Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (39 page)

Security forces, including members of the new Communist secret police, fired on the rioters, killing hundreds. But when Kabul ordered regular army troops to shoot at the mob, the soldiers turned their guns instead on the local office of the party, killing PDPA officials as well as Soviet advisers. The entire Seventeenth Division of the Afghan Army mutinied, and its officers and men joined the mujahideen. (Among its commanders was Ismail Khan, mentioned above.) The rebels helped themselves to weapons from army depots and took over government buildings. They held out for a week until the resistance was broken by air strikes and a large-scale operation by the Afghan Army to retake the city. Herat would never be the same. Many of the city’s glorious ancient monuments were damaged beyond repair. Estimates of the dead range from five to twenty-five thousand; years later mass graves outside the city were still yielding the bodies of victims.

Herat was a harbinger of the war to come. The inflammatory impact of the Iranian Revolution and the involvement of homegrown Islamists like the Jamiat-e Islami signaled that Afghans were no longer looking to traditional elites for leadership; moderates were already being sidelined. The ferocity of the uprising and the extent of the force needed to quell it made it clear that this went far beyond the usual local tribal rebellion. Vladimir Bogdanov, the KGB station chief in Kabul, subsequently saw it as the ignition point of a true Afghan civil war, the start of a chain of events that would end in the Soviet intervention nine months later.

Most important of all, however, Herat marked the moment when the Russians began to be drawn directly into military involvement in Afghanistan’s internal conflicts. The Afghan military proved incapable of suppressing an uprising on this scale by itself, so the Soviets had to step in. Soviet pilots ended up flying many of the sorties against the rebels in Herat. Soviet advisers—at this point numbering about three thousand in the entire country—participated in the ground attack to retake the city. The leaders in Kabul were spooked. Taraki called Moscow and asked for the dispatch of troops from the USSR to shore up his regime. He told Soviet prime minister Aleksey Kosygin that backing for his government had evaporated:

            
“Do you have any support among the workers, city dwellers, the petty bourgeoisie, and the white-collar workers in Herat?” Kosygin asked. “Is there still anyone on your side?”

                    
“There’s no active support on the part of the population,” Taraki replied. It’s almost wholly under the influence of Shiite slogans—follow not the heathens, but follow us. That’s what underpins the propaganda.”
⁷

Taraki was right that Heratis had rejected the PDPA. But he was wrong about the degree of their organization. They were not under anyone’s command—at least not enough for it to matter. Neither the Iranians nor the leaders of the anti-Soviet resistance had ordered the uprising, and it had been suppressed before they could do anything to support it. But that was about to change for good.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that Pakistan would become involved. Since their abortive attempt to topple Daoud in 1975, most of the Islamist leaders had fled there, setting up headquarters in Peshawar, the most important city in Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal belt. The local people in Peshawar spoke Pashtu, a language shared by many Afghans, so many of the exiles found the place congenial. The political climate in Pakistan also worked in their favor. The Pakistani president, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq (in power since July 1977), was eager to burnish his Islamic credentials by helping the mujahideen. Needless to say, his support for the holy warriors was hardly motivated by religious altruism. He saw the rebels above all as a tool for exercising influence over the situation in Afghanistan. Like many members of the Pakistani elite, he recalled only too well Daoud’s attempts to stir up Pashtun nationalist sentiment on Islamabad’s side of the border. He wanted to keep the Afghan resistance divided and weak.

Other countries were also keeping an eye on events. The Chinese, eager to seize any opportunity to counter Soviet influence close to their borders, funneled money and weapons to their own proxies, the small but fanatical movement of Maoist guerrillas. Saudi Arabia, flush with oil cash and eager to further its reputation as the great patron of all Islamic causes, began to consider how it might bring its influence to bear. And in Washington, officials in the Carter White House and the Central Intelligence Agency began to see the growing conflict in Afghanistan as an opportunity to make life difficult for the Soviet Union. In July, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order authorizing the CIA to supply covert assistance to the rebels. America’s assistance to the mujahideen began months before the Russians invaded.

