Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Meanwhile, Soviet forces fighting these fragmented, ever tinier units of Mujahideen (if they can even be called units) found themselves—incredibly enough—losing this grinding war of grain-scale violence. For one thing, the Mujahideen refused to engage in pitched battles. They fought only when they had some tactical advantage.

  A Soviet officer named Major Petrov described one typical encounter. In March 1982, he was assigned to hunt down and kill forty Mujahideen said to be hiding in or near a village called Sherkhankel. He decided to conduct the operation at night with one artillery division and four helicopter gunships. The team pursued figures they thought were Mujahideen down a long straight road between a mud wall and a cement canal. Petrov didn’t realize he was being drawn into an ambush. He didn’t fear it, in any case, because he thought the Mujahideen had only bolt-action single-shot World War II–era rifles. Suddenly, through holes in the wall came grenades, rockets, and machine gun fire. It took the startled Petrov a few minutes to figure out where the gunfire was coming from and to give his men the command to fire back. By then, the Afghans had sneaked away through those underground irrigation tunnels or kahrezes that laced Afghanistan. There was no one left to fight. The Soviet soldiers were firing a hundred rounds a minute into rocks and dirt.2 The British could have told them about this kind of war: they’d been there, done that, in 1879–1880.

  The Soviets soon discovered that, in this kind of war, their fancy equipment was useless. The terrain was so uncharted they couldn’t move their tanks and armored vehicles into most of it. They could patrol the cities but were totally incapacitated in the countryside. They had mobile artillery, but these were too heavy to carry into the mountains, so they had to leave them behind. Their high-speed jets had targeting devices that enabled them to pick off individual enemy soldiers with eerie precision, but these too were useless for they moved too fast to spot, much less shoot, guerillas hidden among the rocks of Afghan canyons. The Soviets deployed their high-tech instruments to detect the Mujahideen; the Mujahideen tuned into the flight patterns of birds, which sense the faintest sounds and slightest disturbances of the air. When the guerillas saw birds rise up from a distant peak, they knew the jets were coming, and they dove into the safety of some convenient cave or crack.3

  The only military equipment the Soviets found really useful were their big Hind helicopter gunships, which they could fly into the canyons. The’copters could hover in one spot, and from there gunmen could shoot the guerillas with high-powered artillery as soon as they showed their head. The only trouble was, the guerillas eventually began to acquire Soviet weapons from tanks they had captured and from soldiers they had killed, as well as from allies outside the country dedicated to hurting the Soviets. Once they had machine guns, the Soviets had to hover at least three hundred yards away from any guerillas they spotted, which eliminated some of the advantage the helicopters gave them.

  Ultimately, winning battles in canyons and defiles and sparsely inhabited mountains and deserts wasn’t going to enable the Soviets and their puppets to govern the country. They had to eliminate the Mujahideen guerillas—not just defeat them in isolated battles but eliminate them.

  The trouble was, the Mujahideen looked just like other rural Afghans, which was scarcely surprising because most of them were just rural Afghans, not full-time revolutionaries or warriors. When they weren’t fighting the Soviets, they were pursuing their usual lives: plowing their fields, grazing their sheep, hatching advantageous marriages, and scheming to one-up their cousins in the next village.

  When they killed a few Soviet advisors in a canyon and then melted away, where they melted to was their local village or qala, where they joined their relatives and friends. When a government team came to set up some program, they were part of the crowd listening quietly and acting docile. After the soldiers left, they dug up their buried weapons and killed the representatives the government had left behind.

  The government couldn’t defeat these Mujahideen by cutting their supply lines to the outside world because most of them had no connection to the outside world. Their base was their own home or a home very much like it: a place where people would gladly feed and shelter them because they knew these guys or guys just like them and subscribed completely to their cause.

  The Mujahideen thus had no logistical problems themselves and were in excellent shape to inflict logistical damage on the Soviets. They devoted themselves to destroying bridges and blowing up sections of highway so that the Soviets would be unable to truck in supplies. The battle was unequal—the Soviets held the short straw.

