Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (56 page)

One of the most concrete effects can be seen in the later journeys of the non-Afghans who personally participated in the war against the Soviets. Garlanded by
their participation in the glamorous Afghan jihad, the Afghan Arabs and their fellow Islamist internationalists personally embodied the message of armed resistance to the infidels and the apostates. Not for nothing would Afghanistan in the 1980s come to be known as the “University of Jihad.”

Inevitably, however, Azzam’s very success as a leader and religious thinker inspired competition. Another Arab who made the pilgrimage to Peshawar was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who arrived in Pakistan in 1985. Trained as a doctor and a religious scholar, he was an alumnus of the Muslim Brotherhood who had been imprisoned after the killing of Anwar Sadat in 1981. Though professing eagerness to help the Afghans in their jihad against the Soviets, he spent much of his time in Pakistan on Egyptian affairs. He soon became the leader of a new group of Egyptian radicals that dubbed itself the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Azzam was soon complaining to his associates that the Egyptians were gaining influence over his protégé Bin Laden, who was already becoming a lodestar of the jihadi movement.
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There is much speculation, indeed, that Zawahiri and his confederates orchestrated the killing of Azzam as part of a plot to take over control of his organization.

But the nascent al-Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad were not the only ones bent on extending the Afghan war to the rest of the world. Another group of Egyptian radicals, mercilessly persecuted by the government at home, set up operations in Peshawar and in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad in the mid-1980s. This was al-Gamaa al-Islamia, the Islamic Group, which had engineered the assassination of Sadat. One of the group’s most prominent figures in its exile was Mohammed Shawki Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s killer. Its religious leader was Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the “blind sheikh,” who had also studied under Azzam and ultimately played a key role in the MAK after Azzam’s death. He established close relations with Bin Laden and Hekmatyar. In 1990 Abdel-Rahmen traveled to the United States, where his preaching inspired a group of young Muslim radicals to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.
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Later in the 1990s, al-Gamaa al-Islamia launched a series of assassinations and terrorist attacks across Egypt that culminated in the Luxor attack of 1997, in which the group’s operatives massacred 62 people (mostly foreign tourists).

After Azzam’s death, Bin Laden and Zawahiri—the latter often characterized, with some justification, as the “brains” of al-Qaeda—presided over a remarkable expansion of global jihadist aspirations. Afghanistan-trained holy warriors dispersed to the four winds. They fought in Bosnia and Chechnya and lent support to the Islamist regime in the Sudan (where members of the Islamist camp had first joined
the cabinet back in 1979). Muslim Filipinos returned home from the training camps in Afghanistan to found a revolutionary jihadi organization of their own, which they called Abu Sayyaf.

In Indonesia a veteran of the Afghan jihad named Jaffar Umar Thalib founded Laskar Jihad, a terror group that aimed to form an Islamic state in a far-flung corner of that sprawling country.
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Another Indonesian by the name of Riduan Isamuddin arrived in Afghanistan in 1988, where he also sought close ties to Bin Laden. Under the nom de guerre of Hambali, he later gained notoriety for his work as the operations chief of the Jemaah Islamiah, Indonesia’s most prominent militant Islamist organization. Aspiring to create a caliphate unifying the Muslim populations of Southeast Asia, he orchestrated a series of terrorist attacks that included the notorious Bali nightclub bombing of 2002, which took the lives of 202 people. Veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan also played an incendiary role in the brutal Algerian civil war that scourged that country in the 1990s, after the secular government annulled the results of an election won by Islamists. As many as 200,000 Algerians died in the fighting, which dragged on for years.