Unbeknownst to the Americans, who had few sources of intelligence inside the country, the nature of the Afghan rebellion was already starting to evolve in significant ways. One illustration of the new dynamic came from the province of Nuristan, where by May 1979 the uprising had been going on for a full year. Many other parts of the country had experienced rebellions of their own in the meantime (Herat being merely the most spectacular), but only the denizens of the Pech Valley had succeeded in expelling government forces and holding territory under their
own control for so long. The valley dwellers had achieved this under the command of their tribal leaders, the influential clan chiefs whose word was law. But already war and ideology were starting to warp the conventional ways of doing things.

In the summer of 1979, a minor Islamic cleric named Maulavi Hussain arrived in the valley. He was of little importance himself; it was what he represented that mattered. And what he represented was the novel but increasingly influential notion of Islam as a modern, revolutionary force. Once, many years earlier, Hussain had run for a seat in parliament, but his campaign had been fatally undermined by the widely shared conviction among voters that politics was not a proper role for religious leaders. In the early 1970s he had joined the country’s first real Islamic activist group, the Muslim Youth Organization; later in the decade he had joined Hezb-e Islami, the “Party of Islam,” the most radical of the new religious groups.

Hezbis (as they were called) were not defenders of the old order, like so many of the traditional Islamic leaders. Hezbis were not only opposed to Daoud and the Communists, but also objected to a restoration of the monarchy, since, like Khomeini, they had concluded that kings were against Quranic teaching. Unlike Khomeini, though, the Hezbis and most of the other Islamic revolutionaries in Afghanistan were Sunnis, and they had no analogue of the powerful and well-organized Shiite religious establishment to guide them. That was probably just as well. Since so many Islamic clerics in Afghanistan were pillars of the old order, the Hezbis rejected them. As the religious revolutionaries saw it, the new Islamic state would be led by righteous Muslims like themselves, beneficiaries of modern education, and not by the corrupt and ignorant members of the old clerical establishment.

To be sure, some clerics, like Hussain, cast their lot with the Islamists and were happy to use their religious authority to serve the radical cause. As soon as he had settled in with the Pech Valley rebels, Hussain informed them (according to American anthropologist David Edwards) that their uprising “could not be considered a lawful jihad because it had not been authorized and commanded by a legitimate Muslim leader operating according to religious principles. Consequently, all those who had died to this point could not be called martyrs (
shahidan
), and the religious reward promised to martyrs in Islam was not guaranteed to them.”
⁸
Hussain and his fellow Hezbis canvassed the locals, handing out party identity cards and telling locals how to be proper Muslims. If men wanted to play leading roles in the jihad, for example, they had to wear beards and clean white clothing, he told them.

The villagers were not sure what to think. They still hewed to their own tribal leaders and their traditional style of combat,
⁹
but as the tribal militias came up against government troops armed with all the modern paraphernalia of warfare—assault
rifles, armored personnel carriers, helicopter gunships—the drawbacks of the received way of doing things were becoming all too apparent. Tribal democracy was fantastically unwieldy; making any decision required hearing the opinions of representatives from every community that had dispatched fighters or contributed resources. Meetings of tribal councils typically drew hundreds of attendees and could drag on for days, noted American anthropologist David Edwards, who interviewed some of the rebellion’s leading personalities. Relatives tended to fight as a group within each militia and to obey only those who stemmed from the same one.
¹⁰

These were all serious handicaps in a struggle against an opponent whose forces obeyed an efficient operational hierarchy and followed a clear, universalistic ideology.
¹¹
This was, perhaps, one reason the new Islamist parties, which followed a very similar principle of organization, gradually asserted themselves over more traditional habits of thought. But there was a second reason, too, and it was much more concrete. By the summer of 1979, weapons were already running short. It turned out that the tribal councils inside Afghanistan had been far too generous in handing out the few arms they had obtained from the enemy, and they soon ran out. The Islamist groups, by contrast, had carefully hoarded their guns. And because their leaders had been in Pakistan for years, they had already built up fruitful working relationships with the Pakistani military intelligence service (the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI) and the army. This was the key to receiving money, training, and weapons. As a result, tribal fighters increasingly found that the best way to a proper gun was to sign up with one of the new parties. Whoever received a party identity card also had good chances of acquiring a modern rifle.

