by Ed Darack
Pashtun dominance took a quantum leap in 1747, when a man named Ahmad Shah Durrani, arguably the most renowned and celebrated in this people’s history (many Afghans would later adopt the name Ahmad Shah as a sign of solidarity in spirit with the leader), paved the way for Afghanistan to become a nation-state by moving the center of authority of the Pashtuns from the Kandahar region to Kabul, enabling Pashtun monopolization of the Trans-Hindu Kush caravan trade route between India and Central Asia. From Kabul, where the region’s center of governance remains to this day, Ahmad Shah began expanding his authority in all directions, slowly coalescing power. And yet the Pashai-speaking mountain people of Kafiristan still refused to accept not only the idea of centralized authority, but Islam as well. This struggle would continue for years, resulting in an unlikely outcome with far-reaching historical ramifications, especially for the Marines of ⅔.
During the 1800s through to the early 1900s, Afghanistan found itself once again squeezed between burgeoning foreign powers: England to its east in India, czarist Russia to its north in Turkistan, and the Persians to its west. Much has been made of the “Great Game,” a term taken by English historians from a line in a British intelligence officer’s letter to a colleague referring to British influence of Afghanistan, and it is true that the vast majority of aggressive “chess moves” of this period were British in origin. During the years of the Great Game, the Russians carried out some espionage missions and studied possible invasion routes into India (they ruled out passage through Afghanistan as they felt they could not maneuver artillery through the high, narrow passes of the Hindu Kush), but it was the British, initially for commercial reasons and then for geopolitical goals, who ventured repeatedly into Afghanistan. Three conflicts ensued between England and Afghanistan, culminating in the Treaty of Rawalpindi on August 19, 1919, granting independence to the hard-fighting and tenacious Afghans. While it was not until the early twentieth century that the British granted independence to the Afghans, they had all but given up on the region by the 1860s, as Russia’s construction of a Central Asian railroad bypassing Afghanistan dashed England’s hopes for monopolization of trade in the region, drastically reducing the strategic commercial importance of Afghanistan to Britain’s East India Company.
Although the Brits ultimately retreated from Afghanistan, they did so only after leaving a number of historically significant marks on the country. One of the most notable, the drawing of the country’s modern boundary, saw the English cunningly demarcate Afghanistan’s border exclusively on slopes so that the surrounding territories, especially those to the east along the portion of the border known as the Durand Line, would have military units approaching Afghanistan from a superior position, firing down upon the Afghans during potential conflict. Visitors to the Khyber Pass are often stunned to find that the pass itself lies over five highway miles inside Pakistan and stands more than a thousand feet above Torkham, the point at which the main road connecting Pakistan and Afghanistan intersects the Afghan border. Historians also note that Afghanistan’s leaf-shape outline was crafted not with the will or welfare of its people in mind, but with the buffering of the surrounding countries from one another as the primary criterion.
Possibly the most important and historically far-reaching consequence of the Great Game era, particularly for the Marines of ⅔, was the British installation of Abdur Rahman Khan as emir, or king, of Afghanistan in 1880. Rahman Khan, the “Iron Emir,” took a fierce nationalistic stance, and sought the complete religious unification of the country. A Pashtun, he focused his ardor for Sunni Islamic conversion on the pagan “infidels” of the secretive ridges and valleys of Kafiristan. While the years since their arrival in the Hindu Kush had seen the Pashtuns chipping away at the lands and customs of the Kafir, intermingling blood and customs in many cases, Rahman Khan took a “convert or die” stance to the people who had yet to switch their religious allegiance to Sunni Islam.
