Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (20 page)

The plotters of the coup against Daoud also sowed the seeds of future problems with their Soviet patrons. Far from instigating the coup, as many in the West assumed, the men in the Kremlin had been caught completely off guard by the news—they learned of Daoud’s overthrow from a Reuters report.
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They were nonplussed. No one had warned them what was afoot, and initially they were not entirely sure they approved. Moscow had been happy enough with the situation under Daoud. But the Soviet leadership nonetheless responded positively to Taraki’s initial requests for additional aid and advisers. Daoud’s overtures to the West in his last years had unsettled Brezhnev and his entourage, so the news of the coup seemed, at first, to offer reassurance that the new government would safeguard Soviet interests on the Hindu Kush. Taraki’s rhetoric did little to disappoint them. He increasingly larded his speeches with references to the example of the Great October Socialist Revolution and praised the Soviet Union’s selfless efforts toward the betterment of his country.

But Taraki’s talk had an opposite effect at home. Afghans did not like to hear their leaders kowtowing to other countries. While many appreciated the aid that they had received from the Russians over the years, there were limits to their gratitude.
Everyone knew that atheism was part of the Soviet Union’s official creed. Many Afghans, indeed, had personal memories of the 1920s and ‘30s, when the Soviet government had brutally suppressed an Islamic guerrilla movement in what later became the central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Many refugees from that campaign had fled across the border to the south and settled in ethnically congenial parts of Afghanistan, bringing with them a residual memory of heroic Muslims in revolt against atheist Russian rule. Afghans were quick to recall this poisonous legacy as Soviet involvement in their country’s affairs increased.

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n June 1978, two months after the coup, Afghan government police in the remote Pech Valley, in the province of Kunar, arrested two local tribal elders, men who enjoyed considerable respect in the community. The reasons for the arrest remain unclear to this day: some say that the men were detained for opposing government policy, but other accounts suggest that the officials doing the arresting were abusing their power to settle a personal grievance. What we do know is the effect that the arrest had on the locals. As the jeep carrying the prisoners passed through the small town of Ningalam, an old woman cried out, “Is there no man among you? Two of our men are being taken away.” Someone in the crowd opened fire on the vehicle, killing an officer and two soldiers. The very next day the army invaded the town with tanks and artillery. According to local accounts, government forces set fire to the houses. They even burned the local mosque and the Qurans inside it.
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Out of these desultory origins was born the first uprising against the Communist government. The stream of disturbing decrees from Kabul stirred talk of heathen practices that would soon be extended to the entire countryside. It was said that officials of the new government had told people to abandon the Quran and study the books of Marx and Lenin instead and had instructed children in school to spy on their parents. Communist officials openly drank, smoked hashish, and paid for the services of prostitutes. And, as with the Ningalam arrests, they insulted tribal leaders, figures held in high esteem by local clans. The Communists said that women were equal to men and that all the received institutions of marriage, like the bride price, would be eliminated—perhaps even marriage itself.
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The arrest of the two elders, and the government retaliation that ensued, provided the spark. Locals gathered up their weapons and attacked the town, driving out the government troops. But they were able to hold it for only a few days before they were forced to withdraw. For months the rebellion remained fragmented and diffuse. That changed in January 1979, when one of the local tribal notables, a man named Samiullah Safi, returned home to the valley from a long sojourn in Kabul. He had served for a while as a deputy in parliament, where he had opposed Daoud’s
increasingly authoritarian reform program. After the April coup, Hafizullah Amin, apparently seeing him as a potentially weighty ally in a notoriously fractious part of the country, had even tried to bring him over to the side of the Khalq. But now, disgusted by the government’s apparent contempt for Islam, Safi was returning home to take up the flag of revolt.

A few days after his return, he brought together a group of local leaders—who represented both his own Safi tribe (who were ethnically Pashtun) as well as the neighboring Nuristani people (who belonged to their own distinct ethnicity)—for a traditional conference. They agreed on the need to rise up against the government and organized an attack on a nearby district headquarters. It was the signal for a broad revolt that quickly seized the entire region. The
lashkar
, or tribal army, that materialized soon numbered, by their own estimates, fifteen to twenty thousand people.
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The leaders of the rebellion formed assemblies,
or jirgas
, representing the areas liberated from the control of the Communist government. The assemblies, protected by small detachments of armed men, moved down the valley, contacting villages still under ostensible government control, to persuade them to join the revolt. Sometimes the emissaries were fired upon by government troops, but more often than not the locals quickly declared their willingness to resist the government. The rebels were willing to accept the risks of this approach because they knew that maintaining tribal unity was paramount. Otherwise the government would play on long-established tribal feuds to divide the opposition.

One of the men who fought with the Nuristanis, starting in late 1978, was not a member of any of the local tribes. He was an ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, a place—though not that distant geographically—that was culturally and linguistically remote to the people of Nuristan. His name was Ahmed Shah Massoud, and he stood for an entirely new kind of Afghan jihad. The son of a high-ranking military officer, he was a gifted student with a good mind for math. He had received an elite education at the French high school in Kabul before going on to study engineering at the Kabul Polytechnic Institute. An obsessive consumer of literature and a natural leader—the kind of kid who ordered his friends around during their games—he had dreamed of embarking on a military career.

But then, as so often happens, his life was derailed by politics. Massoud, a man with a strong religious upbringing, soon found himself joining like-minded classmates in their fights against left-wing student groups. The contempt the two camps felt for each other spilled over into full-scale battles on the campus of Kabul University, just around the corner from Massoud’s institute, throughout the early 1970s.

