When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
From “The Young British Soldier” by Rudyard Kipling
The mountainous land of the Afghans has been invaded by some of the greatest conquerors of history. Darius the Great conquered the Valley of Kabul, Alexander the Great crossed the Hindu Kush and Genghis Khan himself rode through with fire and sword. The Parthians, the Arabs, the British and other tribes and nations too numerous to count have bled for valley and mountainside. Alexander the Great described the inhabitants of this far land as lions in warfare and though his mother had brought only one son into the world, each man who made life so hard for his hardened army could be called an Alexander.
Great empires have come from Afghanistan, as well. The Mughals ruled a vast empire from Kabul and Ahmed Shah Durrani,
‘Pearl of the Age’, defeated the Mahrattas of India and held sway over the lands from Kashmir to Kohistan. But Afghanistan has never been a united land in more than name. The people called Afghans or Pashtuns make up just over a third of the citizens of modern Afghanistan. The others are Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Aimak, Turkmen, Baluch, Nuristani or a number of other ethnicities and have their own cultures and languages.
Always when great empires have come with their armies, the Afghans have conceded their cities and their plains, fighting instead a guerrilla war from the sanctuary of their mountains. The Pashtuns are a warlike people who live by their ancient code of honour, the
pashtunwali or the Way of the Pashtuns, a code that demands hospitality, courage, loyalty, righteousness, dignity and trust in God. It also demands
badal, the fierce ideal of justice where all trespasses must be avenged with blood and vendetta.
The latest empire to march into Afghanistan is the Soviet Union. In 1978, the Communist party PDPA seized power in Afghanistan, backed by the Soviet Union. Their attempts to secularise the Muslim country angered traditionalists and caused civil unrest. The chosen leader, President Hafizullah Amin, was deeply unpopular with his own people and requested Soviet military assistance. The Soviets sent troops, but grew increasingly frustrated with Amin’s performance and began to doubt his loyalty, with some members of the Politiburo becoming convinced that he was a CIA agent. Two days after Christmas in 1979, in a daring special forces raid, their troops assaulted the Presidential Palace and killed Amin, replacing him with President Babrak Karmal, a man they hoped was more malleable.
At the same time, Soviet tanks rolled into the country and the air was thick with airplanes bringing Russian soldiers. Instead of having the hoped-for effect of stabilising the country and suppressing the insurrection, though, the invasion lit a flame of nationalistic fervour. It was no longer a political conflict between worldly Kabul and the conservative tribal people; it was now a religious and ethnic war against an alien invader. It was Afghan Islam against Godless Communists and in obedience with the unyielding tenets of
pashtunwali, the Pashtuns grabbed bolt-action rifles and knives to fight attack helicopters and jet aircraft.
But the Soviet Union had many enemies and these enemies lost no time in arming the
mujahideen or Soldiers of God. From the oil-rich countries of the Arabian Gulf came a flow of money, both from governments and individuals, given in fraternal support for the beleaguered faith of Islam in Afghanistan, and this money could buy weapons from China, Iran and Pakistan. From the principal adversary of the USSR, the United States of America, there came high-tech equipment such as the prized Stinger missiles and more money, always more money. Most of the aid was directed through Pakistan and the intelligence service of that country, ISI, decided who should benefit from foreign largesse and who should not.
The Americans also established training camps in Pakistan and even flew a few
mujahideen to the West in order to teach them skills they needed for modern warfare. In this they were aided by the British, who had historical involvement in the region and were more than willing to take part in giving the Soviet Bear a bleeding ulcer when the Yankees were footing the bill. Officially, neither the British nor the Americans were allowed to enter Afghan territory or engage Soviet troops in combat. Unofficially, both the men of the Special Activities Division of the American Central Intelligence Agency and a number of ‘former’ British Special Air Service troopers went inside Afghanistan and lived with bands of
mujahideen as they trained them in infantry skills, sabotage and guerrilla tactics.
So trained and equipped, the Afghan
mujahideen fought their technologically and numerically superior foes with such ferocity that even the hardest of Cold War hawks on the
Politiburo began to look for a wait out that would not look like defeat. Even with a hundred thousand soldiers in the country, modern tanks, helicopters and jet fighters, they could not break the spirit of the Afghans. The Russians learned that to leave the cities and the plains meant death in the night-time, as the mujahideen stalked them mercilessly. Only the
Spetznatz, the vaunted special forces of the Soviet GRU (Army Intelligence) could fight the guerrillas on their own terms, penetrating deep inside their territory with fieldcraft and stealth enough to surprise even veteran hunters who knew the territory intimately. In that war, the dirty war of commando against guerrilla, no quarter was asked nor given.