Authors: Jason Burke
The roots of Afghan political Islam lie, like the roots of Afghan Marxism, in the new educational institutions set up by King Zahir Shah’s government in the 1950s. When Zahir Shah took power in 1933, the basic structural problems of the nearly 200-year-old Afghan state remained unsolved. Afghanistan was still desperately poor and still lacked an effective system of taxation. The rulers were perpetually short of cash. The power of the ruling clique, still drawn largely from one clan within the Pashtun tribes, was still primarily dependent on
patronage. With no resources at home, Afghan rulers had to get funds from outside the country, much as a rural khan has to find resources from beyond his tribe’s immediate neighbourhood. Once, raiding other nations for loot would have been the solution. Instead, Afghanistan’s leaders in the post-Second World War period returned to the tactics that had been employed by their nineteenth-century predecessors and traded on the country’s strategic position, its biggest asset, to secure the diplomatic and financial advantages that would enable them to keep power. As long as the resources flowed in from overseas the fundamental weakness of the state could be, at least temporarily, covered up. From 1956 to 1978, the Soviets were to give $1.26bn in military and $1.25bn in economic aid to Afghanistan.
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In 1965 alone, the Americans gave $7.7m and the Soviets $11.1m towards infrastructure projects.
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The money allowed the regime to buy off all the various interest groups whose support they needed and postpone the serious reform that might have developed the economy, bridged the profound urban–rural divide and co-opted other ethnic and tribal elements beyond the Pashtuns into central government.
There was, however, limited success in one area of modernization. Opportunities for education were rapidly increased, albeit from a fairly low base. In 1932 there had been 1,350 students in state schooling and no state universities. By 1961 there were 233,809 state schoolchildren and nearly 2,000 in further education. Within a decade the number of graduates would almost treble.
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American money built most of the schools. The Soviets ran a polytechnic, the French a lycée. At the same time, the bureaucracy and the army were also expanded, to provide jobs for the products of the new education system, to increase the regime’s opportunity for patronage and because the centralized, statist style of management learned from the Soviets needed lots of officials.
Ideally, this new educated elite would have become the civil servants, technicians and entrepreneurs who could together have developed their country into an appropriate local version of a consensual, accountable, modern state. Instead, nepotism, corruption, tribal chauvinism and mismanagement meant that the new educated elite merely formed a self-contained, discontented and expensive layer sandwiched between the exclusive royal elite and their cronies, who maintained a monopoly
on genuine executive power, and the rest of the country. A liberal constitution, introduced in 1964, failed to fulfil anyone’s aspirations. As opportunities for foreign travel, the penetration of international media, tourists and the presence of foreign advisers increased, many Afghans became rapidly aware for the first time of their country’s backwardness. Their profound frustration at their inability to do anything about it, or to better their own positions, provoked a questioning of the established order and a search for new solutions.
Discontent was strongest among the new social element created by the new education system.
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These educated, or sometimes semieducated, Afghan youths of rural backgrounds had developed outlooks that were radically different from those of their parents. A survey in 1967 found that 62 per cent of graduates of Kabul University, which was founded in 1947 and became co-educational in 1960, had fathers with no formal education.
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These phenomena, and their consequences, were common across the Islamic world. Interest in left-wing social theories was one result. The growth of political Islam was another.
As ever, the Kabul regime was short of cash, so Cairo’s al-Azhar University sponsored Kabul University’s new faculty of Islamic jurisprudence. Many Afghan students and lecturers travelled to Egypt, Egyptians came to Kabul, and the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood gained wide circulation. The social and political injustices that had inspired al-Banna were, many Afghans felt, evident in their own country too. The works of Maududi and Qutb were widely read. Afghan Islamists also maintained close contact with the Pakistani Jamaat Islami. By 1965, in the year that the Marxists formed the PDPA, Islamists on the Kabul University campus were distributing a leaflet entitled ‘A Tract of Jihad’, clearly influenced by Maududi, and had formed a Muslim Youth Organization, popularly known as the ikhwan, which won the student elections in 1972. The Islamists had learned lessons in organization from the radical Leninist left. The organization of groups was very similar: a secretary general, in the case of the left-wing groups, an ’emir’ for the Islamists, a central committee for the Marxists or a
shura
(a consultative council) for their opponents.
The leader of the Afghan Islamists was Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik who was a junior professor at the University’s faculty of Shariat.
Rabbani had a close relationship with senior Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood figures, had studied at al-Azhar during the 1950s and had been one of the first Afghans to translate Qutb into Dari, the dialect spoken in Kabul and by many of Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun minorities.
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Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf, also a Kabul University lecturer, and a Pashtun from Paghman province, was elected his deputy. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a young Pashtun civil engineering graduate who had turned to radical Islam after flirting with revolutionary Marxism, was placed in charge of political activities, though he could not take up his post at the time because he was in prison for ordering the killing of a Maoist student.
The background of the Kabul Islamists is revealing. They were all from the provinces. Not one was a Kabuli.
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Most were from relatively wealthy backgrounds (otherwise they would have been unable to complete their education) and they included virtually no representatives of the traditional Afghan ulema. They were almost all university educated, mainly in technical faculties. Comparison with leaders in Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria and Iran shows how typical they were of Islamists elsewhere. Such men were also to provide the bulk of the twenty or thirty senior activists who joined bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1996, further evidencing the essentially political roots, and aims, of the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’, and who would continue to provide a significant proportion of high-level militants in the post-2001 phase of Islamic militancy. The common features in the background of many of the more senior activists is striking.
