“One of the more important events in modern Afghan history occurred in 1959,” writes the historian Louis Dupree. “With no prior public announcement or official proclamation, Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Mohammad Naim,e other members of the royal family, the cabinet, and high-ranking army officers appeared on the reviewing stand with their wives and daughters on the second day of Jeshn [Independence Week]… The women had exposed their faces for all to see. Just thirty years before, the government of King Amanullah fell because (among other reform attempts) he abolished purdah and the chadri and established coeducational schools in Kabul.
“… the large crowd of spectators stared in stunned disbelief.
“… the inevitable happened. A delegation of religious leaders requested and received an audience with the Prime Minister.
The mullahs accused him of being anti-Islamic for permitting atheistic Communist and Christian Westerners to pervert the nation … Immediately after leaving the Prime Minister’s office the religious leaders began to preach against the regime. Sardar Daoud’s efficient secret police arrested and jailed about fifty of the ringleaders … Government spokesmen informed the imprisoned religious leaders that removal of the veil was voluntary, which was only partly true, for the government did force officials to attend public functions with unveiled wives in order to set examples for the masses … The weight of this logic (plus the fact that Afghan prisons are designed to punish, not rehabilitate) convinced the mullahs of the error of their ways, so the Prime Minister ordered their release after about a week of incarceration. Not all religious leaders accepted the voluntary abolition of the veil and other reforms, however, because each intrusion into their customary power erodes their secular influence.”f
In his pamphlet What Type of Struggle? (whose cover bears as its device a shining Qur’an nested between swords and wreaths), Professor B. Rabbani, the head of Jamiat-i-Islami Afghanistan, writes the following (September 1981): “… manners and behaviours should be selected very carefully. For instance; where preaching can be a mean [sic] for invitation (to the Way of Allah), implication of arms is not concordant with the wisdom of Islamic teaching. On the other hand, if expression and persuasion is not able to penetrate through the closed doors of contumacy and deviation or arguments and reasonings do not influence proudness, and if invitation is faced with inimical resistance of vanity, then non-implication of weapons (conduct of armed struggle) is idiocy and ignorance.”g
Oh, how nice it would have been if the Mujahideen had appeared spontaneously following the Russian invasion! It would still have been almost perfect if they had come into being after Taraki’s coup in 1978, because THAT was probably bad, too, but if Rabbani and Gulbuddin and the rest of them had begun as creatures of the Pakistanis, then they were bandits, as the Soviets called them; they were terrorists. — It was very difficult for me to accept the tainted origins of necessity.
The National Uprising that the Reliable Source was paying homage to occurred in July of 1975. It was called the Panjsher Insurgency. Everyone agrees that the rebels were led by the mullahs. And who trained them? Pakistan, of course, denied that it had had anything to do with it. The Afghan population failed to join, and the government helicopters came quickly, shooting the rebels down; they captured ninety-three and found all but sixteen guilty, and then Daoud went on with his business.
But does what some of the groups were matter now? Was the Young Man right to feel that the Afghan Resistance was tainted by its origins? — I think not — not at present. I think that the effects of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan have been appallingly evil. Resistance is justified no matter where it comes from. Then, too, if we do accept the Reliable Source’s account, can we say that Daoud was right in his efforts to modernize the country? That (thank God for small favors) is a matter now so laughably academic…
Comparing politics to a chess game, as the Reliable Source loved to do, is, of course, trite in our own mass society, where we expect our politicians to play, and if necessary cheat, for our well-being, while the newspapers glowingly explain the moves for us — for the comparison is trite precisely because it is so valid. The Reliable Source’s use of the phrase was equally justified. — It was the British who first began to speak of the “Great Game” between their empire and Russia’s; and Afghanistan was at the center of the board.h Every new development was less a willed decision than an inevitable crystallization, for the Game was so Great as to be playing the players rather than the reverse. — “In the natural process of civilized and civilizing Powers which I have already dwelt upon,” wrote Lord Lytton on September 4, 1878 (they were invading
Afghanistan again that year), “wherever we leave a vacuum, Russia will assuredly fill it up.” In the last few years before the Soviets gave Afghanistan their Christmas present, as the Reliable Source saw his anxieties congeal and solidify into real monsters, the Game continued, subject to the same pressures of cosmic law: Each of the players made his move because the dynamic equilibrium of the Game forced him to; he was only trying to hold his own, you see. More years fell by the wayside; we spoke of the requirements of Containment when we fought Soviet bogeys in Central America; while they explained that progression from one social arrangement to another occurs only on a one-way escalator, so that feudalism in Afghanistan MUST give way to socialism as a result of Economic Laws, and all the U.S.S.R. was doing was protecting and implementing and developing. Both players advised their pawns to relax and continue down the slaughter chute. — “Under the banner of the great April Revolution,i forward along the path toward full unity of all the national and progressive forces, toward the final victory of the national democratic, anti-feudal, anti-imperialist revolution, for the creation of a new proud, free and independent Afghanistan!” screamed Babrak Karmal after being airlifted into office. (Naturally, it is not in my interest to quote a U.S. counter-example; for if I were so principled as to insist that we help the Afghans for their own sake, not because they are anti-Soviet, whom would I have left to advance their cause with me?) — History shows that the Game has always gone on, no matter who the players are; so if the world must indeed be run in this rotten way we should not blame the Reliable Source, but honor him for his honesty. How ludicrous, how foully ludicrous, when a player pretends not to be playing (though that is part of the Game, too), as when, for instance, the Soviets insist that they uphold the quaint ethnic strictures of backward countries: In the Moscow News Weekly No. 24 (June 21–28, 1981), a column entitled “The Home Hearth: From Our Correspondent in Kabul” has the Elder of the Pashtun Tribe say, “The U.S.S.R.’s military help to Afghanistan is in full accord with the code of honor of the Pashtun tribe, the Pashtunwali. It says that if an enemy has attacked your country you can appeal to your neighbors to help oppose the enemy.” —As the Persian proverb runs, “If the king says at noonday, ‘It is night,’ the wise man says, ‘Behold the stars.’ ”