notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part IV)

(137): The madrassahs were both private and government-funded, and ranged from those who thought of Islamic piety in religious terms to those for whom Islam was also a political calling. In spite of their proliferation, military training was mainly carried out in army camps. The trainees were divided into two groups: Afghan mujahideen and non-Afghan jihadi volunteers. Brigadier Muhammad Yusuf, a chief of the Afghan cell of ISI for four years, confirmed: "During my four years, some 80,000 mujahideen were trained." Ahmed Rashid estimates that 35,000 Muslim radicals from forty-three Islamic countries fought for the mujahideen between 1982 and 1992. United States authorities estaimated that "at least 10,000" received "some degree of military training." A LA Times team of reporters that did a four-continent survey of the Afghan jihad estimated that "no more than 5,000 had actualy fought." Between the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February 1989 and the collapse of Kabul's Communist government in April 1992, another round of "at least 2,500 foreigners" recieved "military instruction of some sort." That made for a total of 7,500, no mean figure... Around this core was a larger group: tens of thousands more studied in the thousands of new madrassahs in Pakistan. Eventually, Rashid concludes, "more than a hundred thousand Muslim radicals around the world had direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan."
(138): The real damage the CIA did was not the providing of arms and money but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence--the formation of private militias--capable of creating terror.
(141): Steve Galster at the National Security Archive calculated that Congress ultimately provided "nearly 3 billion dollars in covert aid for the mujahideen, more than all other CIA covert operations in the 1980s combined."
(141-142): Besides these external funds, there were the funds generated by the drug trade... Alfred McCoy traced the different steps in the drug economy, beginning with peasant production: "As the Mujahideen guerillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax." It no doubt helped that for the grower the price of opium was five times that for wheat. Also, there was no dearth of processing facilities: "Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories." Writing in The Nation in 1988, Lawrence Lifschultz pointed out that the heroin laboratories, located in North-West Frontier Province, were operated under the protection of General Fazle Haq, an intimate of General Zia. The next link in the chain was transport, which was provided by trucks from the Pakistan army's National Logistics Cell (NLC)... Finally, the CIA provided the legal cover without which this illict trade could not have grown to monumental proportions.
(143): Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The production there was of opium, a very different drug, which was directed to small, rural, regional markets. By the end of the Afghan jihad, the picture had changed drastically: the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands becamed the world's leading producers of both opium and processed heroin, the source of "75 percent of the world's opium"... The big push came after 1985. Accounting for less than 5 % of global opium production in 1980, the region accounted for 71 percent of it by 1990, according to this same report.
(143): The worst... was Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, who received more than half of CIA covert resources, estimated to be worth $2 billion over the ten-year war, and quickly came to dominate the Afghan mujahideen... Hikmatyar became the Pakistani army's favorite "contract revolutionary." When introduced to the CIA by the ISI, HIkmatyar was leading an armed guerilla force called Hizb-i-Islami, a creation of the ISI that had little support inside Afghanistan... With a guaranteed long-term subsidy, the Hizb-i-Islami grew into the mujahideen's "largest guerilla army," one that Hikmatyar used "to become Afghanistan's leading drug lord."
(143): Hikmatyar's chief rival was Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, known as the "King of Heroin."... [He] decreed that half of all peasant holdings be planted to opium. He "issued opium quotas to every landowner" and responded "by killing or castrating those who defied his directives."
(150): The Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islam (JUI), a key party in the alliance behind the Afghan jihad, became a part of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's governing coalition in 1993. The JUI was the party of Pakistani Deobandis and was the sponsor of the Taliban, the ideological product of Deobandi madrassahs. Entry into government gave the JUI its first opportunity to build close relations with both the ISI and the army. The harvest came soon after: when the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1995, they handed over the training camps to the JUI.
(153): ...heroin-addicted population had gone from negligible in 1979 to 1.3 million by 1985...
(153): There were seven mujahideen groups in all. They reflected every kind of fisssure, internal and external, to which the Afghan resistance was subject. The internal differences in the Afghan jihad were of two different kinds. Teh first involved regional (north vs. south), linguistic (Farsi vs. Pashtun), and ethnic (Pashtun vs. non-Pashtun) differences... A different kind of internal division arose from doctrinal differences, as between Shi'a and Sunni... The overriding ideological difference among the seven mujahideen groups was between two political points of view: traditionalist nationalists and Islamist ideologues. The traditionalists generally came from the religious leadership, whereas the ideologues came mainly from the ranks of political intellectuals.
(154): Two political objectives, one regional, the other global, shaped US policy in Afghanisan. The regional objective was to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution. This was accomplished with two regional alliances against Iran, one with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the other with Iraq. Whereas the United States saw Islamist social movements as a threat, it was eager to reinforce Islamist--Sunni, not Shi'a--state projects. The American strategy provided a political opening for the intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to promote exaggeratedly anti-Shi'a Sunni doctrines, chief among them the Wahhabi doctrine from Saudi Arabia and the Deobandi doctrine from Pakistan.
(154-155): ...the Regan administration showed no interest in a negotiated or compromise settlement. It wanted to ally itself with internationalist, militantly anti-Communist Islamist ideologues rather than moderately pragmatic Muslims, a view shared by the ISI.
(156): The seven resistance groups that made up the Afghan jihad were divded into two opposing political constellations, one traditional-nationalist, the other Islamist... The leadership of the traditionalist bloc came from the historic elite of Afghanistan, who were either heads of the Sufi orders or traditional alims versed in Islamic jurisprudence. None of these three mainstream groups received extrenal assistance of any significance. The National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, led by the head of the Qadariyya Sufi order, was considered too "nationalist" and "insufficiently Islami" to recieve funds. The Afghan National Liberation Front was led by the family that headed the Naqshbandi tariqa. It was more of a centrist group..."hardly existed as a military force." The only traditional-nationalist group with a military presence on the ground was called the Movement of the Islamic Revolution... its commanders (in particular, Mullah Masim Akhundzada of the Helmland Valley) were also among the largest drug lords inside Afghanistan.... ...Leaders of the four Islamist groups came from students and faculty active in the Jamiat-i-Islami, the parent Islamist organization at Kabul University in the 1970s. The first split from the Jamiat came in 1975 and led to the formation of Hikmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami (Hizb). A later split from the Hizb led to the creation of the Khalis faction. The fourth Islamist organization was led by Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, who had studiet at Al-Azhar... The key parties in the Islamist constellation were the Jamiat and the Hizb. After the split with the Hizb, Jamiat had turned into the "main voice for non-Pashtuns, especially Persian speakers."... Led by the most successful of the commanders, Ahmed Shah Massoud, Jamiat developed into "the most powerful party of the resistance" over the course of the war. In spite of that, the Jamiat was not the preferred recipient for CIA support. There was one important reason for this: Jamiat respresented the moderate center...
(159): The United States and its allies had to continue to support a myriad of groups if only to ensure that the jihad continued to have an even chance. The support of different groups turned out to be support for several wars fought by rival groups. This is why as soon as the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan and victory seemed at hand, the CIA-supported jihad mutated into a civil war. With the traditionalists marginalized, the Soviet withdrawal of 1989 led to a turf battle between different Islamist groups, pitting the extremists led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and the Hizb against the moderates in the Jamiat led by Burhaneddin Rabbani and his spectacularly successful field commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud.