regional commander was Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Jadran
Pushtun associated with Khalis’s Hezbwho came to play a role in
the short-lived ‘National Commanders Shura’ following the Soviet
withdrawal, and who subsequently joined the Taliban. Otherwise,
the two most notable regional commanders were Ismail Khan, of
mixed Pushtun and Tajik ancestry, who came to prominence in
Herat in March 1979; and Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik born in
the Panjsher Valley in the summer of 1952, who mobilised forces
in that valley and other areas in the northeast of Afghanistan, and
came to world attention through the testimony of foreign visitors.
Yet there were significant differences between these two also.
Massoud was a former engineering student who had read widely
on guerilla war, and most who met him found him highly charis-
matic. Ismail was formerly an Afghan Army officer, and opinions
differed on his charisma; instead, he worked with a solid deputy,
former Army officer Alauddin Khan, who was assassinated in June
- Massoud came closest to capturing the ‘mix of millenarian
zeal, revolutionary ideology and organization, and guerrilla war-
fare’ which mark insurgency in its pure form (Desai and Eckstein,
1990: 463). This is not, however, to say that he was an extremist:
he rather reflected a modernism immanent in many Islamist move-
ments, and a desire for ‘Islamic revolution’, but without the
Fanonist overtones that corrupted the Khalq or the Leninist
approach that suffused Hekmatyar’s Hezb.
Urban resistance activities
The Afghan resistance was not a purely rural phenomenon. The
emphasis of the Soviet occupying forces on securing cities and
communications routes meant that urban resistants were confronted
by a more concentrated force, which, while offering targets for
attack, was also better positioned to gather information about its
opponents and strike effectively against them. While Kabul was
under nightly curfew throughout the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan, the size and increasing effectiveness of KhAD also
limited what its urban enemies could achieve. None the less, on
The Development of Afghan Resistance 65