Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (9 page)

If anything could be said to unite them all, it is religion. Virtually all Afghans are Muslims, most of them Sunnis. (The most prominent exception are the Hazaras, an ethnic group, descended from the Mongols, who happen to be Shiites.) Even in the 1960s and ’70s, observers often remarked upon the simple piety of the people in Afghanistan. All activity stopped whenever the call to prayer sounded from the local mosque. References to God and the Prophet punctuated everyday speech. Public figures were expected to invoke the supremacy of the Almighty at every turn.

Yet this did not mean that religion and politics seamlessly overlapped. Throughout their history, Afghans had known rule by kings, not religious leaders. Village mullahs, who performed a variety of religious services in exchange for fees, were often regarded as corrupt or buffoonish, the butt of jokes rather than figures of respect.
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There were, of course, some religious figures who enjoyed privileged status—Islamic scholars, perhaps, or
pirs
, Sufi spiritual leaders. But none of these individuals had any clearly defined institutional power over the others. The diffuse quality of Afghan Islam was also a product of practices that many other Sunni Muslims would have regarded as heterodox—such as the veneration of saints, whose graves, beflagged and decorated, were treated as holy places. In Iran, the Shiite religious elite presided over a clearly defined hierarchy, which greatly increased the power of the clerics. In Afghanistan, there were no central religious institutions to speak of. Islam was flat, localized, and fragmented.

Yet the mystical bent of Afghan Islam did not mean that it was passive. On many occasions in the past, the Sufi brotherhoods had provided surprisingly resilient networks for armed resistance to unjust rulers or foreign invaders. But by the 1970s, Islamic institutions seemed to have lost most of their power to offer coherent opposition to the increasingly powerful central state.

King Zahir Shah, on the throne since 1933, saw little reason to put this to the test. He had little cause to challenge the religious establishment; in 1959, for example, veiling was declared to be voluntary within the city limits of Kabul—a concession to the modern world that excited little response from religious authorities.
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But this relaxed status quo changed dramatically in 1973, when he was overthrown
by his cousin, an intensely ambitious ex-general and former prime minister named Mohammed Daoud Khan. Daoud made his move while the king was receiving medical treatment in Italy. The coup went off without a hitch; no blood was spilled. Daoud declared a republic with himself at the helm. His program had two main planks. First, like so many other Third World leaders at the time, he was eager to lift his country onto the bandwagon of twentieth-century modernization. His second signature cause was “Pashtunistan,” code for unifying the millions of Afghan ethnic Pashtuns with the millions who lived on the other side of the border in neighboring Pakistan. The Pakistani government, which understandably rejected such talk, broke off relations.

Both of these factors—Daoud’s desire to speed up industrialization and his estrangement from one of his country’s most important trading partners—motivated him to edge closer to Moscow. This was also a way to boost his domestic standing with the modernists, since the Soviets had many sympathizers in Afghanistan by now. Their political home was the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the indigenous Communist Party, formed in 1965. It was an unruly organization, with most of its members falling into two mutually hostile factions, the moderate Parcham (“Banner”) and the radical Khalq (“the Masses”). The two groups essentially went their separate ways two years after the party was formed (though the split was never made public).

Still, the PDPA remained a force to be reckoned with. Daoud, a firm believer in state control over the economy, had great respect for the Soviet Union’s achievements, and he did what he could to bring PDPA leaders into the fold. Parchamis had even helped him pull off his coup. Once it was over, Daoud asked their leader, Babrak Karmal, to join the new government, but Karmal declined. Under the king, he had made a career out of giving rousing speeches in the Afghan parliament, assailing the forces of feudalism and backwardness. Now Daoud had closed parliament down, and Karmal and his comrades reasoned that it was better for them to remain on the outside, offering tactical support to Daoud whenever that made sense. But there was no reason to tie their cart too closely to his. Daoud himself had demonstrated how easy it was to topple a government. Surely, they reasoned, their own chance to follow suit could not be far off.

