Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (41 page)

The leader of the group, Juhayman al-Otaibi, was captured and executed a few weeks after the end of the siege. But his ideas would prove prophetic. He had categorically denounced the corruption of the Saudi regime and rejected the presence of infidel foreigners in a country that was supposed to be the undefiled home to Mecca and Medina, two of the three most holy places in Islam. (The third is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.) A subsequent generation of Saudi radicals—Osama bin Laden among them—would not forget.
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The seizure of the Grand Mosque had another important consequence. It forced the Saudi royal family to confront the reality of the sense of discontent that permeated society. Their response was two-pronged. First, domestically, the government reverted to a policy of unbending conservatism in all matters even remotely associated with religion; the idea was to restore its credentials among the ultraconservative religious establishment, which had proved conspicuously unwilling to offer its support during the mosque crisis, as well as to undermine those who accused the government of slackening in its observance of Islamic mores. Second, the Saudis decided to use foreign policy as a safety valve. The regime ramped up its efforts to spread the Wahhabi creed and to further Islamic causes more generally outside the borders of the kingdom. This, they hoped, would bolster their image as defenders of the true faith and also offer opportunities for shunting off malcontents. It would be years until the full implications of this effort became clear, and nowhere would the consequences be more dramatic than in Afghanistan.

A
fghanistan, of course, was not an Arab country. In many ways, given its underdevelopment and its poverty, it was peripheral to the rest of the Muslim
world. It had contributed no fresh ideas, no original thought, to the great Islamic revivalist movement. Yet, thanks to the quirks of geopolitics, it was fated to become the most prominent arena for the ideas of Sunni Islamism.

Afghan political Islam did not trace its lineage to a holy city or a famous seminary. It started, instead, at Kabul University. The university, founded in the 1930s by a reformist king, had expanded steadily over the years, as the nation’s leaders tried desperately to push Afghanistan forward into the modern era. Still, even by the early 1970s, when it was still the only institution of higher education in the country, it boasted a student population of merely twenty-five hundred. The foreign aid that had poured into Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s had given the university a host of new buildings, most of them in the stripped-down concrete modernist style typical of the period. The faculty included quite a few foreigners—not all from the East bloc—and they brought with them exposure to the great political debates in the world at large.

The university was the one place, aside from the army, where Afghans came together from all over the country. As such it was a unique melting pot, one that brought together young men and women of radically different origins. Yet the student body was also riven by deep social differences. Some of the students made it in because they came from prominent families; others managed to get through the application process by dint of sheer hard work and talent. The privileged students, knowing that their instructors would not stand up to them, took liberties with university rules and sometimes engaged in lax ethical behavior—drinking, gambling, patronizing prostitutes—that irritated the students of a more religious bent. For many students, especially those from provincial backgrounds, the confrontation with the loose ways of the modern university was a deeply alienating experience.
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Add to this, then, the fundamental ideological conflicts that were already beginning to tear the country apart. Many of the students were active in Communist politics, and they regarded their more religious classmates as misguided rubes. As one student at the time would later recall, Khalqis kicked soccer balls at Muslim students as they prayed, defecated in the bowls used for ritual ablutions, and ostentatiously smoked or ate near those who were observing the fast. Under Daoud, the more secular-minded students could act in the knowledge that their views enjoyed the tacit approval of the state.

In the late 1960s the Muslim students began to fight back. One of their most passionate leaders was a star student by the name of Abdur Rahim Niazi. Niazi belonged to the new generation of students who believed that Islam, far from
representing a backward culture, actually offered a complete range of solutions to contemporary problems. This new cohort of activists, many of them centered on the university’s Faculty of Sharia, attended lectures by professors who had attended al-Azhar University in Cairo. These men had imbibed the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, and propagated its ideas among their charges when they returned to Afghanistan. It was one of these professors, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who had translated Qutb’s works into Dari.

