warning, based on experience, of his colleague Emilian
Iaroslavskii, Head of the League of Militant Atheists: ‘Religion is
like a nail. The more you hit it, the deeper it goes.’
Grassroots resistance and tribal warfare
The Afghan resistance at its outset was basically a grassroots
movement. This is frequently overlooked, especially by those
whose focus of interest is skewed towards radical groups supported
indirectly by the United States which have returned to haunt
America in the post-communist era. But the bulk of Afghan
Muslims who initially took up arms against the USSR and its
clients were not Muslim intellectuals, but practitioners of what one
might call ‘village Islam’, which scorned atheism and defined
apostasy as departure from ritual. The Soviets were widely known
to be atheists, and this damned them and their associates in the
eyes of many Afghan villagers. This distaste for atheism tended to
be reinforced by a concern for both the independence of
Afghanistan as a political unit, and a desire for personal autonomy
which the assertion of state power would compromise, but it was
the Soviets’ avowed atheism which created a moral basis for
opposition. It helped turn what were pockets of resistance, albeit
substantial ones, into a more full-fledged insurgency, albeit one
with its own distinctive rhythm.
Warfare as conducted by these groups took a pre-modern form.
Olivier Roy has developed a model of ‘traditional warfare’ in con-
tradistinction to jihad. Traditional warfare involves the personal
vendetta writ large; military encounters ‘affect everyday life only
slightly’; and the objective ‘is not to destroy the adversary, but to
improve one’s relative standing vis-à-visotherqawmsand to estab-
lish new social equilibrium’. Traditional warfare ‘is a domestic
competition between equals’; tribal war ‘is neither ideological nor
political’ (Roy, 1995: 63–5; see also Centlivres, 1997)). Elements
of such warfare were apparent through the life of the Afghan
resistance. As Louis Dupree pointed out, combat had a seasonal
character (‘Can’t farm and fight’): it was necessary for combatants
60 The Afghanistan Wars