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40 chapter three the afghan MuJahedIn the afghan MuJahedIn defeated the Soviets. The United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others helped them considerably, but they did almost all the fighting and virtually all the dying themselves. They and the civilian population that backed them paid an awful price—at least 1 million dead and many more wounded—but they got very little of the benefit of their sacrifice. It is the tragedy of modern Afghanistan that the Afghan people helped to bring freedom to so many in other parts of the world but did not get it themselves until many years after their victory against the 40th Red Army. The mujahedin did not need to be coaxed into an insurgency. Their usually very high morale was based on the firm conviction that their country and their religion were under attack by a foreign invader, an extremist communist dictatorship. The mass of rural Afghans was ready to revolt in 1979. However, they did not fight for one cause alone: Islam fed Afghan nationalism and Afghan nationalism fed Islamism. The mujahedin were almost entirely an army of illiterate rural peasants . They never created a national command-and-control system or a national political leadership. The government of Pakistan made a halfhearted effort to organize a political leadership for the mujahedin during the war, but it excluded groups backed by Iran and overrepresented Pashtun groups, especially ones that shared the militant Islamic views of President Zia ul-Haq. The most successful mujahedin commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was largely ostracized by the Pakistanis for most of the war. The CIA had very little direct contact with the mujahedin, a function that was deliberately left to Pakistan. Bob Gates remembers that 03-2595-4 ch3.indd 40 4/30/14 2:14 PM the afghan MuJahedIn 41 the senior CIA leadership during the war “had very little direct contact” with the fighters or their leaders.1 The war was a classic guerilla insurgency. There were few set-piece battles, especially in the early years of the war. The Russians did mount offensive sweep operations every year, but the insurgents usually just melted away into the mountains, from which they harassed the Soviets but did not engage in big battles. Territory did not really change hands except for limited periods of time when the Russians moved into rural spaces on sweeps. When they returned to garrison, the status quo ante returned. Thus there is no way to map the war like a conventional conflict, tracking battle lines during major engagements and noting important dates. Only in the last year of the war did the mujahedin stand and fight, and even then it was only in isolated battles very near the Pakistani border. Since the mujahedin did not keep records of their losses, it is impossible to track their casualties or strength. If the ISI kept such records, they would have been incomplete at best and probably somewhat fanciful. In any case, there is no evidence of any records kept by the ISI or the CIA. Nor did the mujahedin resort to suicide bombing. Suicide bombing was very common in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East in the 1980s, so the tactic was well known, but the Afghans regarded it as inconsistent with their concept of warfare and did not turn to it for another generation. In the 1980s they preferred small-unit clashes, especially ambushes, like those that their grandfathers had mounted against the British; they did not use suicide bombers against enemy targets until after the U.S. intervention in 2001. The conflict was seasonal. Winter fighting was unusual; it is simply too cold and difficult to operate during the Afghan winter. So spring, summer, and early fall, when it was relatively easy to move around, defined the fighting season. Some of the mujahedin went to Pakistan to refit and regroup during the winter; others just went home. The mujahedin were divided by ethnicity and sect. Because a real census has never been taken in Afghanistan, there are no truly accurate estimates of the size of the country’s various ethnic groups; all estimates are informed guesses. The CIA’s World Factbook estimates that Pashtuns are the largest group, accounting for about 42 percent of the population, while Tajiks and Aimaks constitute about 30 percent; Hazara, about 9 percent; Uzbeks, also about 9 percent; Turkmen, about 4 percent; and 03-2595-4 ch3.indd 41 4/30/14 2:14 PM [18.189...

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