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particularly those of the distant Hindu Kush, immediately resisted what they felt to be a monumental threat to their traditions and way of life. While most simply disobeyed the new laws, others became agitated, particularly those in areas that held the most conservative of Islamic beliefs. And then on June 22, 1978, the first shots of a conflict that would ultimately explode into the Soviet-Afghan War rang out—in Nangalam, at the western end of the Pech River Valley, just a few miles from the Chowkay and the Korangal valleys, fired by the descendants of the infidels-turned-Muslim purists, the Safi. The Communist government immediately responded with tanks, artillery, and aerial bombing. As the residents fled into the surrounding hills and valleys, the Communists attacked Nangalam’s mosques, burned Korans, then poured gasoline on the villagers’ homes and burned them. The government troops found a widow and her child who hadn’t fled into the hills with the other villagers, and doused them with gas, burned them alive, and threw their charred bodies onto one of the village’s main intersections. The story of Nangalam spread throughout the valleys of the region like the gas-fueled fires themselves, sparking further unrest, only to be put down with similar brutality. In October of that year, however, men of the village of Kamdesh, north of Nangalam in the heart of Nuristan, attacked a government outpost and obliterated it. And that uprising wasn’t put down. The war against the new government was on, between the Soviet-backed Communist government and those who saw themselves as the warriors of Islam, literally, “those who struggle”: the infamous mujahideen.
    The Soviets poured millions of dollars’ worth of military and infrastructure aid into Afghanistan throughout 1978; they also sent countless advisers to help the Taraqi regime quell the fast-growing revolt against the new government. Despite the Soviets’ increasingly aggressive posture in Afghanistan, the United States seemed to barely wince at the radical move to hard-line Communist rule. In 1978, the United States sent an ambassador to the new regime, a U.S. Marine veteran of World War II named Adolph “Spike” Dubs, one of the nation’s leading experts on the Soviet Union at the time (whom the KGB wrongly considered a spy). In February of 1979, however, Islamic militants kidnapped him, sequestering Dubs in a room in the Kabul Hotel. Government security forces, under the close advising of a Soviet KGB agent, dismissed the wishes of U.S. State Department officials for a peaceful resolution, and opened fire on the room, killing Dubs—a grim portent of the shortsighted tactical mind-set the Soviets would embrace throughout Afghanistan in the years to come. While the United States had been granting Afghanistan a small amount of foreign aid at the time, Dubs would have been the key to an expansion of this assistance. With his death, however, U.S. aid—at least overtly—withered to nothing. But other American funds, of the covert sort, would begin arriving in just a few months.
    The blooming insurgency against Afghanistan’s Communist puppet government in 1979 consisted of a few disorganized, loose-knit bands of Islamic fighters scattered throughout the Hindu Kush and other parts of Afghanistan. In March of 1979, the people of Herat, in western Afghanistan, revolted against the government’s reforms, storming a prison and liberating political prisoners. Then they rounded up and killed fifty Soviet advisers and their families—decapitating them and placing their heads atop sticks surrounding the town. Days later, Taraqi’s retaliation began—from the sky—as five-hundred-pound bombs destroyed much of the city, killing an estimated five thousand people. Soon thereafter, an entire division of Afghan soldiers based in Herat renounced their allegiance to the new government and joined the mujahideen.
    Taraqi’s government once again put down an uprising in