History, after all, was on their side. Wherever the Afghan Communists looked—Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia—Moscow’s allies appeared to be surging ahead. To be sure, the appeal of Marxism-Leninism was waning in the developed world, where leftist ideology was splintering into a kaleidoscope of options: Social Democracy, Trotskyism, Eurocommunism, Maoism, the New Left,
the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition. But such examples held limited relevance to would-be modernizers in the Third World. To the elites in the poor countries, the key to Marxism’s attraction lay in its ability to mobilize backward societies. To them, the history of the Soviet Union showed how a relatively small bunch of zealous Communists had transformed a land of illiterate peasants into a mighty industrial power in the course of a few years. What Afghan Communists saw in the USSR was exactly what they wanted for Afghanistan: big factories, hard-topped roads and hydroelectric dams, widespread literacy, and modern military equipment. As Stalin had noted, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” The adherents of material progress could not hope to make things better without destroying the forces that stood in the way: the big capitalists, the feudal landowners, the mullahs, the priests.

So the Afghan Communists welcomed the rousing talk of militant social reform and armed anti-imperialism that was so essential to the Soviet revolutionary program. A country like Afghanistan, they reasoned, could be changed only by decisiveness and force. What the United States and its liberal Western allies offered by comparison was a Band-Aid on a suppurating wound. Sometimes you had to stir people out of their torpor, smash the old order. Didn’t those Westerners understand that gradual economic reform and incremental progress toward democracy would take millennia in a place like Afghanistan? That the feudalists would never give up power willingly?

Some of the PDPA radicals knew the United States from firsthand experience. Nur Mohammed Taraki, the leader of the Khalq group, had worked for a while at the Afghanistan Embassy in Washington. Another Khalq member, Hafizullah Amin, had earned a master’s degree in education at the teachers college of Columbia University in New York. The Americans themselves delivered an additional argument for the Communist propaganda about the superiority of the Soviet model. US assistance to Afghanistan had peaked in the 1960s, as Washington tried to counter Moscow’s rising influence. But the Americans gradually decided to concentrate their efforts on other, more powerful, allies in the region, Iran and Pakistan. Afghanistan didn’t really seem like it was worth the investment.

So Soviet influence steadily grew, though the Communists were no threat to Daoud at first. The challenges to his budding dictatorship came from other quarters. An urbane, Western-educated secularist who favored women’s rights and government control of education and the courts, he had little sympathy for Islam. He managed to buy off many of the members of the Islamic religious establishment, who were used to receiving favors from the state in return for their support,
but a group of young religious hotheads were still causing problems. In the late 1960s, some enthusiastic young Muslims, taking their cue from Communist practice, had decided to form their own semiclandestine political organization, which they named the “Muslim Youth Organization.” Some of them went well beyond the usual religious platitudes by agitating for the creation of an “Islamic state” in which sharia (Quranic law) would reign supreme and the government would be in the hands of people who followed the example of the Prophet. Upon taking power, Daoud had thrown some of their organizers in jail. The rest had fled to Pakistan.

Then, in 1975, they tried to organize a dilettantish coup that went awry almost as soon as it began. Few in the society at large paid attention, and Daoud suppressed it easily. The activists who fell into his hands, including several key leaders, were summarily shot, shattering the movement. The survivors returned to Pakistan, where they could expect sympathy from a Pakistani government that was eager to take revenge on Daoud for his Pashtun irredentism. But the religious establishment back at home—the village mullahs, the religious scholars, and the Sufi notables who were all tightly bound into the status quo—didn’t lift a finger in the rebels’ defense. And why should they have? The Islamists, after all, had come to their cause through the universities, not the madrassas, and thus had few ties with the ulama, the religious establishment.

By now Daoud felt himself safe enough to set his own course. In 1975, he created his own political party and declared all competitors illegal. He started purging the army and the security services of Communists. And he began to show other signs of easing away from Moscow’s suffocating embrace. He removed Soviet advisers from military units and sent them home. He put Pashtunistan on the back burner and worked to repair his relations with Pakistan. And he began promoting ties with other countries in the Muslim world, courting Egypt as well as oil-rich Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Islamic world welcomed Daoud’s initiatives. The Soviets (and their Afghan proxies) watched these shifts with growing dismay.