In Central Asia, still other alumni of the “University of Jihad” joined forces with the Islamists in the former Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, fighting on their side against ex-Communist secularists in another bloody civil war that tore that country apart in the 1990s. One of the men who participated on the Islamist side in that conflict went by the nom du guerre of Juma Namangani. Born in the Soviet Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, he had fought in an elite paratrooper unit on Moscow’s side during the war in Afghanistan. The experience had radicalized him, transforming him into a zealous holy warrior. He was among the founders of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, arguably the first transnational Islamist guerrilla group to emerge from the former USSR. His soldiers fought on al-Qaeda’s side in post-9/11 Afghanistan. In this way, too, Moscow’s 1979 intervention in Afghanistan unleashed surprising demons.

T
he mujahideen victory in 1989, when the last of the Kremlin’s troops finally vacated Afghanistan, did not actually end the war. The departure of the occupiers was followed by a surprisingly long struggle against Moscow’s last client leader in Kabul, the wily Mohammed Najibullah. Through a combination of shrewd maneuvering and cynical pandering to religious sentiment, he managed to keep his government alive longer than just about anyone had predicted—all the way up to 1992, thus outlasting even the USSR itself. He achieved this partly by playing on the
divisions among the various Peshawar-based resistance groups, a rancorous bunch even at the best of times. But not even Najibullah could keep this up indefinitely.

It soon proved that the mujahideen were far more effective at fighting a guerrilla war against a vastly superior enemy than they were at governing their own country. Their failure had much to do with the immense destruction visited on the country by the Communist governments in Kabul and the Soviet invaders. But it was also a result of the determined attack on traditional society and its elites orchestrated by the Islamists, who undermined existing institutions wherever they had the opportunity. US historian Barnett Rubin writes that, for the first time in Afghan history, political parties succeeded in penetrating into even the most remote corners of society.
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Despite the allegedly universalist creeds they professed, these parties all too often turned out to be vehicles for the personal ambitions of their leaders, so they had little of value to offer when it came to filling the power vacuum they had helped to create.

No sooner had the holy warriors entered Kabul than their squabbling segued into open warfare. The old vendetta between Ahmed Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the two pioneers of the Islamist insurgency of 1979, occupied a central role in this drama. Massoud had spent the war years fending off Soviet attacks and patiently building up his alternate government in the Panjshir Valley. Hekmatyar, who did not receive as much as he had hoped for from the power-sharing arrangement agreed upon by the seven mujahideen parties, had spent years hoarding his weaponry. Now he unleashed it on his rivals within the resistance. During the years of Soviet occupation and the Najibullah regime, Afghanistan had retained at least had some semblance of centralized government. But now that broke down completely, condemning the country to a vicious internecine conflict that continued, at various levels of intensity, right up to the US intervention in the fall of 2001.

From this environment emerged the fundamentalist group that promoted its own brand of post-1979 Afghan Islamism: the Taliban. Actively supported by the Pakistani military and intelligence services (just like Hekmatyar and Massoud in the 1970s), the Taliban exploited the squabbling among the various established ji-hadi groups to startling effect. Within a relatively short time, the Taliban had established itself as the dominant power in the land, imposing its own sere brand of “Islamic justice” on a citizenry exhausted by years of war. His followers declared Taliban leader Mullah Omar to be the “Amir al-Momineen,” the commander of the faithful. He was also hailed as such by Osama bin Laden, who had returned from a sojourn in Islamist-controlled Sudan to seek a safe haven for al-Qaeda. It was, of course, from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan that Bin Laden launched the terror
operation that led to the horrors of 9/11 and the consequences that derived from it. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who at first opposed the Taliban, returned to Afghanistan from Iranian exile after 9/11 and allied himself with Bin Laden. But it was, more than anyone, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Panjshir Valley insurgency, who showed what could be achieved by a charismatic Sunni warlord who was capable of combining the thinking of revolutionary Islam and the art of insurgency. Of all the jihadis, it was above all Massoud who achieved the greatest successes on the battlefield—despite the relatively modest logistical support that he received from the Pakistanis and their paymasters in the West. It was Massoud who perfected the use of sophisticated intelligence work, raids at enemy weak points, and exploitation of the possibilities of modern media as tools in the religious war against a superpower. Troughout the struggle, his movement remained relatively moderate in its aims and never succumbed to the vision of the West as inherently inimical to the Prophet’s cause. The new generation of Islamic radicals, above all Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, could not tolerate such a rival. Yet they never quite succeeded in subduing him by military means. And so it was that Bin Laden resolved to have Massoud assassinated, an effort that finally bore fruit two days before the attacks of September 11. The apprentice had supplanted his master, and the twenty-first century is still living with the consequences.

