THE RESISTANCE IN AFGHANISTAN
Roy, Olivier
At the start, the uprising of the Afghan population against the Communist regime was a spontaneous movement, centered around the village elders. But very soon and of necessity, the character of...
...They must be typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...What the Ulemas cared about was Moslem law, the Shariat—that is, the management of civilian society...
...And we must distinguish between two main areas: the tribal areas, particularly the southeast with its Pushtu population, and the nontribal areas of the north, with their predominantly Tadzhik population...
...After the Soviet invasion, in many instances they initiated the revolt but were generally not able to set up a political organization...
...These young people, who come out of the mod378 ern lay schools, products of modernism rather than of tradition, are revolutionaries by design...
...It requires a certain kind of organization, a conception of what guerrilla warfare is about, and a political program that will enlist the help of the civilian population...
...These modernist and reformist young Islamists are political people...
...379...
...In addition, the dual control by the political cadres on the one hand and by the Ulemas on the other ensures civil justice under Ulema rule...
...although the tribal people are very religious, their political system rests on tribal custom and not on Moslem law...
...Very soon thereafter, in the days of repression, differences arose between the movement's "radicals"—led by the engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—and the "centrists" guided by the very few Ulemas (religious scholars) who had joined the movement (among them Professor Rabbani, the present leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami party...
...To get a more valid picture, one has to go into the field, which is far away...
...On the other hand, they have placed the civilian population under a political organization, each village with its committee that includes a religious judge, an administrator, and a "political commissar," as well as an auxiliary group, rather poorly armed and responsible for village security and protection against possible attack...
...Its character, however, still varies from one area to another...
...Most of them come out of the provincial petty-bourgeoisie...
...Surely, the Afghanistan war is not a vestige of the Middle Ages...
...WHEN ONE PENETRATES DEEPER into the nontribal areas of Afghanistan the larger part of the country and travels, as this writer did, north of Kabul (to the Pandzhir valley) or west (to Herat), one sees a very different picture: the emerging new resistance cadres...
...There are the right-wing clichés—proud, turbaned warriors—and the left-wing cliches—obscurantist, fanatical peasants—and the two, incidentally, are not so far apart...
...is waging a colonialist war, and this raises many questions, especially for certain people on the left...
...Translated from the French by HELEN KATEL q Re: Letters • Dissent welcomes letters, but we must ask that they be kept within bounds, about 225 words...
...They were recruited in secondary-school and university science departments, whereas the Marxists tended to be liberalarts students...
...In these cadres one finds young intellectuals, not in great numbers but now holding the command posts (within the Jamiat-e-Islami party at any rate...
...The mullahs wield much less influence over them than one might assume...
...In the various areas of Afghanistan, the movement developed in very different ways, depending on geographic conditions, the local ethnic groups, and the various resistance parties...
...ALL THIS SHOWS that the situation is more complex than the caricature usually drawn by the media, for which there are several explanations...
...This rift is still being felt in the resistance...
...But very soon and of necessity, the character of the resistance changed: to fight a machine as formidable as the Soviet army, it's not enough to have weapons and fighters...
...These reforms are more modest but more realistic than those of the Communist regime and at any rate much closer to the peasant's image of social justice...
...it is a present-day war...
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...This flight of the old dignitaries enabled the Islamists and the Ulemas to bring about, within the framework of Moslem law, the minimum set of reforms the peasants expected...
...Afghanistan is not Beirut, where everything can be observed from the terrace of the Intercontinental...
...The young Islamists opposed the Westernization of the Afghan way of life and the increasingly pro-Soviet drifting of President Daoud's regime, as well as the mullahs' traditionalism...
...On the one hand, they have set up a guerrilla army by creating permanent mobile groups trained right in Afghanistan and led by cadres...
...The traditional dignitaries in the north (the elders of the Khan and Malek tribes and landowners) lost all their power and took refuge in Peshawar (which explains why the refugees one meets there are precisely those who are not representative of the resistance, since they have fled...
...The resistance indeed is so pugnacious and so effective precisely because it does not fit the mold that allegedly characterizes it, especially in the north...
...They abolish interest and usury but retain private property, provide for a fixed and precise fiscal system (5-10 percent taxation on the products of the land, plus a tax on capital...
...When it occurred, in 1975, many young Islamists were imprisoned by Daoud and later executed under Taraki...
...They have tried to organize the resistance in two ways...
...As there is generally no (overall) political organization outside the tribal structures, this form of resistance doesn't seem to generate much mobility...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...And it should be noted, once again, that in the tribal areas, especially in the southeast, the situation is slightly different...
...They are university educated, many have a scientific background, and their political activism dates back to the days of the old regime...
...other Islamists were recruited in the government theological schools, while the nongovernment theological seminaries produced a far more traditional clergy...
...And the Afghanistan war is somewhat embarassing to many people, because it forces one to admit that the U.S.S.R...
...Their concept of warfare remains traditional—mass mobilization, harassment of the enemy on roads and military posts...
...For this reason most of the people in the tribal areas have joined the so-called moderate, that is to say lay and traditionalist, parties...
...The others opted for exile and returned only after the peasant uprising for which, since 1980-81, they have supplied the cadres...
...This protects the peasant against arbitrariness—something that is always possible under a military resistance chief...
...The Afghan resistance now is no longer a peasant revolt but rather a movement guided by political cadres...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...It should be added that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iran, the members of the clergy were never large landowners...
...The tasks therefore were divided between them: the young activists attended to the party and warfare, the Ulemas to civilian life...
...In the tribal areas (those determined by tribal life and divisions), the resistance remains very traditionalist...
...As they do not in any way object to modern technology while opposing its underlying ideologies, they very soon became engaged in political activism against the old regime, which climaxed in the failed Pandzhir insurrection of 1975...
...And then, we carry in our heads a series of cliches about the Afghans and Moslems generally...
...The differences among the resistance parties are determined largely by ethnic and social diversity but also by the varying, more substantive political attitudes...
...They became politicized in their student days when they joined the Moslem Youth Organization, strictly a student movement often viewed with distrust by the traditional clergy...
...Since most Afghan refugees, especially in the camps in Pakistan, are of tribal background and Afghanistan's tribal areas are located along the Pakistani border, most superficial Western observers —not to mention those who merely stay in Pakistan for a short while and then proceed to write about the Afghan resistance—view the tribes as its mainstay...
...Through their alliance with the Ulemas, these young Islamists were able to become dominant in the north...
...What the young Islamists cared about was waging the war and politics...
...The Ulemas were scarcely involved in politics before the war but were highly respected by the population...
...The cadres form along tribal lines— Khan and Malek...
Vol. 30 • July 1983 • No. 3
