corner, and someone else was governor on his street corner. Thatâs how it was.â
This early 1990s â mujahideen timeâ was the incarnation of Afghanistan as Yaghestan , a word that has often been used to caricature it. For centuries, courtly Persian monarchs flung this epithet at the rock-strewn land that lay at the far fringes of their empire. The early Muslim conquerors broke their teeth on the place for decades and never really reduced it. By â yaghestan ,â the Persians meant a land of the rebellious, of the incorrigibly ungovernable.
Reverting to yaghestan served again and again as a fallback position for a people who, every once in a while, did grudgingly gather under one banner into something like a nation. But ties of kin and clan always remained strong. A tribeâs feeling for its ancestral territory ran deeper than its loyalties to the institutions of national government. So when that empire or national government came under attack, Afghans were quick to dissolve it, and run like water between the fingers of their would-be conquerors. 3
The Soviet Union was only the latest predatory empire to be confounded by this trick. âIt took the USSR thirty-one years to seize the machinery of the Afghan state,â writes Michael Barry, in a brilliant analysis of Afghan history called Le Royaume de lâInsolence ( The Kingdom of Insolence ). âThe Sovietsâ mistake was to assume that controlling the government and army of Afghanistan was enough to place the whole country in their graspâ¦. Whereas, the real country slipped away from them byresorting, in a desperate lurch, to the yaghestan reflex.â 4
The Soviets, like many predecessors, finally acknowledged the task of controlling Afghanistan beyond them and pulled back across its mountains to their windswept steppes. But what they left behind, after ten years of mortal combat, after countless atrocities and reprisals, and repeated decimation of civilians and their livelihoodsâwith continued funding afterward from the United States, the USSR, Saudi Arabia, and others, and with neighboring countries egging on the various rival factionsâwas a yaghestan in its most extreme form.
All the invisible bonds that weave a country together into a single polity had been dissolved. All the renunciations of personal sovereignty in exchange for the comforts and protections of a joint destiny had been retracted. Anyone claiming the allegiance of a few armed men felt entitled to strike out for himself. Scores of petty commanders fell to preying on their countrymen. This version of yaghestan was a metastasized cancer; it had grown beyond the capacity of traditional tribal structures to contain it.
In Kandahar, the bloodletting was less systematic than it was in Kabul. With the 1992 defeat of the rump Communists, only one full-blown military campaign remained: for local resistants to rid the countryside of the forces of one of their chief erstwhile allies, and an ominous one, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar. The most radical Islamic fundamentalist among the resistance leaders, Hikmatyar was a precursor of the Taliban.
In the obsessive Cold War context of the day, the likely consequences of his radicalism were ignored by the foreign countries that supported him: Pakistan and the United States. Indeed, the extremist religious ideology he professed was seen as a spur to resistants whom it might inspire to take up arms against the atheistic Communists.
The United States had not overlooked the potential impact of the Afghan war in its global contest with the Soviets, a contest that had preoccupied it for more than thirty years. Like Latin America, Afghanistan was seen as a key battleground where the overextended Soviet empire could be bled. From at least 1980, the U.S. Congress was allocating ever-increasing funds to the Afghan rebels. Over the course of a decade, Washington had poured an average of more than a quarter of a billion dollars a
This early 1990s â mujahideen timeâ was the incarnation of Afghanistan as Yaghestan , a word that has often been used to caricature it. For centuries, courtly Persian monarchs flung this epithet at the rock-strewn land that lay at the far fringes of their empire. The early Muslim conquerors broke their teeth on the place for decades and never really reduced it. By â yaghestan ,â the Persians meant a land of the rebellious, of the incorrigibly ungovernable.
Reverting to yaghestan served again and again as a fallback position for a people who, every once in a while, did grudgingly gather under one banner into something like a nation. But ties of kin and clan always remained strong. A tribeâs feeling for its ancestral territory ran deeper than its loyalties to the institutions of national government. So when that empire or national government came under attack, Afghans were quick to dissolve it, and run like water between the fingers of their would-be conquerors. 3
The Soviet Union was only the latest predatory empire to be confounded by this trick. âIt took the USSR thirty-one years to seize the machinery of the Afghan state,â writes Michael Barry, in a brilliant analysis of Afghan history called Le Royaume de lâInsolence ( The Kingdom of Insolence ). âThe Sovietsâ mistake was to assume that controlling the government and army of Afghanistan was enough to place the whole country in their graspâ¦. Whereas, the real country slipped away from them byresorting, in a desperate lurch, to the yaghestan reflex.â 4
The Soviets, like many predecessors, finally acknowledged the task of controlling Afghanistan beyond them and pulled back across its mountains to their windswept steppes. But what they left behind, after ten years of mortal combat, after countless atrocities and reprisals, and repeated decimation of civilians and their livelihoodsâwith continued funding afterward from the United States, the USSR, Saudi Arabia, and others, and with neighboring countries egging on the various rival factionsâwas a yaghestan in its most extreme form.
All the invisible bonds that weave a country together into a single polity had been dissolved. All the renunciations of personal sovereignty in exchange for the comforts and protections of a joint destiny had been retracted. Anyone claiming the allegiance of a few armed men felt entitled to strike out for himself. Scores of petty commanders fell to preying on their countrymen. This version of yaghestan was a metastasized cancer; it had grown beyond the capacity of traditional tribal structures to contain it.
In Kandahar, the bloodletting was less systematic than it was in Kabul. With the 1992 defeat of the rump Communists, only one full-blown military campaign remained: for local resistants to rid the countryside of the forces of one of their chief erstwhile allies, and an ominous one, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar. The most radical Islamic fundamentalist among the resistance leaders, Hikmatyar was a precursor of the Taliban.
In the obsessive Cold War context of the day, the likely consequences of his radicalism were ignored by the foreign countries that supported him: Pakistan and the United States. Indeed, the extremist religious ideology he professed was seen as a spur to resistants whom it might inspire to take up arms against the atheistic Communists.
The United States had not overlooked the potential impact of the Afghan war in its global contest with the Soviets, a contest that had preoccupied it for more than thirty years. Like Latin America, Afghanistan was seen as a key battleground where the overextended Soviet empire could be bled. From at least 1980, the U.S. Congress was allocating ever-increasing funds to the Afghan rebels. Over the course of a decade, Washington had poured an average of more than a quarter of a billion dollars a
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