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Too many puppets, too many strings
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Since the man whom I call the Reliable Source was promised that he would not be identified in any way, I will abstain from any description of him or his surroundings. He was hospitable, as everyone was, and gave the Young Man a Sprite. — The difficulties across the border had begun, he said, in 1973. —Yes, it would have been in 1973 that the Soviet Union became especially interested; so the Young Man supposed. That was when Daoud overthrew the monarchy in Afghanistan.† And when the Soviet Union got interested, then Pakistan had better get interested, too. — The Young Man switched on the recorder. “So you started studying the problem in 1973? ” he asked.
“Yes, ” said the Reliable Source, “in ’73 our government began to see changes on the horizon — not only in Afghanistan itself but in the entire region. You know, the Chinese leadership was aging, and so they would be going out inside some period of time. One had to allow for that.” —He was ticking off the falling colossi on his fingers. — “Then the Russian leadership was aging. No one could figure out with certainty who would follow in their shoes.” —Another finger fell. — “Much closer at home, we saw the Shah of Iran. Now, we knew that he would possibly have to go under to a popular movement at some point in time. There was no organized and organic system which could take over and run the government after him, because there were only court ministers and such.” —Another finger. — “Then, closer at home, we saw Afghanistan. With Zaher Shah ousted, we began to have real nightmares — in this sense: that as long as Daoud remained, there was some stability in the country, but once Daoud went out, then unknown people would start emerging. And that is what set us upon a certain plan of action — because we had our own national compulsions, Young Man! — In addition to that, Afghan people had never been friendly to us since ’47.‡ They had also conducted certain activity in this province, and in Punjab, and these areas.”
“That was because of Pushtunistan? ”§ the Young Man said.
“Well, that was the racket, ” laughed the Reliable Source, “but I mean it must have been the other superpower interests who brought it about. Naturally there were proxies who were playing that game, but whether it was at the behest of the Indians, or the Russians, or their own …” —He shrugged. To the Young Man he seemed rather lonely. — “But right from the time we joined the United Nations they had opposed our entry, the Afghans. That was the only country that opposed our entrance. — But then we developed a relationship. The government of Afghanistan and of Pakistan both knew that if tomorrow, in case one of us or the other of us went out …” —The Reliable Source had a trick of not finishing his sentences. Partly, no doubt, that was because English was not his main language, although he spoke it almost fluently; partly it must have been because now everything about the Afghanistan situation seemed so conditional, vanished, wistful. In case one of us or the other of us went out … — And now, of course, they had both gone out. — “Daoud in 1976 when he came here, ” said the Reliable Source, “he told Mr. Bhutto, he said, ‘If from the north, it is us today; tomorrow it is you. If from the south’ (that is, India), ‘today it is you; it is us tomorrow.’ So they could see the realities. But they had to play a certain chess game that was going on” (and in his mind’s ear the Young Man could hear Daoud calling yet again for a plebiscite in the
North-West Frontier Province; he could hear the yells and rifle shots of Afridi tribesmen on horseback, come across the border to found the sovereign state of Pushtunistan no matter what the Pakistanis might say; he could hear the border closing, slamming like a door so that the nomads could no longer cross the Durand Line‖ for their summer grazing in the snowy grassy mountains as they had done for hundreds or thousands of years) —“but the Afghans never were against our genuine interest, ” said the Reliable Source, “in the sense that they never interfered in our communication or our …” —Again his voice trailed off. — “In the ’65 warb and in the ’71 war, a if they did not lend us support, at least they did not add to our strains. But then when Zaher Shah went out, we thought that henceforth that would be lacking! The royalty gave a continued stability to the system in Afghanistan: today Zaher Shah, tomorrow it will be his son or someone else; and there was continuity of government in Afghanistan; it remained a stable area. Now, with Daoud’s ouster of Zaher Shah, we knew that an element of uncertainty had come into being. And it had to be looked after.
“In addition, as I have said, there were the little bomb blasts and pinpricks in this area. Now, at the same point in time these groups — and they remained as such, as one group, until the fifth of July 1977 …” —The Reliable Source was getting something just right in his head. — “Well, first of all came a gentleman by the name of Habib Raman. He was then later captured by the Afghans in ’75; he was”—the Reliable Source drummed his fingers—“brutally tortured and finally killed in Kabul Jail. Then, of course, Gulbuddin and those people. Rabbani was brought in later, as he was actually kept in the background because he would not disclose his identity. We kept asking them for some time whether they had a leadership which would meet the situation in Afghanistan, and they kept insisting that they had a man but they would not disclose him. But later on in ’74 they brought him, and they said, ‘This is Rabbani, and he is our genuine leader.’
