering of farm animals. But they would not find any mujahedin—at least not initially. Massoud might allow a column of Soviet tanks to advance well into the valley before ordering his men to attack. When they did, they would never stand and fight head-on. Instead, they might send a few particularly courageous soldiers to streak in with rocket-propelled grenades and take out the first and last tanks in the column. Larger rebel contingents, well hidden behind rocks and trees, would then spray the paralyzed column with gunfire before sprinting back to the safety of a side valley. In the narrow Panjshir, with only one road in and out, the Red Army soldiers often had no choice but to abandon their tanks. The crippled vehicles, with a little tinkering by Massoud’s mechanics, sometimes became part of the mujahedin arsenal within a week.
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