Soldiers of God Read Online Free PDF

speak of, and their command structure was often so informal as to be nonexistent. A KhAD or KGB agent in their midst would have been hopelesslyconfused: there was nothing to infiltrate, and no pattern — often no logic or planning — to guerrilla attacks. Predicting the mujahidin's actions was like forecasting the wind direction. In Peshawar, it was said that their very incompetence helped to defeat the Soviets (though after the Soviets departed, the complete disorganization of the resistance hindered its efforts to capture major Afghan cities still held by the Afghan Communists).
    The mujahidin were a movement without rhetoric or ideology or a supreme leader — they had no Arafat or Savimbi or Mao. Their Moslem fundamentalism lacked political meaning because Afghanistan, unlike the Arab world and Iran, never had an invasion of Western culture and technology to revolt against. The guerrillas had no complexes, no chips on their shoulders regarding the modern world, since they had never clashed with it until the Soviets came. Religion for them was inseparable from the other certainties of a harsh and lonely mountain existence. In sum, the mujahidin had no politics; therefore, with few exceptions, they could not be extremists. Concepts like “the Third World” and “national liberation” had absolutely no meaning for them. After a trip to Paktia province in November 1987, William McGurn wrote in the European edition of the
Wall Street Journal
that the Afghan guerrillas were “simply ornery mountain folk who have not cottoned to a foreign power that has seized their land, killed their people and attacked their faith.”
    If the mujahidin resembled anyone, it was the early-nineteenth-century Greek
klephts,
who with foreign help liberated their country from Ottoman Turkish occupation. Like the Afghans, the Greeks then were an unruly hodgepodge of guerrilla bands driven by a fervid religious faith (in their case, Orthodox Christianity). They were at a stage of development similar to that of Afghan peasants today: they lived an austere life in the mountains, were riven by blood feuds, and never forgot an insult. Lord Byron and the other foreign eccentricswho flocked to Greece in the 1820s to assist the rebels might have felt at home among the relief workers and journalists in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
    The Afghans were able to withstand a late-twentieth-century military onslaught by relying on nineteenth-century values and methods. In
The Face of Battle,
John Keegan observed: “Impersonality, coercion, deliberate cruelty, all deployed on a rising scale, makes the fitness of modern man to sustain the stress of battle increasingly doubtful.” There is an awful lesson here: even conventional warfare is now so horrible that only the values of the past may make victory possible. And in Afghanistan, the lack of all-weather roads and a national press left the Afghans only the values of the past to fall back on, inward-oriented village codes that were undiluted by the rationalism that pervades not just the West but the more technologically developed parts of the Third World.
    The Soviets killed a larger percentage of Afghans than the Nazis killed Soviets in World War II. Were Americans or Europeans to suffer the same level of mass violence today, it is questionable whether they would fight back as the Afghans have. More likely, they would seek some sort of compromise with their occupier.
    The Afghan mujahidin, numbering over 100,000, were the first group of insurgents to drive out a Russian army since Czar Peter the Great began his empire's southward expansion three hundred years ago. The mujahidin were attacked with more firepower than any Moslem group in the Middle East could imagine, yet almost never did they resort to terrorism. Though the guerrillas were responsible for political assassinations, the brutal treatment of enemy soldiers, and rocket attacks in Kabul and other cities that killed civilians, to my knowledge or that of