In the final analysis, though, Afghanistan was still a bit player. If someone had asked you, in the middle of the 1970s, to name a country that would have an impact on the world’s affairs in the decades to come, Afghanistan would have been near the bottom of the list—perhaps along with Bangladesh and Bolivia and some of the more obscure African countries. It was just too poor, too underdeveloped. Someone like Mohammed Daoud was probably its best bet: an enlightened dictator, secular, “progressive,” with a clear vision for the future. Little did he and his supporters realize that the way of life they represented would soon become extinct.

W
hen Daoud tried to turn Afghanistan into a one-party state in 1975, he was not doing anything original. He was following advice given to him by a neighboring ruler who had achieved remarkable success in his efforts to wrench another deeply traditional and underdeveloped Islamic country into the modern age. This was the Head of the Warriors, the Light of the Aryans, the King of Kings, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran.

Iran, in 1977, was one of the world’s great economic success stories. When the shah ascended the throne back in 1941, at age twenty-one, his country had been an economic and political dwarf. Indeed, the shah owed his crown to the two outside powers, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, that had invaded the country and deposed his father, Reza Pahlavi, for what they deemed to be his friendliness toward Nazi Germany.

In the 1940s, Iran was a feudal backwater where the central government could barely collect taxes. Three decades later, it was an industrial powerhouse with a strong, centralized state. Its growth rates—averaging 9 to 10 percent for the decade between 1963 and 1973—were astonishing. It boasted modern communications networks and health care systems, car factories, and hydropower dams. Literacy was expanding. Iranian universities were filled with upwardly mobile youth—almost as many women as men—and thousands of others were studying overseas, all aspiring
to join the ranks of the ever-expanding middle class. Iran’s military was the envy of the Middle East, well trained and armed with the latest weaponry. And it was all the achievement—or so you thought if you were an aspiring despot like Afghanistan’s Mohammed Daoud—of a single wise leader.

The shah’s rule had started off in uncertainty. The Allied invasion plunged Iran into chaos—but also freed up its political development. The departure of the shah’s domineering father, who had been known to administer personal beatings to his political opponents, ushered in an era of ferment. Political parties came out into the open to fight parliamentary elections; opinions proliferated in the media.

The end of the 1940s saw the rise of Mohammed Mossadeq, the reformist prime minister who rode to power on a wave of populist demands. Mossadeq fused moderate socialism and anticolonial nationalism into a program with broad electoral appeal. He made himself immensely popular by nationalizing the British-dominated oil industry in 1951. The British, who had built the Iranian oil industry, were accustomed to keeping the lion’s share of the revenues to themselves—a fact well known to the impoverished Iranian citizens who were left to suffer the consequences of their country’s underdevelopment. Because the shah was so dependent on outside powers, Mossadeq’s move undermined the very foundations of the Iranian monarchy. In 1953, prodded by the British, the US Central Intelligence Agency collaborated with a camarilla of royalist schemers and disaffected generals to topple Mossadeq’s government. From now on, firm in the knowledge that he enjoyed the patronage of the world’s most powerful country, the shah managed to reassert his control over the political system, rolling back the constitutional limits to his rule and establishing a ruthlessly effective secret police, the SAVAK (which received training from the United States and Israel).

After the fall of Mossadeq, the Americans and the British agreed with the Iranian government on a more equitable sharing of revenues from the sale of Iranian oil. The shah’s authoritarian instincts coexisted with a strong desire to modernize his country, and now he had the resources to make it happen. The shah’s father had instilled in him a great admiration for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who created the new Republic of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I. Atatürk was a ruthless modernizer, a secularist and a fan of all things Western who forced Turks to wear Western clothes, embraced European-style educational and political institutions, and imposed the Latin alphabet on the Turkish language (written until then in Perso-Arabic script). The young Mohammad Reza Shah wanted to follow suit, but he wanted to do it in a way that would respond to Iran’s unique conditions and at the same time cement his reputation as a monarch in step with modern times. He also wanted to steal some thunder from Iran’s powerful
Communist Party, the Tudeh, as well as respond to insistent demands for reform from the new Kennedy administration in Washington.