  At last, Soviet military planners made a fateful decision. They decided to deny the Mujahideen their logistical advantage in the only way that looked feasible to them: they would cut the ties between the people and the guerillas by driving the people out of the countryside. Thus began the most terrible phase of this terrible war, a phase that should never be allowed to fade from the annals of infamy. The Soviets launched a deliberate effort to depopulate rural Afghanistan. They bombed countless villages. Flying over the farmlands, they scattered land mines, which still litter Afghan soil and have made much of the land difficult if not impossible to cultivate. They strafed livestock from the air, cutting them to pieces so that the rural population would no longer be able to feed the guerillas—or (incidentally) themselves, which would force them to move, either to the nearest big city, which the Soviets could control with their armored vehicles and artillery, or to the nearest safe country of refuge, which for most meant Pakistan or Iran. The bloodiest year of the war was 1985. By the end of that year, some one million Afghans had been killed and some six million were living in Pakistan or Iran as refugees.

  The refugees, however, were not whole families, generally. The horror rained down upon the country aroused a grim resolve among rural Afghans to fight this implacable enemy to their last drop of blood. Men of fighting age moved their families to the refugee camps outside the country and went back inside to keep on fighting. The culture paid a terrible price for this decimation of families, a price that has never been analyzed systematically. Afghan culture is, to be sure, a macho culture. From the earliest age, boys are expected to be tough. They think nothing of taking beatings from their fathers and elder brothers. They learn to laugh off such beatings and even take pride in how hard they’ve been hit by the people who care about them most. It’s all part of becoming a man. It even makes them feel appreciated because heaven help the boy who comes into adulthood a weakling.

  But the macho elements of Afghan culture are tempered by many other factors—by the pride Afghan boys take in representing their family and the shame they feel about bringing their families into disrepute, by the solicitude they express as a matter of course toward their elders, by the tenderness so many Afghan men intuitively display toward babies, whom they dandle and kiss without embarrassment, by the almost exaggerated protectiveness they display toward their mothers and wives and sisters, by the demands their culture places on their instincts for charity and the ways in which it honors their impulses toward generosity . . .

  At the height of the Soviet occupation, Afghanistan became a country in which the tempering effects on men of living as members of families, clans, and communities dropped away. Millions of men went through years of living solely in the company of other adult men in some of the toughest conditions imaginable. They were members of militias in a land devoid of women, children, and elders. That experience changed the soul of the country, or so it seems to me.

  To make matters worse, the Soviets invented a type of land mine designed to look like a toy and thus specifically to attract children. These mines were not strong enough to kill, just strong enough to maim. As a military strategy, the idea was to hurt the families migrating to the refugee camps. A child killed by land mines was buried wherever he or she died, and the family moved on. Children who lost a foot or a hand but survived bogged down their whole family. They would not be abandoned, it would take the man of the group much
longer to get his family to refuge before he could go back to the war, and he might not even abandon them once he got them to safety. Viewed purely in scientific terms, these toy-like land mines were an intellectually elegant solution to a military problem.

  Many of the mines are still there. Most of the people who planted them are middle-aged men living in some blighted part of the former Soviet Union. And the men who dreamed up this scientific scheme have, for the most part, died of natural causes by now.