Massoud was soon radicalized by the rivalry. He often walked over to the university campus to listen to lectures by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdul Rab Rasul
Sayyaf, two Afghan religious scholars who had had the privilege to study at al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prestigious religious university in the Sunni Islamic world. In Egypt the two men had also imbibed the Islamist ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they subsequently set upon importing to their homeland. It was to that end that Rabbani founded his Jamiat-e Islami, the “Islamic Society,” which set as its goal the establishment of an Islamic state in Afghanistan. The avowed secularist Daoud viewed the group as a natural foe and unleashed his secret police against its leadership.

In 1975 the Jamiat leaders decided to strike back by launching an uprising against Daoud’s government.
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Massoud, then age twenty-two, took on the job of fomenting an armed rebellion in the Panjshir Valley, his home district. The disastrous failure of the uprising—which ended in the execution and imprisonment of dozens of its activists—forced him to flee to Pakistan, where some of the movement’s leaders had found refuge. The abortive revolt also triggered a split among Afghanistan’s Islamists. A former Kabul University engineering student, a firebrand named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, denounced Rabbani’s leadership and established his own organization, which he called Hezb-e Islami (“the Party of God”). Massoud stuck with Rabbani and spent his time in Pakistani exile reading Persian classical literature and absorbing the classic works of guerrilla warfare, including Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Régis Debray.
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He also followed the reports from home of Daoud’s growing repression of the Islamist movement and the electrifying news of the Communist takeover. The stories of the new government’s campaign to crush Islam and implement its ideas by force deepened Massoud’s determination to fight back.

The revelation that the Nuristanis had revolted against Communist rule galvanized Massoud. He headed there, several colleagues and a French journalist in tow, to fight for several weeks at the side of the rebels. The tight-knit Nuristanis showed how a determined guerrilla force, motivated by faith and exploiting the difficult terrain, could fight back against to drive out government forces. The guerrillas managed to retain a hold over some of the territory they freed from the Communists for months. Massoud watched and learned.

The Nuristanis were surprised to see him. Afghans had little sense of themselves as citizens of a wider state. When they rebelled, they usually did so as representatives of tribes or villages. But Massoud brought a larger view, one influenced by the gathering agitation in the global Islamic community in the 1970s. As a student of Rabbani and Sayyaf, he knew about the burgeoning Islamist movement in Egypt and other faraway corners of the Muslim world. Islam could no longer be regarded as “merely” a faith, something innately separate from politics. The new Islamists were reminding believers that their religion offered an answer to all of
life’s questions, that it was better at addressing the problems of modern life than Marxism or liberal democracy. Meanwhile, the astonishing success of the revolution in Iran had demonstrated that Muslims united by their faith could defy an oppressive local government even when it enjoyed the direct support of the world’s most powerful country.

Few in the West were paying much attention. Foreign-policy experts still viewed the world, understandably, through the lens of Cold War conflict. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict, which pitted mostly Soviet allies against the US-sponsored Jewish state, fitted neatly into the template. The Israeli political elite was still dominated by secular Zionists, and their Arab enemies—especially the Palestinians—adhered to this-worldly ideologies of their own. The Palestine Liberation Organization and its off shoots consisted of revolutionary Marxists. Even the Baath Party dictatorships in Syria and Iraq had little time for religion—and this made them all the more intelligible to Western observers. Very few people in the international elite suspected that Islam was capable of posing a fundamental challenge to the global order—and certainly not in a place as backward and marginal as Afghanistan.

What happened next was extraordinary, even in light of Afghanistan’s long history of organized resistance to central authority. What outsiders often miss is that Afghan revolts tended historically to be highly specific affairs: a particular group in a particular place rises up against a perceived affront and fights until its demands are met or an acceptable balance of power in Kabul is restored. But by late 1978 this was already beginning to change. The tribal revolt in the Pech Valley quickly found imitators all around the country. Afghans of a wide variety of ethnic and social origins rose up against the government, and most of them took issue with the very nature of the regime.

Most of the anti-government feeling in the countryside was spontaneous and poorly organized, following age-old fault lines of tribe and tradition. But increasingly the rebels were being encouraged by young holy warriors like Massoud, people who had been educated at a university—just like the Marxists—to serve as doctors and engineers of a future, more modern Afghanistan. These young men know about the wider world; some of them even spoke foreign languages. But what they shared with their Shiite counterparts across the border in Iran was the belief that Islam had all the answers—and especially when it came to problems with twentieth-century politics. These new radicals did not want to see Afghanistan transformed into a republic that merely gave lip service to Islamic beliefs; nor did they want to see it revert to monarchy, a system they, like Khomeini—regarded as un-Islamic. These young Islamic revolutionaries in Afghanistan wanted to see Islam capture the state, just as they had in Iran. They were about to get their chance.

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nthusiasm for the Islamic revolution extended beyond the border of the Islamic world. In October 1978 an Iranian student named Mohsen Sazegara drove to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago and boarded a flight for Paris. Three years earlier Sazegara had enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology to study mechanical engineering. Like thousands of other Iranians who had traveled overseas to study in the same period, he had expected that he would be staying put in the United States until he completed his degree. He didn’t have the money to travel back and forth between Chicago and Tehran.

But now the demands of politics were reshaping his agenda. The day before his flight, Sazegara had received a phone call from Ebrahim Yazdi, a Texas-educated Iranian lawyer and political activist. Yazdi, one of the leaders of a revolutionary organization called the Iran Freedom Movement, had traveled to Iraq to act as a political adviser to a Shiite religious scholar who was living there in exile after making a name for himself as a merciless critic of the shah. The cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had been living outside of Iran for thirteen years. He had spent the first year of his banishment in Turkey, then moved to Najaf in Iraq, a center of Shiite culture and learning. But now, due to a rising tide of unrest in Iran, the shah had grown nervous about Khomeini’s relative proximity, and the Iranian government had prevailed upon the Iraqi leaders to expel him.