TANZEEM

by Deva, Mukul

  While it is said that he was poisoned and later shot, there is much controversy over how exactly President Hafizullah Amin died. Later, his bullet-riddled body was displayed to the half-jubilant, half-petrified leaders of the new Soviet client state of Afghanistan.

  The dawn of 28 December 1979 saw Babrak Karmal firmly installed in the hot seat and Soviet forces in command of all key installations in the capital.

  By end January 1980, there were 50,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan, and their number increased to 80,000 by the end of the summer.

  Blissfully unaware of the escalating catastrophe, Jalal was playing with his newfound cousins with the enthusiasm of any eight year old. He was looking forward to wearing the new clothes that he had got for his birthday and savouring the delicacies that he knew would be served.

  For the next two weeks Jalal’s innocent life remained untouched. He felt the impact only when Russian armour rolled through and met with the still random and disorganized resistance that had begun to spring up in the Afghan countryside. The Afghans do not take kindly to intruders.

  Jalal felt a thrill the first time he heard the dull, resonating boom of Russian armour in the fading sunlight. Fascinated by all things military, like most young boys, he was very excited with the metallic monsters trundling past the village.

  It did not take long for his excitement to turn to fear as he realized that the Soviet tanks meant death to all that lay in their path.

  The third Russian T-62 tank had just passed by Saret Koleh and the fourth one was coming level with it when four men darted out of the darkness. Running in pairs, they attacked either side of the advancing armoured column. They were armed with Molotov cocktails.

  First used by General Franco’s Spanish Nationalists against the Spanish Republicans, the Molotov cocktail attained prominence when the Finns used it against the Russians during the Winter War in 1939. This simple weapon is basically a glass bottle filled with petrol fuels or wood alcohol and turpentine, ignited by an alcohol or paraffin soaked cloth. The Finns so named it to mock the Soviet Commissar for foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, who often claimed in radio broadcasts that the Soviet Union was delivering food to the starving Finns when in reality they were dropping bombs.

  The weapon became exceedingly popular and was mass-produced by the Alko Corporation at its Rajamäki distillery. Production totalled 450,000 bombs during the Winter War. The original design of the Molotov cocktail was a mixture of ethanol, tar and gasoline in a 750-millilitre bottle fitted with two long pyrotechnic storm matches.

  The bombs used by the Afghans that evening were basically a petrol and diesel mix ignited by alcohol-soaked fuses. They proved more than adequate.

  The newly inducted Russians, not yet subjected to the hammer blows of retaliation, were so complacent that all the tank commanders had their hatches open and were casually surveying the countryside, behaving more like tourists than soldiers in a combat zone.

  Both pairs of attackers dropped their lethal Molotov cocktails into the open hatches of the tanks, then spun around and escaped.

  The bottle bombs exploded even as the attackers leapt clear of the tank. Within minutes, flames consumed both tanks. As the screaming crew jumped out, a crackle of rifle fire greeted them. The rifles were ancient, bolt action ones, but the bullets they threw out were lethal, and the men wielding them were anything but novices.

  By the time the Soviet patrol got its act together there was nothing to hit back at. The attackers had melted into the darkness. This was the pattern of most such attacks in the years of Russian occupation that followed. It took a while for the Russians to understand this and even longer for them to develop an adequate tactical response to combat it.

  The reaction to this opening strike was as predictable as it was regrettable. The Russians were clear that the attack could not go unpunished. An example had to be set. So the Soviet column turned its wrath on the only identifiable thing around: the village they had just crossed.

  The staccato commands yelled out in Russian meant little to the villagers who stood gawking at the Russian foot patrol that entered Saret Koleh. A couple of tanks were on either side of the patrol, their guns sweeping across the area menacingly.

  Some of the villagers were pulled out of the crowd and taken to the centre of the village. Jalal’s father and uncle were among them.

  The twelve men were lined up along the wall of one of the huts and an equal number of Russian soldiers formed up, facing them. The other villagers watched in disbelief as a sharp command was snapped out and the rifles in the hands of the soldiers came level. At a second command, the Russian rifles fired in ragged unison.

  It was hard to tell what impacted the minds of the villagers first – the crash of gunfire or the sight of their men thrown backwards, hitting the wall behind with a thump and then slumping to the ground, leaving uneven blotches of red on the mud wall.

  ‘Each Russian life will cost you two of your own,’ the patrol leader shouted at the stunned villagers.

  The first to react was Jalal’s mother. Screaming, she ran towards her husband’s body.

  When the Russian infantryman saw a hysterical woman rushing towards the firing squad he acted on blind instinct – the way armed men respond when confronted with the uncertain or the threatening – he opened fire, emptying his magazine into her.

  Jalal watched as the brute force of the bullets picked up his mother and smashed her against the wall of the same hut where his father had been shot.

  Jalal did not cry. Not that day. Nor the next, when the last rites were performed. In fact, no one would see Jalal shed tears ever again.

  He became very quiet. From that moment on he did not speak to anyone except when he was asked a direct question, to which he replied in monosyllables.

  The only family he had left now was his aunt who, in one fleeting moment, had not just become a widow, but had also been left with five children to take care of. She was too devastated to notice the ominous quiet that had enveloped her young nephew.

