Free Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl Page B

Quran and study the books of Marx and Lenin instead and had instructed children in school to spy on their parents. Communist officials openly drank, smoked hashish, and paid for the services of prostitutes. And, as with the Ningalam arrests, they insulted tribal leaders, figures held in high esteem by local clans. The Communists said that women were equal to men and that all the received institutions of marriage, like the bride price, would be eliminated—perhaps even marriage itself. 5
    The arrest of the two elders, and the government retaliation that ensued, provided the spark. Locals gathered up their weapons and attacked the town, driving out the government troops. But they were able to hold it for only a few days before they were forced to withdraw. For months the rebellion remained fragmented and diffuse. That changed in January 1979, when one of the local tribal notables, a man named Samiullah Safi, returned home to the valley from a long sojourn in Kabul. He had served for a while as a deputy in parliament, where he had opposed Daoud’sincreasingly authoritarian reform program. After the April coup, Hafizullah Amin, apparently seeing him as a potentially weighty ally in a notoriously fractious part of the country, had even tried to bring him over to the side of the Khalq. But now, disgusted by the government’s apparent contempt for Islam, Safi was returning home to take up the flag of revolt.
    A few days after his return, he brought together a group of local leaders—who represented both his own Safi tribe (who were ethnically Pashtun) as well as the neighboring Nuristani people (who belonged to their own distinct ethnicity)—for a traditional conference. They agreed on the need to rise up against the government and organized an attack on a nearby district headquarters. It was the signal for a broad revolt that quickly seized the entire region. The lashkar , or tribal army, that materialized soon numbered, by their own estimates, fifteen to twenty thousand people. 6 The leaders of the rebellion formed assemblies, or jirgas , representing the areas liberated from the control of the Communist government. The assemblies, protected by small detachments of armed men, moved down the valley, contacting villages still under ostensible government control, to persuade them to join the revolt. Sometimes the emissaries were fired upon by government troops, but more often than not the locals quickly declared their willingness to resist the government. The rebels were willing to accept the risks of this approach because they knew that maintaining tribal unity was paramount. Otherwise the government would play on long-established tribal feuds to divide the opposition.
    One of the men who fought with the Nuristanis, starting in late 1978, was not a member of any of the local tribes. He was an ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, a place—though not that distant geographically—that was culturally and linguistically remote to the people of Nuristan. His name was Ahmed Shah Massoud, and he stood for an entirely new kind of Afghan jihad. The son of a high-ranking military officer, he was a gifted student with a good mind for math. He had received an elite education at the French high school in Kabul before going on to study engineering at the Kabul Polytechnic Institute. An obsessive consumer of literature and a natural leader—the kind of kid who ordered his friends around during their games—he had dreamed of embarking on a military career.
    But then, as so often happens, his life was derailed by politics. Massoud, a man with a strong religious upbringing, soon found himself joining like-minded classmates in their fights against left-wing student groups. The contempt the two camps felt for each other spilled over into full-scale battles on the campus of Kabul University, just around the corner from Massoud’s institute, throughout the early 1970s.
    Massoud was soon radicalized by the rivalry. He often walked over to the