I
n October 1980 members of the British Conservative Party gathered in the sea-side town of Brighton for the annual Conservative Party conference. Margaret Thatcher’s government had completed its first seventeen months in office, and the results so far were catastrophic. In the first year of her term, the inflation rate had doubled. Unemployment had soared to 2 million, a level last seen during the Great Depression.
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Manufacturing output ultimately dropped by 16 percent over the course of the year 1980.
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The moderates who still dominated her cabinet—the “wets”—had become increasingly overt in their denunciation of what they described as the “dogmas” of monetarist theory. There was, in short, little evidence of the economic revival that the prime minister had promised. The conference delegates were spooked.

The reasons for this seemed clear enough to everyone. Thatcher’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, had pursued a harsh new counterinflationary course that depended on restricting the money supply, keeping interest rates high, and cutting public expenditures. The Keynesian ideas that had governed economic thinking in Britain throughout the postwar period had operated under the assumption that the most desirable policy goal was full employment. You could achieve it, Keynes had suggested, through judicious “demand management,” various measures to stimulate consumption through fiscal and monetary policy. Thatcher and Howe threw this notion out the window. They were prepared to tolerate a certain degree
of pain as the price of wringing inflation out of the economy. But not even they had quite planned for this.

Resistance from the miners’ unions had pressured Ted Heath into the so-called “U-turn” of 1972, when he backed away from the free-market principles enshrined in the party’s 1970 election manifesto. It was that reversal that later spurred Keith Joseph into his quixotic campaign for a market-oriented conservatism two years later. For Thatcher, who was serving in Heath’s cabinet at the time, the U-turn was nothing less than an act of moral weakness, a shameful capitulation. Heath had caved, betraying the collective interests of the nation to the vocal demands of a radical minority. Now she wanted to show that she was made of sterner stuff, and she chose Brighton to do it.

The trade unions were there, too, and their activists were demonstrating loudly outside the hall. But Thatcher—a politician who always seemed to draw energy from the protestations of her opponents—was unperturbed. “No policy which puts at risk the defeat of inflation—however great its short-term attraction—can be right,” she told the delegates.
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She knew that many members of her own party were not entirely convinced. But she was happy to disabuse the weak-kneed: “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” The reference behind the line was somewhat obscure: her speechwriter, Ronnie Millar, was playing off the title of a 1940s play.
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But you didn’t have to spot the allusion to get the message. She was showing that she was determined to proceed with the course she had set no matter what the potential political cost—a hugely significant psychological watershed. It was aimed not only at the British public as a whole, but also at those within her own party who still clung to the hope that the old postwar consensus could be maintained. This was the moment, British journalist Simon Jenkins observed, when Thatcher forged her political brand as the woman who knew what medicine the nation needed and wasn’t afraid to administer it whatever the pain. She had many more battles to fight in the years ahead, but the 1980 conference marked the point when she conclusively shook off the legacy of Heath and emerged as the prime minister who would dominate British political life for decades to come.
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From now on, Britons would either love her or hate her, but there was no mistaking what she stood for.

She used the next few months to drive home the point. In January 1981, she began to purge her cabinet of the dissenters. The minister of state for the arts, Norman St. John Stevas, who had ascribed to himself the role of unofficial court jester—breezily referring to the prime minister as the “leaderene,” for example—was summarily fired. (Thatcher said that he had “turned indiscretion into a political
principle.”)
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Perhaps most important, economist Alan Walters, who played a critical role in the economic debates that were yet to come, received an appointment as her personal economic adviser.