to take time off to plant crops and then to harvest them (Dupree,
1989: 30–1). War was prosecuted by loose networks, often based
on norms of reciprocity in a tribal context, rather than trained,
organised, professional militaries. This is not to say that one did
not find persons with military skills participating in such combat;
on the contrary, former Afghan Army conscripts who had returned
to their villages after compulsory military service often had some
skills which were useful in confronting the Soviet challenge, and
managed to achieve some local prominence because of the ‘slaugh-
ter of the tribal aristocracy’ under the Taraki and Amin regimes
(Lemercier-Quelquejay and Bennigsen, 1984: 209). In other areas,
such as Logar, war brought the local mulla(prayer leader) to
prominence, often as precursor to the establishment of a repressive
local regime (Kakar, 1995: 141–4), of a kind which the Taliban
were later to emulate on a nationwide scale.
In contrast to a ‘pure’ model of traditional warfare, however, the
grassroots of the Afghan resistance tended to pursue localised
objectives, but on the basis of a deeper and politicisedvalue sys-
tem. This made the resistance difficult to decapitate or coopt. As
Jalali and Grau have argued: ‘The Mujahideen structure would be
difficult to fit into a line- and-block chart and there was never a
central leadership that was critical to the cause. Yet this inefficient
disunity may have been a strength of the Mujahideen. No matter
which commanders or leaders were killed, the Mujahideen effort
would continue and the Soviets would never be short of enemies’
(Jalali and Grau, n.d.: 401). This difficulty for the Soviets was
compounded by their scorched-earth tactics, which helped create a
generation of Afghans with nothing left to do but fight, as their
property had been destroyed, and their families killed or scattered.
Beyond this, it is perilous to generalise about the grassroots
resistance. From the outset of the revolts in Summer 1978, signifi-
cant variations in the behaviour of elements of the resistance could
be detected (Shahrani and Canfield, 1984). Groups differed in scale
and capacity, in passion and degree of engagement, in the preexist-
ing solidarity networks on which they built, in terms of the issues
which provoked them into action, and even in specific values.
The Development of Afghan Resistance 61