“Now, these people had come away — one, against the oppression of Daoud; the other factor was that we wanted to bring home to Daoud’s government that two can play that same game with bomb blasts here and things, playing this game across the border. You see, that is what we did in 1975 in Panjsher, c and we brought home one lesson to Daoud with regard to ending the Pushtunistan problem and getting recognition of the Durand Line and so forth. So that was one of the objectives.”
“So Gulbuddin and Rabbani and so forth helped with these bomb blasts? ” said the Young Man, trying to conceal his dismay. Somehow he had thought that they were freedom fighters.
“No, they organized, let us say, an uprising; it was not just bomb blasts; it was a national uprising against the Daoud regime in the Panjsher Valley.”
“Now, what did they want? Did they want Zaher Shah back? ”
“They did, yes, because at that time they were all agreed on that, and so was our government — because we thought, you see, that any revolution which came about in Afghanistan at this point in time would not be in the people’s interest, in the sense that politically and socially they were not mature enough to take on the responsibilities of a revolution, be it leftist or rightist. So we thought, ” said the Reliable Source, “that they required more time. And that time could only be forthcoming if Zaher Shah was brought back, and he had given them a few more years for education to start coming up. Now, these groups had also come up, because of the social awakening, like the Parcham and Khalq, d and these elements like the Mujahideen were already here, too. But they needed time.”
Clearly the Reliable Source enjoyed the role of mentor. The Young Man felt like a little boy who should have been in bed, being allowed just this once to stay up, raising himself on tiptoe so that he could see where the balls went on the international pool table — and when the Reliable Source had been a man of consequence, in the days before Bhutto’s fall, he had let the Afghans stay up late, too, and taught them tricks. He told the Young Man how it had been decided, for instance, to extend the franchise in the tribal areas to include all adult males; formerly only the tribal elders had had it. — “So if you make things better for people this side of the Durand Line, ” he said, “then the Afghans start looking toward Pakistan. So we wanted the elements which were lying on our borders to be looking toward us, to look up to us for change. Most of the tribes are so divided that half the elements are on the other side of the Durand Line, cis- and trans -Durand Line; they have ethnic commonality …”
The Young Man wanted to word his question tactfully. — “How did Gulbuddin, Rabbani and so forth feel about the fact that the, uh, main impetus for these changes was coming from Pakistan? ”
“They agreed with us, ” said the Reliable Source blandly, “for they were also, at that time, not quite so militant. They knew that our policy of evolution vis-à -vis the tribal areas had succeeded, and that the Afghans were also looking for these same social reforms. As I said, they were not revolutionaries at that stage. But they wanted a change of two things. One was against the tyranny of Daoud, and the second one was of course what they could see coming in ideologically from across the borders.”
“THE TYRANNY OF DAOUD” (1959)
“One of the more important events in modern Afghan history occurred in 1959, ” writes the historian Louis Dupree. “With no prior public announcement or official proclamation, Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Mohammad Naim, e other members of the royal family, the cabinet, and high-ranking army officers appeared on the reviewing stand with their wives and daughters on the second day of Jeshn [Independence Week]… The women had exposed their faces for all to see. Just thirty years before, the government of King Amanullah fell because (among other reform attempts) he abolished purdah and the chadri and established coeducational schools in Kabul.
“… the large crowd of spectators stared in stunned disbelief.
“… the inevitable happened. A delegation of religious leaders requested and received an audience with the Prime Minister.