In 1969, Niazi formed a group called the Muslim Youth Organization, which aimed to work toward the establishment of a true Islamic government. Taking their cue from the Egyptians, the Muslim Youth leaders organized their members into conspiratorial cells; these activists would serve as the avant-garde of the revolution that would capture the state for Islam. Afghanistan’s young Islamists represented a completely new breed. Just like their Iranian counterparts, these new religious militants understood that they were engaged in a struggle for survival not only against their own dictator but also against the forces of the Left more generally, and they set out to redefine their faith in terms of a modern-day political creed. Islam, the radicals argued, was more “progressive” than Communism. Niazi wrote: “Fourteen centuries back, Islam taught a very revolutionary and logical lesson for achieving revolution. God said to do jihad in the path of God with honesty. The establishment of an Islamic government requires that kind of jihad. . . . Today truth has been replaced by tyranny, and the only way that has been left has been to invite the people to truth and untiring militancy in this path.”
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What was particularly striking about the Muslim Youth was its comparative lack of traditional religious leaders. In Shiite Iran, the clergy had a long tradition of playing an independent political role, and it was the clerics—or at least some of them—who had adapted to the changing mental environment of the late twentieth century. In Afghanistan, the state had tended to co-opt the mullahs by offering them emoluments, and this had undermined their status in the eyes of many ordinary Afghans—along with the petty corruption that plagued religious notables. For all of these reasons, many Afghans tended to look with suspicion upon members of the ulama who tried to play a political role. Niazi and his generation also reproached the religious establishment for its failure to stand up to the increasingly assertive Communists.

Niazi, a smart and charismatic man who had a galvanizing influence on the nascent Islamist movement, died of cancer in 1970; it is interesting to speculate what his role might have been had he lived longer. In his place a number of other young
firebrands came to the fore. One of them was the engineering student Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was a member of the Ghilzai tribal confederacy that had often opposed the rival Durranis, the clan that provided Afghanistan with many of its leaders right up until the death of Mohammed Daoud. He came to the university after a brief stint at the military academy. In 1972 he was jailed for killing a student Maoist during one of the perennial feuds between young Islamists and leftist radicals. For the other Islamists, this was merely tangible proof of Hekmatyar’s radical credentials, and they rewarded him with a leading role in the Muslim Youth.
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To this day, there are those in Afghanistan who insist that Hekmatyar came to the Islamic cause only after an initial flirtation with the Communists. Hekmatyar and his colleagues deny this. What is certain, however, is that Hekmatyar envisioned Hezb-e Islami, the “Party of Islam” he founded in 1977, as just the kind of organization that Qutb had mapped out in
Milestones:
an Islamic revolutionary avant-garde based on Leninist conspiratorial principles. After Niazi’s death, Rabbani had transformed the Muslim Youth Organization into a party called the Jamiat-e Islami, the “Islamic Society” (a name that mimicked the party founded by Mawdudi in Pakistan). When the group failed in its attempt to foment a coup against Daoud in 1975, Hekmatyar broke away, seizing the opportunity to create an organization that would be entirely beholden to him. Strictly hierarchical, Hezb-i Islami was supposed to represent the small, elite spear point of the violent struggle that would one day transform Afghanistan into an Islamic state.

Just as Lenin directed his choicest invective at social democrats and other moderate socialists, Hekmatyar reviled the representatives of traditional religion. His Hezbis assailed village mullahs as blockheaded traditionalists who still supported the long-deposed king and were willing to keep the secular state as long as they continued to receive their accustomed perks. The traditionalists were also accused of rejecting modern science and technology, of purveying superstition, and of clinging to local Sufi traditions of saint worship—all of which was depicted by the modernizing Islamists as a rejection of the pure, “rationalist” monotheism of the Prophet’s original message.
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Hezb-i Islami shared some of these ideas with Rabbani’s Jamiat; where the two parties differed strongly was in their ethnic makeup. The Jamiat was somewhat more diverse, though Tajiks (including Rabbani and Massoud) were overrepresented among its members. Hekmatyar’s organization, by contrast, consisted almost entirely of Pashtuns. As the years went by, Hezb-i Islami also gained a reputation as a much more radical group, while Jamiat tended to take a more pragmatic and inclusive line. As several Afghanistan scholars have pointed out, the
social and ethnic divide between the two groups strikingly paralleled that between Khalq and Parcham, the two factions whose mutual animosity had such a crippling effect on the Afghan Communists.