  A few days later, Jalal’s aunt did what she thought was the best thing to do: she took her three children,Jalal and his brother, and fled for what she assumed was the safety of the Pakistan border. Since the invasion was still in its early stages, the flood of humanity that would eventually surge towards this nebulous sanctuary had not yet begun in earnest; yet with every passing day, the crowd heading there was gaining strength.

  It was a brutal journey, especially for a lone woman travelling on foot in the bitter cold with five children.

  She lost her youngest boy to the fever he picked up on the first night. The second child, another victim to the unforgiving Afghan winter, succumbed two days later. She herself barely made it to the border with the three surviving children.

  They were within touching reach of the border when the Soviet helicopter gunships found them.

  The gunships would have left them alone had it not been for two men in the mass of people heading for the border. The only excuse for their foolishness was the fact that both had lost their entire families in the week gone by and were seething with rage. The gunships sweeping past provided a focal point for their anger. Futile though the act was, the men impulsively raised their rifles and opened fire. Their bullets clanged off the armoured underbelly of the gunships. But they certainly drew the attention of the crew. Both gunships swung around in a wide loop and aligned themselves with the crowd below as they swooped in.

  The Mi24 helicopter (called Krokodil by the Russians) was the first version of the Hind gunships. It was armed only with a 12.7 mm machine-gun, AT-2 Swatter Anti-Tank Guided Missiles and simple rockets or bombs. Despite its relative inefficiency (compared to modern equipment), it was more than adequate to mete out quick death to the confused civilians below.

  By the time the screaming crowd of refugees could take shelter, Jalal’s aunt and his infant brother, whom she had been carrying in her arms, both lay dead.

  ‘Kismat.’ The elderly, white-bea
rded Afghan shrugged as he came across Jalal and his cousin Hassan huddled in the bloody swarm of bodies, long after the choppers had departed and the survivors had started sifting through the dead for signs of life. ‘Who can fight what has been written? I suppose this was Allah’s will.’

  His philosophical words fell on deaf ears. Already struck by the relentless blows fate had dealt them in the past two weeks, the assault by the gunships had delivered the final assault on their young, impressionable minds. By now both boys had lost all sense of reason. It is doubtful whether they would have survived if the old man had not taken them under his wing.

  It did not take long for the Good Samaritan to display his true colours. On the second night, he took Jalal and Hassan away from the other refugees. Driven to the very edge of reason by grief, hunger and fear, they lacked the strength or maturity to understand when the exploitation began. When the kind-looking man who had saved them took out his penis and asked them to take turns in rubbing it, they did. When he asked them to suck it, they did. When he made them turn around and sodomized them, it hurt beyond belief, but they silently complied.

  Having satisfied the demons that possessed him, two weeks later their Samaritan finally dumped them at the gates of a refugee camp on the outskirts of Bajaur in Pakistan.

  The refugee camp – if one could call it that – was a massive, unruly cluster of tents that had sprung up in the middle of nowhere. The tents were grossly inadequate to keep out the bitter cold, and the food available was barely enough for a child to survive. Even so, as it became clear that the war was not going to end any time soon, the camp started to acquire a more permanent appearance. With the passage of time, it was engulfed by the endless deluge of people fleeing the destruction of Afghanistan.

  It is estimated that by the time the dust finally settled, approximately 3 to 5 million Afghans had fled from the advancing Russian juggernaut. Although many fled to other countries, a large number ended up in refugee camps in Pakistan. Lost in this sea of people were Jalal and Hassan.

  The two cousins would not have survived had it not been for the arrival of Abdullah Al Azzam, a key player in the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, who would soon acquire the dubious status of being the intellectual architect of the jihad against the Russians. With him came Mullah Ismail Hamidi and a host of like-minded zealots and self-proclaimed mullahs.

  Hamidi picked Jalal and Hassan, along with numerous other orphans, and took them to the newly established madrassa a couple of miles away from the Bajaur refugee camp. As soon as they reached the madrassa they were given food. They gulped down every morsel. They were then lined up and asked to introduce themselves one by one.

  ‘Just tell us your name, age and whatever else you want to about yourself,’ Hamidi gently told the children.

  ‘Jalaluddin,’ said the young Pashtun boy when it was his turn. ‘Jalaluddin Haq.’ And then he went quiet. Unlike the other children, he spoke neither of his village nor his family. Jalal’s mind was a clean slate.

  For most children in the madrassa, the memory of their parents had become hazy amid the successive shocks that life delivered to them. It did not take long for the firm but kindly Hamidi to assume a god-like position in their guileless heads. Soon, every thing he said was their gospel.

  When he told them there was no god but the One God, they believed him. When he said they were suffering because the kafir wanted to decimate Islam, they did not question him. When he told them they must dedicate their lives to the defence of Islam, they did so unflinchingly.

  A few years later, when he told them they should go across the Af-Pak border and fight the Russian infidel who was raping their country, they willingly took up arms and followed him.

  And when he told them Allah would open the doors of jannat to them if they were to die in His cause, they believed him. And thus the ultimate jihadi killing machine was born.