The mullahs accused him of being anti-Islamic for permitting atheistic Communist and Christian Westerners to pervert the nation … Immediately after leaving the Prime Minister’s office the religious leaders began to preach against the regime. Sardar Daoud’s efficient secret police arrested and jailed about fifty of the ringleaders … Government spokesmen informed the imprisoned religious leaders that removal of the veil was voluntary, which was only partly true, for the government did force officials to attend public functions with unveiled wives in order to set examples for the masses … The weight of this logic (plus the fact that Afghan prisons are designed to punish, not rehabilitate) convinced the mullahs of the error of their ways, so the Prime Minister ordered their release after about a week of incarceration. Not all religious leaders accepted the voluntary abolition of the veil and other reforms, however, because each intrusion into their customary power erodes their secular influence.”f
EVOLUTION OF THE MUJAHIDEEN (1959–79)
In his pamphlet What Type of Struggle? (whose cover bears as its device a shining Qur’an nested between swords and wreaths), Professor B. Rabbani, the head of Jamiat-i-Islami Afghanistan, writes the following (September 1981): “… manners and behaviours should be selected very carefully. For instance; where preaching can be a mean [sic] for invitation (to the Way of Allah), implication of arms is not concordant with the wisdom of Islamic teaching. On the other hand, if expression and persuasion is not able to penetrate through the closed doors of contumacy and deviation or arguments and reasonings do not influence proudness, and if invitation is faced with inimical resistance of vanity, then non-implication of weapons (conduct of armed struggle) is idiocy and ignorance.”g
IDIOCY AND IGNORANCE (1987)
Oh, how nice it would have been if the Mujahideen had appeared spontaneously following the Russian invasion! It would still have been almost perfect if they had come into being after Taraki’s coup in 1978, because THAT was probably bad, too, but if Rabbani and Gulbuddin and the rest of them had begun as creatures of the Pakistanis, then they were bandits, as the Soviets called them; they were terrorists. — It was very difficult for me to accept the tainted origins of necessity.
“IT WAS NOT JUST BOMB BLASTS; IT WAS A NATIONAL UPRISING! ” (1975)
The National Uprising that the Reliable Source was paying homage to occurred in July of 1975. It was called the Panjsher Insurgency. Everyone agrees that the rebels were led by the mullahs. And who trained them? Pakistan, of course, denied that it had had anything to do with it. The Afghan population failed to join, and the government helicopters came quickly, shooting the rebels down; they captured ninety-three and found all but sixteen guilty, and then Daoud went on with his business.
THE RIGHT OF IT (1987)
But does what some of the groups were matter now? Was the Young Man right to feel that the Afghan Resistance was tainted by its origins? — I think not — not at present. I think that the effects of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan have been appallingly evil. Resistance is justified no matter where it comes from. Then, too, if we do accept the Reliable Source’s account, can we say that Daoud was right in his efforts to modernize the country? That (thank God for small favors) is a matter now so laughably academic…
THE GAME (1878–1982)
Comparing politics to a chess game, as the Reliable Source loved to do, is, of course, trite in our own mass society, where we expect our politicians to play, and if necessary cheat, for our well-being, while the newspapers glowingly explain the moves for us — for the comparison is trite precisely because it is so valid. The Reliable Source’s use of the phrase was equally justified. — It was the British who first began to speak of the “Great Game” between their empire and Russia’s; and Afghanistan was at the center of the board.h Every new development was less a willed decision than an inevitable crystallization, for the Game was so Great as to be playing the players rather than the reverse. — “In the natural process of civilized and civilizing Powers which I have already dwelt upon, ” wrote Lord Lytton on September 4, 1878 (they were invading
Afghanistan again that year), “wherever we leave a vacuum, Russia will assuredly fill it up.” In the last few years before the Soviets gave Afghanistan their Christmas present, as the Reliable Source saw his anxieties congeal and solidify into real monsters, the Game continued, subject to the same pressures of cosmic law: Each of the players made his move because the dynamic equilibrium of the Game forced him to; he was only trying to hold his own, you see. More years fell by the wayside; we spoke of the requirements of Containment when we fought Soviet bogeys in Central America; while they explained that progression from one social arrangement to another occurs only on a one-way escalator, so that feudalism in Afghanistan MUST give way to socialism as a result of Economic Laws, and all the U.S.S.R. was doing was protecting and implementing and developing. Both players advised their pawns to relax and continue down the slaughter chute. — “ Under the banner of the great April Revolution, i forward along the path toward full unity of all the national and progressive forces, toward the final victory of the national democratic, anti-feudal, anti-imperialist revolution, for the creation of a new proud, free and independent Afghanistan! ” screamed Babrak Karmal after being airlifted into office. (Naturally, it is not in my interest to quote a U.S. counter-example; for if I were so principled as to insist that we help the Afghans for their own sake, not because they are anti-Soviet, whom would I have left to advance their cause with me?) — History shows that the Game has always gone on, no matter who the players are; so if the world must indeed be run in this rotten way we should not blame the Reliable Source, but honor him for his honesty. How ludicrous, how foully ludicrous, when a player pretends not to be playing (though that is part of the Game, too), as when, for instance, the Soviets insist that they uphold the quaint ethnic strictures of backward countries: In the Moscow News Weekly No. 24 (June 21–28, 1981), a column entitled “The Home Hearth: From Our Correspondent in Kabul” has the Elder of the Pashtun Tribe say, “The U.S.S.R.’s military help to Afghanistan is in full accord with the code of honor of the Pashtun tribe, the Pashtunwali. It says that if an enemy has attacked your country you can appeal to your neighbors to help oppose the enemy.” —As the Persian proverb runs, “If the king says at noonday, ‘It is night, ’ the wise man says, ‘Behold the stars.’ ”
STATEMENT OF THE RELIABLE SOURCE (continued) (1982)
“Did the Mujahideen groups accept and trust you and President Bhutto? ” asked the Young Man.