In 1973, Sardar Daoud Khan, the king’s cousin and a former prime minister, led a military coup and established a pro-Soviet government with the help of the PDPA. One of his first acts was to move against the Islamists. Several, including Sayyaf, were jailed. Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud, a Tajik engineering student from the Panjshir valley, fled to Pakistan where Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, irritated by the Afghan government’s attempts to foment trouble among Pashtuns in Pakistan, gave them a refuge in Peshawar, where they were cared for by a young Pakistani Pashtun Islamist called Hussein Ahmed, a former geography lecturer at Peshawar’s Islamia University and the future leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat Islami party.
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Bhutto’s adviser on Afghan Affairs was General Naseerullah Babar, a Pashtun himself, who gave the ISI the role of watching over the new arrivals. Hekmatyar was appointed the ‘contact’ in Pakistan for any Afghan Islamists, boosting his prestige immeasurably.
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Rabbani received donations from private donors in Saudi Arabia, and in 1975, with Pakistani help and training, the Afghan Islamists organized a rebellion from exile. They had hoped they would be the vanguard that would spark an Islamist movement across the country. Massoud, the best military mind among them, was heavily influenced by Mao. He hoped that, by seizing islands of territory, which could be Islamicized, the rebels would inspire, radicalize and mobilize the whole population. Such tactics were to become standard for domestic Islamic radical groups across the Islamic world over the coming decades and would heavily inform bin Laden’s later strategic decisions. In 1975, the Afghan Islamists’ rebellion, despite Islamabad’s assistance, failed utterly to garner any sympathy at all and did nothing but reveal the complete lack of support for modern political Islam in the rural areas.
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Despite this setback, however, the process that would eventually lead to the weak and marginalized Afghan Islamists running their country had begun.
So how did Hekmatyar, Rabbani, Massoud (who, despite his moderate reputation in the West, remained broadly committed to political Islam all his life) and the other Afghan Islamists manage to gain primacy in the mujahideen resistance movement? The traditional structure of Afghan society, and the continuing weakness of its state, led communities, whether refugees, villagers or mujahideen groups, to turn to those who were most likely to be able to provide resources. The ideological sympathy and mutual political reliance of General Zia and Pakistani Islamists meant that the ISI directed by far the greatest proportion of funds towards those who shared their politics and beliefs. The greatest beneficiary was Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami group.
Zia and his close advisers were acting on two main impulses: the desire to see a compliant and pro-Pakistan group win the war and take power in Kabul; and a genuine ideological and personal sympathy built up over several years between the Pakistani Islamists, especially Jamaat Islami, and their Afghan counterparts. The question of cross-border
Pashtun nationalism, a legacy of colonial days, also played its part. Islamabad never recognized Pashtun nationalist parties, or allowed King Zahir Shah, the only figure recognizable to all Afghans, to contact the resistance in Pakistan. An ethnic element also came into play. The Pakistanis favoured the Pashtuns, but only from the Ghilzai branch of the Pashtun tribes. Not one leader of a recognized resistance party was from the broadly pro-royalist Durrani Pashtun tribes who had held power for centuries and had historically entertained ambitions to enlarge their dominions towards the Indus.
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Nobody, Pakistanis, Gulf Arabs or Americans, was particularly interested in the ‘moderate’ parties, which were far more pro-Western and had little sympathy for the hardline political Islamists’ project. Four of the seven mujahideen groups allowed to operate by Pakistan were hardline Islamist, while the other three could be characterized as moderate Islamists or Islamist/traditionalist.
Hizb-e-Islami, the most radical of the groups in Peshawar in 1979, was, with its better organization, state sanction and larger resources, best placed to exploit the new and swiftly changing circumstances of 1979–80.
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In Pakistan, the three million Afghans who poured into the new refugee camps along the country’s northwest frontier effectively provided the urban masses that Afghanistan had previously lacked.
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Stripped of their traditional leadership and their tribal identities and thrown together in the crowded shanty towns of the camps, the refugees provided the political Islamists with a constituency for the first time. They were far more receptive to the messages of Rabbani, Massoud and particularly Hekmatyar than the pre-war rural populace had been. Zia gave Hekmatyar’s cadres privileged access to camps. They made many recruits.
The other Islamist resistance groups, Rabbani’s Jamaat Islami and the Hizb-e-Islami faction led by Maulvi Younis Khalis, represented differing strains within Afghan political Islam. Khalis, an alim himself, brought together more radical elements among the ulema of the tribes of his native Paktia province and in Nangahar. There, Jalaluddin Haqqani, another alim, established himself as a highly competent military commander. Rabbani, a Persian-speaking Tajik, largely drew non-Pashtun Islamists to his banner. Though his military commander
in the field, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was by far the most effective opponent of the Soviets, his Jamaat Islami group received far less aid than Hekmatyar’s faction.
It is important to remember that, as stressed earlier, much of the aid came from the Gulf, not Washington. The Saudi government matched the Americans dollar for dollar, and private donors from throughout the Middle East, like those solicited by bin Laden, also sent very considerable sums. Those leaders close to Riyadh received Saudi passports. Most were frequent visitors to the kingdom. The Saudis were not alone in their support. Sheikhs, emirs, princes and devout businessmen throughout the Gulf made huge donations, developing a complex network of personal associations and channels for funding, often through specially created charities, that were to be of critical importance during the 1990s.
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Just how important the Gulf funds were is shown by the success of Sayyaf, the Arabic-speaking Afghan Wahhabi. In 1981, two years after escaping to Pakistan, his Ittehad-e-Islami faction was recognized by the ISI. He had managed, purely through his access to Saudi cash and support from the Saudi religious establishment, to build up a mujahideen group from nothing. The American political scientist and Afghan expert Barnett Rubin describes Sayyaf’s group as having ‘virtually no social networks in Afghanistan… [His fighters] were a heterogeneous group of individuals who affiliated themselves… because of the money and arms he could supply’.
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