Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency

4: Religion and Insurgency in the Twentieth Century

Religion and Insurgency in the 20th Century 67 67 CHAPTER 4 RELIGION AND INSURGENCY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The twentieth century witnessed religious insurgencies as violent as those of the preceding century, and in the case of Afghanistan, as consequential internationally as the anti-Napoleonic revolt in Spain. AFGHANISTAN For generations, Afghanistan ranked as one of the most remote and obscure places on earth. Yet the religiously inspired uprising that swept across that country beginning in 1979 is probably the best-known guerrilla insurgency of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Because several chapters of this book discuss key aspects of that conflict, only the outlines of the religious basis of the war are presented here. The Communist Party of Afghanistan, the PDPA, came into existence in 1965. It always remained an exiguous minority, beset by bloody factional divisions. In 1978, after a coup and assassinations, the minuscule and inexperienced PDPA unexpectedly found itself in power, and it began imposing Leninist reforms. The urban membership and Soviet orientation of the PDPA had incubated a fierce hatred both of Islam and of the peasantry. The PDPA regime launched an all-out assault on the customs of the population, aiming in effect for a latter-day, full-scale Central Asian Stalinism. Forcible and arbitrary land reform offended Muslim concepts of legality.1 As part of the PDPA literacy campaign, women were dragged from their homes to listen to antireligious lectures . The regime admitted to killing without trial 12,000 political prisoners and religious teachers in its first two years of power; the actual number was probably much larger. The regime appeared as “repulsively anti-Islamic.”2 Such egregious behavior, in a country with perhaps 320,000 mullahs, naturally called forth a widespread popular rebellion, in fact “the largest single national rising in the twentieth century.”3 68 RESISTING REBELLION In March 1979, anti-regime riots rocked the streets of Herat. The PDPA reprisals, including aerial bombings, killed between three thousand and five thousand inhabitants of that city. Revolt swept over the country, and soon most provinces were in the hands of the insurgents. To prevent the fall of the PDPA regime, the Soviet army invaded in December 1979. The entrance of Soviet troops enflamed rather than quenched the rebellion. In the eyes of most of the Mujahideen guerrillas , the conflict became a defense of religion against foreign atheists . To the Kremlin’s incredulous dismay, the resistance stalemated the Soviet forces, the first clear reversal of the “historical inevitability of Marxism-Leninism” since the 1920 war with Poland. The invincible Red Army, conquerors of Berlin, held at bay by semiliterate warriors of God, Leninism tamed by Islam—what a spectacle. Faced with this burgeoning disaster, Mikhail Gorbachev and others initiated a major reexamination of the entire Soviet national defense doctrine , a move that resulted in the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and eventually from Central Europe. Trotsky supposedly said in 1919 that “the road to Paris and London lies through the towns of Afghanistan , the Punjab and Bengal.”4 As in so many things, Trotsky was wrong about this—dead wrong, so to speak. But in a devastating way, Trotsky’s aphorism about the relationship between revolution in Europe and Asia turned out to be correct. The cries of battle in the Afghan mountains found their echo in the shouts of freedom on the Berlin Wall.5 And even with all this, the world had not heard the last of Afghanistan . The religiously generated insurgencies considered below are not nearly so well known as the Afghan case, even though they all produced major conflict in their respective countries, and one of them— the Sudanese—still continues after more than forty years. MEXICO The Cristero rebellion—“the last insurrection of the masses” in Mexico6 —was one of the largest insurgencies in the Western Hemisphere . Yet few Americans have ever heard of it. As the foremost student of that conflict observed, “history has failed the Cristeros.”7 The Cristero movement, called by Mexicans La Cristiada, fought against religious persecution by the regime in Mexico City. Although Mexico has an overwhelmingly Catholic population, the Church there Religion and Insurgency in the 20th Century 69 suffered considerable tribulation for more than a century. After independence from Spain, “the definition of the proper role of the Church became the critical issue; the history of Mexico from 1821 to 1872 could be written in terms of the...