“They basically trusted us. And that is why they remained with us from when they first came, in October 1973.j I would say that there were various periods when we were more or less happy or unhappy with each other in the sense that from October ’73 until about November ’74 they were very happy with us because I was here, and I was looking after them.” —The Reliable Source sighed. — “Then, fortunately or unfortunately, my successor who came, he thought he was a soldier, and should not dabble in this political business. So he then deprived us … He, let us say, went slow on it. It was a question of policy. It was not a question of personality. The result was that there was a little relaxation in the manner of support.”
“It must have been a very tricky job for you, ” the Young Man said.
“Why? ”
“Well, you must have been worried about Mr. Daoud.”
“No, at that time they were playing their games with us. So the fact is, when one side is trying to play a game according to its own rules, then you also set your own set of rules. We lost Habib Raman, but we brought a very major change to Daoud’s mind. He was compelled to come and talk with us.k He was compelled also to understand the nature of those changes, and that is why he requested us, in 1977, ‘Please postpone your election on the elder tribal franchise basis, in the tribal area, for one year.’ He said, ‘You give me some time, so I can bring about a certain amount of reform, so that otherwise, they would rebel against me.’ Because you could see people feeling the change over here.”
How desperate was Daoud by the time he talked with Bhutto and the Reliable Source? Did he have any suspicion of what his end, what his country’s end, was going to be? And did the Reliable Source feel less enmity toward him during that meeting, simply by virtue of his precarious position? For however much he disliked Daoud, I imagine that he cared for Taraki somewhat less.
“Now what was the reaction in Afghanistan and in those political groups when Bhutto was replaced by General Zia? ” asked the Young Man.
“You see, that is when the split amongst the group came. At the time when they were looked after, they were undoubtedly controlled in a certain manner, in the sense that they remained in one group.”
“What form did that control take? ”
“By— understanding, ” said the Reliable Source. “They understood and we understood that we and they had a common program, with the result that we were supporting them to the extent that they required. And they understood, too, that we were using each man according to his ability. Now, this fellow Gulbuddin, he is a militant; Khalis is militant; Nabil … they are all militant. Rabbani, on the other hand, he is one who would like to carry it out through a program of education. He was a preacher in Scandinavian countries. He came to us toward the end of ’76.† So we told him that he was doing an adequate job in Scandinavia, and he should continue over there; no need for him at the moment, because all the other groups were here, and they were united … But they were all agreed on wanting Zaher Shah back. That is why their representatives went and met with him at end of ’76, early ’77, and he agreed to come and lead them, because they also needed a central leadership.”
“So why isn’t Zaher Shah here coordinating things now? ”
“Ah, that is because General Zia got cold feet, I suppose.”
“You think all the major factions still want Zaher Shah? ”
“Not today. You see, Khomeini had come by then, and that was one reason; and secondly I told you that after July ’77m they became a rabble; they became a disorganized group for lack of support. Everyone started looking around. Someone went to Kuwait, someone went to Saudi Arabia and so on, because they were not getting the support they wanted or desired within Pakistan.”
“So where are they getting their support now? ” asked the Young Man.
“Now? From the Americans.”
“From the C.I.A.? ”
“Yes.”
“General Zia isn’t—? ”
“That — that is, my own impression is that, because, uh, there are so many things one cannot say directly, ” cried the Reliable Source. “If you turn this tape recorder off, I will tell you …”
The recorder was shut off for ten minutes.n