  PART IV: OLD AFGHANISTAN ERUPTS

  Nadir Shah and his family had resumed the project launched by Dost Mohammed, the project that consumed Abdu’Rahman and Amanullah. The Musahibbans moved more cautiously, but they did move relentlessly to consolidate a country governed from an all-powerful center. The ruling elite in Kabul saw development as the key to this project, so they used strategic nonalignment to squeeze resources out of both sides in the Cold War, which they used to build roads, schools, postal services, telecommunications, and other infrastructure. Sure enough, all this development directed from the capital made Kabul not just a city but The City: bigger, stronger, and more culturally dominant than all the other major cities of Afghanistan combined. It also spawned a powerful new class of technocrats that outpaced the old aristocracy, a class whose prestige derived from secular skills and education, not from ancestral religious and tribal affiliations. Kabul became an imperial presence in the Afghan countryside, building institutions that could not help but put pressure on the traditional Afghan way of life. The tug and push between new Kabul and old Afghanistan became a contest between modern ways and traditional ways, internationalism and parochialism, religious law and secular law, Western culture and Islamic culture, urban values and rural values . . . and Nadir Shah’s dynasty seemed destined to succeed. Old Afghanistan seemed to be giving ground, losing steam.

  Actually, no one was giving ground. The forces pulling the country in opposite directions were only gaining ominous intensity. Their tension generated an appearance of stability only because the two sides were evenly matched: equilibrium was not stability. Something would have to give, and the rising tension guaranteed that, when it did, it would be explosive. Within the urban camp, radicals strained against moderates to push for secular development harder, faster. When Afghan Communists seized power, it wasn’t a revolution of the poor against the rich or of peasants against landlords. It was a putsch within the urban elite about how to pursue the long-standing goals of imperial Kabul.

  The real conflict wasn’t within Kabul, however, but between Kabul and the countryside; and that showdown was yet to come. When the Soviets crashed into the country, they intended to keep the country out of American hands, but they need not have bothered. The emergent Afghan Left may have embraced one side of the bipolar global confrontation between Communism and Capitalism, but their opponents felt no analogous affiliation with the other side. These were not proxies for American interests or ideals. Domestically, they represented old Afghanistan, the one that Abdu’Rahman and his successors stomped but couldn’t kill. Ideologically, they were proxies for a new factor in global politics: revolutionary Islamism. In short, the Afghan conflict had little to do with Cold War issues. It was an eruption of unresolved Afghan contentions going back to the days of Amanullah and Bachey Saqao and before. By intervening in this contest, the Soviets shattered all the checks and balances and accommodations Afghans had crafted over the course of the previous 140 years, and they opened the gates to forces that had been repressed for decades by the modernizing project emanating out of Kabul.

  21

  The Mujahideen

  AFGHANS ARE SAID TO BE A PEOPLE WHO COME TOGETHER AS ONE IN THE face of foreign invaders, but that is a sentimental stereotype. Within one year of the Soviet invasion, over eighty resistance groups were operating out of Peshawar, Pakistan.1 Some were big, some were small. A tiny fraction of these groups came from the liberal left, a few espoused some form of traditional nationalism, but the overwhelming majority claimed to be fighting under the banner of Islam as Mujahideen, “Defenders of the Faith.”

  If all these groups were fighting for the same cause against the same enemy, why were there nearly eighty of them instead of just one? Good question. And the answer is, because they coalesced around particular personalities and their allies, not around ideological positions and ideas. Every leader was in competition with every other for command of the whole. Not one was willing to merge with a similar group and accept the authority of its leader. Why? Because leadership in Afghan culture still goes back to personal interactions and associated networks of personal connections. This was true in the days of Ahmad Shah Baba. It was still true in 1985—and it was just as true for the Communists as for the Mujahideen.

  The eighty-plus groups in Peshawar did not correspond to eighty-plus armies in Afghanistan. Most of the Peshawar groups were stand-alone entities connected only tenuously, if at all, to in-country fighting groups, of which there were not scores but hundreds, perhaps thousands. The connections between groups in Pakistan and those in Afghanistan were based on personal favors and deals between the leaders.

  What favors? What deals? Well, the Mujahideen leaders in Peshawar were essentially fund-raisers, competing for money and guns from various sources out there in the wide world. Some groups had major sponsors in Saudi Arabia, others in Iran, and others with Islamist revolutionary parties in Arab North Africa.

  And, right from the start, at least a trickle of money and guns was coming from the United States, Britain, and other Western European countries. The Western aid did not flow directly to the Mujahideen but to the Pakistan government, which distributed it among its favorites. For this reason, the various Mujahideen competed ferociously for influence in the Pakistan political establishment.

