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

university campus to listen to lectures by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdul Rab RasulSayyaf, two Afghan religious scholars who had had the privilege to study at al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prestigious religious university in the Sunni Islamic world. In Egypt the two men had also imbibed the Islamist ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they subsequently set upon importing to their homeland. It was to that end that Rabbani founded his Jamiat-e Islami, the “Islamic Society,” which set as its goal the establishment of an Islamic state in Afghanistan. The avowed secularist Daoud viewed the group as a natural foe and unleashed his secret police against its leadership.
    In 1975 the Jamiat leaders decided to strike back by launching an uprising against Daoud’s government. 7 Massoud, then age twenty-two, took on the job of fomenting an armed rebellion in the Panjshir Valley, his home district. The disastrous failure of the uprising—which ended in the execution and imprisonment of dozens of its activists—forced him to flee to Pakistan, where some of the movement’s leaders had found refuge. The abortive revolt also triggered a split among Afghanistan’s Islamists. A former Kabul University engineering student, a firebrand named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, denounced Rabbani’s leadership and established his own organization, which he called Hezb-e Islami (“the Party of God”). Massoud stuck with Rabbani and spent his time in Pakistani exile reading Persian classical literature and absorbing the classic works of guerrilla warfare, including Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Régis Debray. 8 He also followed the reports from home of Daoud’s growing repression of the Islamist movement and the electrifying news of the Communist takeover. The stories of the new government’s campaign to crush Islam and implement its ideas by force deepened Massoud’s determination to fight back.
    The revelation that the Nuristanis had revolted against Communist rule galvanized Massoud. He headed there, several colleagues and a French journalist in tow, to fight for several weeks at the side of the rebels. The tight-knit Nuristanis showed how a determined guerrilla force, motivated by faith and exploiting the difficult terrain, could fight back against to drive out government forces. The guerrillas managed to retain a hold over some of the territory they freed from the Communists for months. Massoud watched and learned.
    The Nuristanis were surprised to see him. Afghans had little sense of themselves as citizens of a wider state. When they rebelled, they usually did so as representatives of tribes or villages. But Massoud brought a larger view, one influenced by the gathering agitation in the global Islamic community in the 1970s. As a student of Rabbani and Sayyaf, he knew about the burgeoning Islamist movement in Egypt and other faraway corners of the Muslim world. Islam could no longer be regarded as “merely” a faith, something innately separate from politics. The new Islamists were reminding believers that their religion offered an answer to all oflife’s questions, that it was better at addressing the problems of modern life than Marxism or liberal democracy. Meanwhile, the astonishing success of the revolution in Iran had demonstrated that Muslims united by their faith could defy an oppressive local government even when it enjoyed the direct support of the world’s most powerful country.
    Few in the West were paying much attention. Foreign-policy experts still viewed the world, understandably, through the lens of Cold War conflict. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict, which pitted mostly Soviet allies against the US-sponsored Jewish state, fitted neatly into the template. The Israeli political elite was still dominated by secular Zionists, and their Arab enemies—especially the Palestinians—adhered to this-worldly ideologies of their own. The Palestine Liberation Organization and its off shoots consisted of revolutionary Marxists.