In November 1989, the eyes of the world were fixed on the astonishing torrent of images emerging from East Central Europe, where the Communist system implanted by the Red Army after 1945 was falling apart. So the global media took little note of a brief spasm of violence in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The war in neighboring Afghanistan was about to enter its tenth year. The Soviet forces had left, but their proxy, the former secret police chief Mohammed Najibullah, still held precarious sway in Kabul. Since assuming the presidency in 1986, he had made a number of overtures to the opposition, even promising the introduction of sharia law. But the holy warriors, who regarded him as a creation of the Russians, still wanted him dead. And so the war continued.
By now the war had transformed the fortunes of Peshawar, the regional capital. The city had languished throughout most of the seventies in a provincial drowse, but the Soviet invasion had swiftly transformed it into the focal point of the anti-Communist jihad. There had been a time, not that long ago, when the grand political maneuverings in the rest of Pakistan, so far removed in culture and outlook from the tribal areas, took place as if beyond a distant horizon. Now, in this strange new era, the entire world had arrived in Peshawar to fight one of the great set pieces of the Cold War. It was not just that the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, used the city for the safe houses and logistical facilities of the rebel groups it chose to support. The diplomats and spies of countless nations also descended upon Peshawar to dispense weapons and advice and jockey for vital information. Their ranks included both operatives from the CIA, whose agreements with the ISI banned them from traveling into Afghanistan itself, and agents from the East-bloc countries, desperate to neutralize the enemies of socialism and harvest intelligence that might prove of use to Moscow. It was also in Peshawar that Muslims from around the world, drawn by earnest faith or a yearning for adventure, gathered to support the holy war against the godless Russians. Add the fact that Peshawar was also the main conduit for weapons supplies to the Afghan guerrillas, with all the shadowy flows of finance this entailed, and the result made for a combustible mix.
On the evening of November 24, a Palestinian Islamic scholar named Abdullah Azzam was on his way to Friday prayers at his preferred mosque in the center of the city. Accompanied by his two sons and the offspring of a slain mujahideen commander, Azzam stepped out of his car. At that moment a huge blast shook the street. The car vanished; only a tiny fragment of it remained after the explosion. Azzam’s younger son was catapulted into the air, his body landing three hundred feet away. The other two boys were shredded by the blast, their body parts scattered across trees and power lines. “As for Sheikh Abdullah Azzam himself, his body was found resting against a wall, totally intact and not at all disfigured, except that some blood was seen seeping from his mouth,” wrote one sympathizer who claimed to have seen the body immediately after the attack. Azzam was buried in the same Peshawar cemetery that became the final resting place of many of the holy warriors who fought in the Afghan war.1
His killing came as an enormous shock to those who had devoted their lives to the Afghan jihad, for Azzam had played a crucial role in fusing that struggle with global Muslim politics. Born in 1941 in the West Bank town of Jenin, he had come of age in the most intense phase of the Palestinians’ war against Israel. In striking contrast to so many of his contemporaries, however, Azzam had rejected revolutionary Marxism or secular nationalism. He found the answer in a deeply conservative reading of Islam. He studied sharia in Syria for a few years in the 1960s. Like so many others of his generation, he was deeply demoralized by Israel’s crushing victory in the war of 1967. Drawn to activism, he moved to Jordan, where he joined the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. Later he continued his studies of Islamic law at Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar University, where he built up his contacts with like-minded Islamists. By the end of the 1970s, he was lecturing at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.