  Perhaps, viewed in isolation, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan would not have been as cataclysmic an event as it eventually became. In the last 5,600 years of recorded history, approximately 14,600 wars have been fought, about three wars per year. Like so many others, this war too would have faded into time had it not been for the games that nations and governments play; thoughtless, vicious games in the name of diplomacy, economy, projection of power, influence, personal glory and, of course, religion.

  It came as no surprise to anyone when America, eager to gift a Vietnam to its traditional enemy, decided to back the rebel movement that had erupted in Afghanistan against the Russians.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the CIA officer, briefing the officials and agents who had been assembled to handle the situation, ‘we will fight the Russians to the last Afghan.’ And that was precisely what they went on to do.

  Thus began Operation Cyclone, the longest-running and one of the most expensive covert operations ever conducted by the CIA. Decreed under President Jimmy Carter’s signature on 3 July 1979, the sole purpose of Op Cyclone was to arm and equip the Afghan mujahideen against the Russians.

  Starting with a relatively paltry 20 to 30 million dollars in 1980, the sum eventually rose to 630 million dollars per annum by 1987. This money poured into Afghanistan in the form of automatic weapons, explosives, Stinger missiles, land mines and other death-dealing munitions that would eventually claim more Afghan lives than Russian.

  Having no direct access into Afghanistan, the Americans turned to their traditional, if generally unreliable ally, Pakistan, to act as the conduit through which money, arms and ammunition could flow to the mujahideen.

  The then Pakistani dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq accepted the offer with alacrity. He had recently executed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the legally elected Pakistani premier whom he had deposed after a bloody coup d’état, and launched a secret nuclear weapons programme, so he was desperate to get back into the good books of the Americans.

  However, veteran schemer that he was, Zia rejected the 400 million dollars that Carter offered him in 1980. The gamble paid off because the very next year, Ronald Reagan, the newly elected American president, upped the amount to 3.2 billion dollars.

  Zia, out to to take full advantage of the situation, accepted Reagan’s offer only after the Americans confirmed that Pakistan would have complete control over the materials that went into Afghanistan and that American contact with the mujahideen would only be through the Pakistani ISI. This suited the Americans because it allowed them to deny any involvement with the sordid mess that Afghanistan was rapidly degenerating into.

  Consequently, Pakistan had a free hand with the money that could be diverted either to the Swiss bank accounts of the generals in power or to the terror groups that had been set up to harass the Indians in Kashmir. They determined how much actually reached the mujahideen in Afghanistan. They were the ones who reinforced certain mujahideen groups and ignored the ones who did not toe the line.

  Given the fundamentalist mindset of Zia and his ISI chief, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman Khan, Pakistan dominated the infamous Peshawar Seven, an umbrella organization that formed the core of mujahideen resistance to the Soviets. They ensured that four of the seven parties – the Khalis faction (set up by Khalis), Hezb-i-Islami (Hekmatyar), the Islamic Union for Liberation for Afghanistan (Sayyaf) and the Jamiat-i-Islami (Rabbani) – were hardcore political Islamists and outweighed the three traditionalist parties: National Islamic Front for Afghanistan (Gailani), Afghanistan National Liberation Front (Mojaddedi) and the Revolutionary Islamic Movement (Mohammadi). Not surprisingly, all but one of the Peshawar Seven – Rabbani’s Jamiat-i-Islami – were Pashtun.

  It was during these years that Zia established and consolidated the links between the terror groups, which had been declared strategic state assets by Pakistan, and the Islamic fundamentalists in the Pakistan government. Zia also completed the Islamization of the Pakistani armed forces and the ISI.

  Soon, the lines between the ISI, the Pakistan Army and the mujahideen groups blurred and, from being
a secular state, Pakistan turned into a country where the Islamists yielded tremendous power.

  Perhaps they did not know that one day, not far in the future, this legacy would rear its ugly head and tear apart the fabric of Pakistan, or perhaps that had always been their plan.

  Not to be left out of the rat race, China, perpetually jockeying for power with Russia and India, also began to pump munitions into Afghanistan. So did Egypt and a host of other countries. To conceal this aid, most of the donor countries funnelled Soviet-origin arms – which were far cheaper than American weaponry – into Afghanistan.

  However, none of this would have had a resonating effect on the future had it not been for the entry of Saudi Arabia on the scene. Looking to restore its image as the Defender of the Faith, which had been delivered a severe blow when Mecca was held hostage by a group of extremists, the Saudi regime was keen to strengthen its ties with the conservative Wahhabis.

  Despite the fact that the Saudi agenda was deeply rooted in history and should have been known to one and all, the CIA displayed a remarkable level of shortsightedness and acquiesced to Saudi’s nefarious plans.

  In concord with the alliance struck between the House of Saud and the purist Muhammad Ibn Abd al Wahhab in the eighteenth century to eliminate all deviations from the practice of Islam, Saudi Arabia agreed to double the amount given by America. Afghanistan was a predominantly Muslim country with low literacy and high poverty levels – a perfect mix for the Saudis to spread the Wahhabi doctrine and unleash a jihad against the kafir, at almost negligible cost.