And while some chose death through resistance, most acquiesced to conversion—but to varying degrees. In the past, many Afghans whom outsiders had converted quickly disavowed Islam as soon as those having effected their new religious adherence departed their villages. However, in the Pech River region, particularly in those villages of the upper reaches of the Korangal and the Chowkay valleys, some not only embraced Sunni Islam under Rahman Khan’s press, but adopted its most extreme form. Calling themselves the Safis, meaning “the Pure Ones,” the people of the Korangal, upper Chowkay, and segments of the surrounding valleys, while continuing to speak in dialects of the millenniaold Pashai language, would become the most conservative Muslims in all of Afghanistan, if not the world. Kafiristan had become Nuristan, literally “Land of Light”—meaning “Land of the Enlightened Ones.”
Afghanistan, however, wasn’t the only part of the globe where European colonial powers sought to influence lands dominated by Muslims. In North Africa, while the Great Game raged far to the east, a group of ultraconservative Muslims, inspired by burgeoning anticolonialist sentiments, conceived the Salafiyya movement. Members of this group, who saw themselves as strict adherents to the Salafi, which means “following the forefathers of Islam,” would many decades later radically alter the course of human history, igniting the Global War on Terror through their extremist acts. Often incorrectly referred to as Wahhabism (in reality a small offshoot of the Salafiyya movement, Wahhabism emerged through the interpretations of the Salafi by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century on the Arabian peninsula), Salafis would become increasingly powerful, widespread, and ever more extreme throughout the twentieth century, establishing madrassas throughout the Middle East as well as in Pakistan for the teaching of ultraconservative, ferociously anti-Western interpretations of Islam.
In addition to learning about the Pashtuns and their culture, practicing conversational Afghan phrases (in both Pashto and Dari, both official languages of Afghanistan, although Pashto predominates the area where the Marines would deploy), and studying the nuances of Sunni Islam, the Marines of ⅔ focused much of their predeployment studies on a period of the country’s history particularly relevant to their forthcoming tour, the Soviet-Afghan War. While the latter was triggered by and fought for starkly different reasons than that of the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Marines would glean both tactical and cultural insight by researching individual battles of the period. But while most studies of the Soviets in Afghanistan discuss the war during the 1980s, the Soviet “invasion” actually began many decades prior to the Christmas Eve 1979 insertion of Spetsnaz special operations teams in the country, the event marking the war’s official commencement.
The Soviet-Afghan relationship actually began a few months prior to Afghanistan’s transition from British protectorate status to independent statehood, when Lenin issued a March 27, 1919, message to the Afghan king stating: “The establishment of permanent diplomatic relations between the two great peoples opens up an extensive possibility of mutual assistance against any encroachment on the side of foreign predators on other people’s freedom and other people’s wealth.” A number of economic-assistance and trade agreements followed, and by the 1930s, the two countries had established a strong bond. But in the post-World War II years, the Soviet Union grew increasingly aggressive, its leaders’ eyes scanning all corners of the globe, from Cuba, to Africa, to Southeast Asia, in the hope of expanding its empire.
In 1955, Nikita Khruschev traveled to Afghanistan and signed a ten-year extension to the Soviet-Afghan treaty of neutrality and nonaggression, first ratified in 1931. But this signing was more than a mere extension of an old agreement; it marked the beginning of an era of Soviet investment in construction, education, and military expansion. During the following decades, the Soviets built numerous roads and highways—the vital Salang Tunnel giving an all-weather connection between the north and south of Afghanistan—high-rise living quarters, a massive state farm outside of Jalalabad, and the enormous Bagram Airfield, among many other projects. The Co
mmunists also brought to Afghanistan a full spectrum of military equipment, from AK-47 rifles to T-series tanks, armored troop carriers, Mig-17 jets, and MI-8/17 “Hip” multirole helicopters, which they instructed the Afghans to both fly and maintain. Interestingly, Afghanistan also established limited ties with the United States in the 1950s; the U.S. military even undertook some training exercises with the Afghans over a number of years, but never transferred large stocks of weapons to them as the Soviets had done. When the Soviets inevitably crossed paths with the Americans during their respective military training missions, they reportedly cooperated with each other, albeit quietly.