And now, by the summer of 1979, another process was contributing to the ascendancy of modern political Islam over the old ways. The Communist government in Kabul meted out a harsh response to any area that fought back against its rule. Wherever the army or the secret police made their way back into a rebel zone, reprisals were sure to follow. Not all of the Nuristanis, for example, had been able to hold out against the combined forces of the government, and many had already been forced to make the humiliating trek through the mountains to the refugee camps in Pakistan. There, too, it was the Islamic political parties that offered food, housing, schooling for the children—but only to those who pledged their allegiance. This, too, undermined the traditional leaders, who, once they were in exile, found they had nothing to offer their own people.

A
fghanistan may have been geographically remote, but that did not mean that it was completely isolated from events elsewhere in the Islamic world in the
twentieth century. The rise of political Islam on the streets of Herat and in the gorges of Nuristan represented the culmination of decades of intellectual ferment that spanned the
umma
, the global community of believers.

The main issue that concerned Islamic thinkers during the twentieth century was how to respond to Western hegemony. For centuries after its founding, the Islamic world could rightfully claim the mantle of an advanced civilization, boasting achievements in science and culture that rivaled anything in the West. But by the end of the nineteenth century, those days had receded into the mythical past. The initiative had gone over to the Europeans, who, thanks to their superior technology and organization, had divided up much of Asia and Africa among themselves. Many Muslim intellectuals concluded that the only hope for their societies lay in adopting Western ways, accepting the imperative of modernization. Some of them embraced Western ideologies, such as Communism or radical secular nationalism.

But there were also those who soundly rejected the notion that religion was the problem. They declared that Islam held all the answers and that what ailed Muslims was precisely their own lack of faith. What was needed, these thinkers argued, was a revival and renewal of Quranic teaching, not its abolition or dilution. At the end of the nineteenth century, an uprooted Persian who called himself Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani had wandered from country to country, spreading a political philosophy that amounted to an eclectic mix of traditional Islam and anti-imperialist modernism. He portrayed the Muslim world as crippled by political and moral corruption and argued that the
umma
could respond to the threat from West only by rediscovering the primal vitality of Islamic teaching and seeking to unify itself into a single political entity. Afghani had a profound influence on Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Shahabadi, the scholar who initiated the young Ruhollah Khomeini into the mysteries of
erfan
.

In Egypt a vigorous young thinker named Muhammad Abduh followed al-Afghani’s cue. He strove, somewhat more systematically than al-Afghani, to refashion Islam into the basis for a modern ideology that could challenge the West on its own ground. He opposed certain traditions, like polygamy, as outmoded and un-Quranic, and he preached tolerance for other religions (specifically the Christian Copts of his homeland). This was a form of Islamism that did not yet suffer from the violent perversions of thought that were yet to come.

What Abduh did not provide his followers was a precise organizational recipe for achieving these ends. That job fell instead to another Egyptian, a young former schoolteacher by the name of Hassan al-Banna. Intensely opposed to the effects of British colonialism on traditional Egyptian society, Banna began to imagine a
modern Muslim political party that would organize believers into an all-encompassing revivalist movement that contained a pronounced element of social activism. In 1928 he decided to give this idea concrete form by establishing an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, perhaps the first modern Islamist group, became the most influential Islamic political vehicle of the twentieth century, and its slogan—“Islam is the solution”—laid out the contours of a project that continues today. Egypt is the largest and most culturally influential country in the Arab world, and the Brotherhood eventually spawned affiliates in all the major countries of the Middle East. For centuries, scholars from all over the Muslim world have come to Cairo to study at al-Azhar University, the Islamic world’s leading academic institution. Among them were many Afghans, figures of considerable learning and stature who transmitted the new ideas of the Muslim Brothers back to their home country.