• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1428 0

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 Nangalam in the summer of 1979, using both land and airpower, razing much of the beautiful enclave—again. Whatever animosity the Safis who dwelled in the lower valleys may have held toward their onetime aggressors, the Pashtuns, was at least temporarily put aside now that they had a common enemy, the “Red Kafir.” After the brutal strikes by the Taraqi government forces against Nangalam and other villages—indiscriminate raids that killed men, women, children, dogs, and other animals—refugees, including the fighting-age males who now considered themselves mujahideen, began to migrate into Pakistan. Pakistan took them in and would continue to welcome the now-homeless Afghans through the coming years, a relationship vital for the eventual outcome of the war. But while Pakistan served as a critical ally at the time, its aid was offered less for humanitarian reasons