Ahmed Shah Massoud, by now a hardened veteran of Islamist infighting, opted to maintain his distance from these battles. His own readings of Qutb and Mawdudi had strengthened his belief in the need for an Islamic state, and he remained a member of Jamiat, technically subordinate to Rabbani. But he had long since decided to fight his own war against the Communists, and to do it entirely on his own terms. His experience among the Nuristanis had given him valuable insights into the nature of this new war. In July 1979, at the age of twenty-five, he once again returned to his home turf in the Panjshir Valley, the place where he had launched the doomed rebellion in 1975.
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Now, thanks to the mishaps of the Khalqi regime, the Panjshiris were much more receptive to his arguments about the anti-Islamic character of the government. But this did not necessarily make up for inadequate resources. Later Massoud told an interviewer that he began his new uprising with thirty followers, seventeen rifles of various makes, and the equivalent of $130 in cash.
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Massoud, however, did have several important assets that he could draw upon. One of them was the Panjshir itself. For anyone intent on fighting a guerrilla war against vastly superior forces, terrain like this is the great equalizer. About sixty miles long, the Panjshir plunges from the high passes of the Hindu Kush down to the open plains just north of the Afghan capital of Kabul. A bewildering labyrinth of canyons and gorges feed into the valley, whose steep walls make life hard for would-be invaders. Most of the valley is just wide enough to allow for a single road that winds steeply up along terrifying defiles. Here and there ledges and plateaus allow for terraces where farmers grow apricots, almonds, and wheat.

The people who live in this place inhabit a relatively self-contained world, and their spirit of fierce independence was a major resource for Massoud to draw on. In 1979, however, it was still not quite enough. Massoud and his tiny army attacked government posts where they could find them, but the Khalqis and their Soviet advisers fought back ferociously, bolstered by their jet fighters, tanks, and helicopters. Massoud and his fighters held out for forty days. By August they had had enough. Battered by government air strikes, he and his band of core followers withdrew from the valley and set off for their safe haven in Pakistan. It was a brutal journey, over the high passes and down through the mountains to Peshawar on the other side. Massoud had been wounded in the leg, and one can only imagine how he managed to make the trip. It was a small beginning, to be sure. But it was a beginning that put Massoud in a good position to exploit the situation that was soon to come.

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he students had been planning for days. A small group of activists—including the young Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a future president of the country—had favored going after the Soviet Embassy instead. But they had been overruled: American diplomats would be the target. Now, as the day of November 4, 1979, dawned, the young radicals gathered quietly in light autumn rain. Behind the walls they could see the buildings of the US Embassy, all designed according to the same bland architectural style that had prompted the diplomats who worked there to compare it to an American high school. The student demonstrators had issued themselves armbands that would make it easier to recognize each other in the turmoil, and they bore makeshift cards identifying them as members of their group, which they called “Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line.” Their ranks included a number of women. The girls hid bolt cutters underneath their chadors, waiting for the moment to cut through the locks on the embassy gates.

The students, all zealous supporters of the revolution, were eager to strike a blow at the country they saw as the “Great Satan,” the evil imperialist power that had supported the shah’s regime for decades. When the signal was given, hundreds of them clambered over the walls and stormed through the gates. The US Marine guards fired tear gas into the crowd, but refrained from using the deadlier weapons they had on hand, knowing that killing any of the rioters would enflame them, perhaps triggering violent reprisals. Unimpeded, the mob surged into the compound, fanning out to the various buildings. Overwhelmed by superior numbers, the Marines
surrendered. Many of the students in the crowd claimed that they were there merely to stage a nonviolent protest. But among them was a hard core of radicals who were pursuing a different mission. These young militants grabbed every American they encountered. They bound their captives’ hands and blindfolded them with strips of cloth brought along especially for the purpose.