Of course, along with their financial, educational, and military aid, the Soviets brought their Communist ideology and propagandizing tools, too, and in 1973, Afghanistan took yet another hairpin turn on its historical pathway when Mohammad Sarder Daoud seized control of the government from King Zahir Shah (who was Daoud’s cousin) during a July 17 coup d’état, ending decades of lackluster and corrupt monarchical rule. Daoud installed himself as the country’s first president and declared Afghanistan a republic. Having gained power with the help of the subversive, pro-Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), members of which expected big political payoffs once he took authority, he shocked the party when he ordered a crack-down on the group as soon as he assumed power.
Daoud immediately instituted massive social and political change in Afghanistan, but his attempts failed miserably and most of the country spiraled into turmoil. Then the PDPA returned, with a vengeful bloodlust, killing Daoud and most of his family on April 27, 1978. The country was declared the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, led by Nur Muhammad Taraqi, the secretary general of the now-hard-line-Communist PDPA. Taraqi announced the institution of an array of liberal economic and social changes, key among these the replacing of laws founded on Islamic tradition with those based on Marxism, forcing men to cut their beards, and a push to introduce girls into the education system.
But the people, particularly those of the distant Hindu Kush, immediately resisted what they felt to be a monumental threat to their traditions and way of life. While most simply disobeyed the new laws, others became agitated, particularly those in areas that held the most conservative of Islamic beliefs. And then on June 22, 1978, the first shots of a conflict that would ultimately explode into the Soviet-Afghan War rang out—in Nangalam, at the western end of the Pech River Valley, just a few miles from the Chowkay and the Korangal valleys, fired by the descendants of the infidels-turned-Muslim purists, the Safi. The Communist government immediately responded with tanks, artillery, and aerial bombing. As the residents fled into the surrounding hills and valleys, the Communists attacked Nangalam’s mosques, burned Korans, then poured gasoline on the villagers’ homes and burned them. The government troops found a widow and her child who hadn’t fled into the hills with the other villagers, and doused them with gas, burned them alive, and threw their charred bodies onto one of the village’s main intersections. The story of Nangalam spread throughout the valleys of the region like the gas-fueled fires themselves, sparking further unrest, only to be put down with similar brutality. In October of that year, however, men of the village of Kamdesh, north of Nangalam in the heart of Nuristan, attacked a government outpost and obliterated it. And that uprising wasn’t put down. The war against the new government was on, between the Soviet-backed Communist government and those who saw themselves as the warriors of Islam, literally, “those who struggle”: the infamous mujahideen.
The Soviets poured millions of dollars’ worth of military and infrastructure aid into Afghanistan throughout 1978; they also sent countless advisers to help the Taraqi regime quell the fast-growing revolt against the new government. Despite the Soviets’ increasingly aggressive posture in Afghanistan, the United States seemed to barely wince at the radical move to hard-line Communist rule. In 1978, the United States sent an ambassador to the new regime, a U.S. Marine veteran of World War II named Adolph “Spike” Dubs, one of the nation’s leading experts on the Soviet Union at the time (whom the KGB wrongly considered a spy). In February of 1979, however, Islamic militants kidnapped him, sequestering Dubs in a room in the Kabul Hotel. Government security forces, under the close advising of a Soviet KGB agent, dismissed the wishes of U.S. State Department officials for a peaceful resolution, and opened fire on the room, killing Dubs—a grim portent of the shortsighted tactical mind-set the Soviets would embrace throughout Afghanistan in the years to come. While the United States had been granting Afghanistan a small amount of foreign aid at the time, Dubs would have been the key to an expansion of this assistance. With his death, however, U.S. aid—at least overtly—withered to nothing. But other American funds, of the covert sort, would begin arriving in just a few months.