The outbreak of the war in Afghanistan galvanized him. In 1979 he issued a religious ruling, a fatwa, in support of the mujahideen entitled Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation After Faith. He called upon Muslims to pay heed to the example of Afghanistan. Here, he said, was an Islamic nation whose pure devotion to the faith sustained a blazing jihad against the world’s great atheist superpower. In rational terms, it made no sense at all. How did impoverished tribesmen dare to take on the Soviet Union’s vast army, bristling with modern weapons? Yet the Afghans continued to fight on, even though they were clearly outgunned. This was a story, Azzam insisted, that could only fire the imagination of the truly pious: “The battles in Afghanistan . . . have reached a level of intensity, the likes of which have not been witnessed in the mountain ranges of Hindu Kush, nor in recent Islamic history.” The stated goal of the Afghan mujahideen, he noted, was the creation of an Islamic state—a fact that stood in refreshing contrast to the official Palestinian liberation movement, which, as he saw it, had been appropriated by a dispiriting variety of political camps, including Communists, nationalists, and even some reformist Muslims. None of them, he noted sadly, shared his Islamist priorities.
He took care to point out another salient difference between the two struggles. The Palestinian cause had become entangled in Cold War maneuverings. By accepting support from the USSR, the Palestinians had subjected themselves to forces over which they had no control: “The situation has become a game in the hands of the great powers.” This submission to an atheist ally, moreover, betrayed the Palestinians’ Muslim identity. The Afghans, by contrast, “refuse help from any disbelieving country.” (This was not strictly true even at the time that Azzam was writing: Jimmy Carter had signed the first presidential order stipulating covert support to the Afghan rebels in the summer of 1979, and though Azzam could not have known this particular detail, he would have been aware of the Americans’ involvement. The fact of American support did become a complicating factor for radical Islamists as the Afghan jihad went on; they were forced to rely on “lesser of two evil” arguments to rationalize US participation. But many of them refused to have anything to do with the Americans in the field.)
Azzam noted another vital difference between Palestine and Afghanistan. It had to do with geography. The Palestinians confronted an Israeli enemy that had the power to keep their borders tightly closed and to monitor any movements across them. Afghanistan, by contrast, boasted eighteen hundred miles of open borders that were impossible to control, as well as many isolated tribes that resisted manipulation from the outside.2 Afghanistan’s remoteness made it a safe haven for an Islamic state. Azzam may have been influenced in this thinking by leftist theories of guerrilla warfare, which were much in vogue in the 1970s—perhaps even by Mao’s theory of the Communist “base area,” which, once firmly established, could serve as the political and military launching pad for a broader insurrection against the strong points of capitalist society.
In any case, it was extraordinary to see a Palestinian activist in the 1980s publicly relegate his own people’s struggle to the back burner while giving priority to the struggle of non-Arab Muslims in an entirely peripheral country. For Azzam, it was not the particular concerns of individual peoples that mattered so much as the fate of the umma as a whole. Like Sayyid Qutb, he believed strongly in the notion of an irreconcilable “clash of civilizations” between the community of Muslims and the non-Muslim world.
Azzam did not stop there. Following the lead of some earlier Islamist theoreticians (notably Mawdudi), he declared support for the Afghan jihad to be an individual religious obligation (fard ayn) for every Muslim around the world. In so doing, he effectively elevated the pursuit of a holy war to the status of a “pillar of the faith,” on a par with the five core practices of Islam that are incumbent upon every believer. This went much further than the rulings of traditional Islamic scholars, who argued instead that assisting the Afghan jihad was a fard kifaya—a collective religious obligation that could be fulfilled if the community as a whole gave weapons, money, and other forms of support to the struggle; individual believers, in other words, weren’t expected to go and do the fighting themselves. For Azzam, by contrast, prosecuting the jihad against Islam’s enemies had become a central religious duty. Azzam’s contrary fatwa lent crucial religious legitimacy to the new spirit of militancy that was coursing around the Islamic world as a result of the great revivalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.3
His ideas were hugely influential. His writings and lectures were passionate and persuasive and characterized by a strong mystical bent that entranced his followers. (He spoke at great length about the miracles of the jihad: how birds suddenly taking wing gave warning of imminent Soviet attacks and how the bodies of slain mujahideen gave off a smell like perfume.) He used his extensive network of international contacts to distribute pamphlets and video recordings of his sermons. Many young Sunni Muslims who embraced the Islamist call to action viewed his instructions as a guide.4
Azzam himself strongly stressed practical results as well as theory. In 1980, seeking to get closer to the action in Afghanistan, he accepted a teaching position at the International Islamic University in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. The name of the institution was entirely appropriate to a man who had devoted his life to the creation of a global movement in pursuit of an Islamic state. Within months, however, Azzam relocated to Peshawar, where he could lend more concrete support to the mujahideen cause. His connections now came in handy. He could call on wealthy donors throughout the Gulf. He could draw on organizational advice from a range of militants around the Middle East. And his cosmopolitan teaching career had given him contact both with established Islamists (like the family of Sayyid Qutb, whom he greatly admired) as well as with the younger generation of would-be jihadis.