  The agency that handled most of the aid flowing from the West to the Mujahideen was Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence, or ISI. This spy agency theoretically served all the branches of the Pakistan military. It was a small outfit compared to, say, the Pakistan army or air force, but, as the liaison among the various military branches and the one group privy to the secrets of all, ISI was in a unique position to build its power. Now, with Western money flowing through its hands, this agency had its own considerable off-the-shelf budget. And because ISI could disburse the money as it pleased without having to answer for its choices, this secretive nodule within Pakistan’s political establishment was able to gain commanding influence among the dangerous Afghan militants on its soil—which made ISI itself the most dangerous gang of all.

  The Peshawar-based Mujahideen in turn funneled the money and guns they received to their selected in-country commanders, using this aid to build stables of clients among the guerillas, thereby laying the groundwork for the day when they would be competing with one another for power in Kabul. What the Soviets and their puppets faced, in short, was not an entity nor even a movement but a situation.

  The country the Mujahideen hoped to govern someday was more than fragmented now; it was atomized. Farming and manufacturing had pretty much shut down. Aside from gem smuggling, gun running, and the opium trade, there was hardly any economy. Afghanistan was living on foreign subsidies—the cities on Soviet money, the rural people mainly on money from Arab and Western sources. Much of the Western money didn’t get all the way through the pipeline. Much stuck to sticky fingers in ISI, turning that little agency into a state within a state. Some improved the lifestyle of the Afghan fund-raiser–politicians in Peshawar, transforming them into a unique class of their own. What did finally get through to Afghans in the country funded only violence.

  Among the Mujahideen in Peshawar, every leader was competing with every other for followers. Since all were theoretically fighting for Islam, none could advance his cause by declaring himself more moderate than the next man. “More moderate” connoted less committed, less pure, less Muslim. In the cauldron of that competition, every leader was under pressure to prove himself more Muslim than his rivals. If one said he
planned to establish an Islamic state, the next one had to say, “Mine will make his look like an atheist’s fleshpot.” The structure of the situation kept pushing the Mujahideen toward extremism, and it favored those who were already authentically extremist in their views.

  Although much of the aid came through ISI, not all of it did. Iran dealt largely with the country’s Shi’as, the biggest group of whom were the Hazaras, the ethnic group crushed by the Iron Amir in the nineteenth century. The Hazaras mounted stiff resistance to the Soviets but were not about to join the Sunni-dominated Mujahideen of Peshawar. The Saudis, too, set up direct channels with some groups, bypassing ISI. Egypt had its clients, and so did India, Pakistan’s implacable enemy.

  The anti-Soviet war became a proxy for many deadly conflicts in the wider world; those conflicts in turn stoked ethnic, religious, and linguistic divisions among Afghans into hostilities. Non-Afghans sometimes say, “Oh, these people have been fighting one another for a thousand years.” Not true. Before the Soviet invasion, the country’s various ethnic, linguistic, and religious subgroups were not at war much except during the reign of the Iron Amir. They had learned to accommodate one another and had evolved complex symbiotic interdependencies. Feuds, yes. Intertribal wars, yes, sometimes; but those involved warriors fighting warriors, not armies eviscerating one another’s homes, farms, flocks, and families. The Soviet invasion and the Afghan response shattered age-old accommodations among groups and laid the groundwork for savage ethnic wars to come.

  The Soviet invasion and the resistance to it also reconfigured the social fabric of the old Afghanistan, the universe of village-republics described in Chapter 2, which was still more or less intact when the Soviet invasion began. In the village-republics of Afghanistan, authority had always belonged to secular “elders”—landowners, tribal chiefs, village maliks. They were partnered with clerics, but clerics had the subordinate role. The elders made the serious decisions because they had the land, wealth, weapons, and will to fight. The clerics’ role was to give their decisions sanction.