The blooming insurgency against Afghanistan’s Communist puppet government in 1979 consisted of a few disorganized, loose-knit bands of Islamic fighters scattered throughout the Hindu Kush and other parts of Afghanistan. In March of 1979, the people of Herat, in western Afghanistan, revolted against the government’s reforms, storming a prison and liberating political prisoners. Then they rounded up and killed fifty Soviet advisers and their families—decapitating them and placing their heads atop sticks surrounding the town. Days later, Taraqi’s retaliation began—from the sky—as five-hundred-pound bombs destroyed much of the city, killing an estimated five thousand people. Soon thereafter, an entire division of Afghan soldiers based in Herat renounced their allegiance to the new government and joined the mujahideen.
Taraqi’s government once again put down an uprising in Nangalam in the summer of 1979, using both land and airpower, razing much of the beautiful enclave—again. Whatever animosity the Safis who dwelled in the lower valleys may have held toward their onetime aggressors, the Pashtuns, was at least temporarily put aside now that they had a common enemy, the “Red Kafir.” After the brutal strikes by the Taraqi government forces against Nangalam and other villages—indiscriminate raids that killed men, women, children, dogs, and other animals—refugees, including the fighting-age males who now considered themselves mujahideen, began to migrate into Pakistan. Pakistan took them in and would continue to welcome the now-homeless Afghans through the coming years, a relationship vital for the eventual outcome of the war. But while Pakistan served as a critical ally at the time, its aid was offered less for humanitarian reasons than as a political maneuver.
Pakistan, which had won its independent statehood through partition from British India in 1947, has maintained a tenuous relationship with Afghanistan for decades. While those unfamiliar with the region might believe that the two countries have enjoyed close, almost familial ties (if for no other reason than they share Islam as a national religion and stan as the last syllable in their names), Pakistan aligned itself strategically on the other side of the table from Afghanistan’s global commitments—with the United States—while the Soviets embraced Afghanistan. Few can forget the shoot-down of American Francis Gary Powers’s USAF/CIA U2 spy plane over the Soviet Union—or Khruschev’s ominous PR move of drawing a red circle on a map around the city from which Powers launched his craft: Peshawar, Pakistan.
Afghan-Pakistani relations have been marked by tension ever since Pakistan emerged as an independent state. In 1955, hostilities over their shared border culminated in Pakistan closing its trade route with the Afghans, threatening to harm Afghanistan’s fragile economy—an act Pakistan would repeat through the years. But then the Soviets intervened and provided an alternative logistical plan, which furthered the bond between the Afghans and the Soviets. The Durand Line was also a source of conflict between the two countries. The Durand Line effectively split in two a region known to the Pashtuns as Pashtunistan, and many Afghans to this day refuse to acknowledge it, crossing unchecked over the invisible line just as people in the southwestern United States pass from Utah to Colorado. Afghans, during the drawing of their borders, sought to have included as part of their country those areas n
ow known as the Northwest Frontier province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan; although this effort was to end in failure, the Pakistani government, in a wink-and-nod style compromise, pretty much keeps out of many of these regions, allowing the people to govern themselves.
The greatest single element shaping Pakistan’s strategic planning and positioning through the years, however, lies to its east: India. Pakistan and India have fought three bloody wars throughout the years, and as India developed close ties with the Soviet Union in the decades following World War II, Pakistan felt increasingly squeezed by inimical flanking powers, particularly in the late 1970s with the aggressive Soviet influx into Afghanistan. Furthermore, many historians believe that Pakistan has long considered Afghanistan to be a buffer zone, providing “strategic depth” into which Pakistan can retreat, regroup, and realign its forces in the event that India overruns its eastern border. In the late 1970s, Pakistani president Zia-ul-Haq envisioned a continuous Islamic union, stretching from Pakistan, through Afghanistan, to Iran. As the Soviet-backed campaign against the mujahideen exploded in magnitude and viciousness, Zia felt that providing support to the resistance was not only necessary, but that Pakistan’s very survival hinged on supporting it. But he’d have to do this covertly, as a direct war with the Soviet Union—which India could easily join on Pakistan’s eastern front—would virtually assure Pakistan’s demise.