This new generation included Osama bin Laden, a well-born Saudi whom Azzam probably met during his teaching stint in Jeddah and who joined him in Peshawar not long after the start of the war. Azzam decided that he and his followers could best support the Afghan jihad by setting up an organization to coordinate the flow of weapons, funds, and fighters. He called it the Services Office (Maktab-al Khadamat). The MAK became a significant logistical hub for much of the private support for the mujahideen coming in from the Arab world (though the bulk of government money from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim governments continued to flow to the Pakistani government, which worked hard to maintain a monopoly over funding to the mujahideen). It was the MAK that provided the most important organizational base for Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
It was Azzam and his ideological heirs—of whom Bin Laden was but one—who can be credited with transforming the local Afghan jihad into a truly global one. Azzam ultimately traveled to dozens of countries (including the United States) on his fund-raising trips, and everywhere he went he sowed the seeds for his vision of a worldwide revolutionary struggle for an Islamic state. During the 1980s, thousands of fighters from around the Muslim world passed through his training camps and traveled to Afghan battlefields with his help. Their military contribution to the jihad was relatively limited; they were often regarded with contempt by the Afghans, who tended to see them as arrogant and out of touch. It was in their own homelands that the so-called Afghan Arabs and the other foreign veterans of the Afghan conflict arguably had their greatest impact.
The mujahideen struggle against the Soviets—a struggle that ultimately ended with a humiliating retreat for the forces of Moscow—filled Muslims around the world with pride. This glorious victory seemed to many a confirmation of what the Islamists had been arguing all along: with God’s help, anything is possible. (The Quran is replete with verses promising victory to those who are faithful to God.) The triumph of the Afghan jihad inspired Muslims in a general way, but it gave particular impetus to the more militant strains of Islamist thought. The full psychological impact is hard to quantify, of course.
One of the most concrete effects can be seen in the later journeys of the non-Afghans who personally participated in the war against the Soviets. Garlanded by their participation in the glamorous Afghan jihad, the Afghan Arabs and their fellow Islamist internationalists personally embodied the message of armed resistance to the infidels and the apostates. Not for nothing would Afghanistan in the 1980s come to be known as the “University of Jihad.”
Inevitably, however, Azzam’s very success as a leader and religious thinker inspired competition. Another Arab who made the pilgrimage to Peshawar was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who arrived in Pakistan in 1985. Trained as a doctor and a religious scholar, he was an alumnus of the Muslim Brotherhood who had been imprisoned after the killing of Anwar Sadat in 1981. Though professing eagerness to help the Afghans in their jihad against the Soviets, he spent much of his time in Pakistan on Egyptian affairs. He soon became the leader of a new group of Egyptian radicals that dubbed itself the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Azzam was soon complaining to his associates that the Egyptians were gaining influence over his protégé Bin Laden, who was already becoming a lodestar of the jihadi movement.5 There is much speculation, indeed, that Zawahiri and his confederates orchestrated the killing of Azzam as part of a plot to take over control of his organization.
But the nascent al-Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad were not the only ones bent on extending the Afghan war to the rest of the world. Another group of Egyptian radicals, mercilessly persecuted by the government at home, set up operations in Peshawar and in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad in the mid-1980s. This was al-Gamaa al-Islamia, the Islamic Group, which had engineered the assassination of Sadat. One of the group’s most prominent figures in its exile was Mohammed Shawki Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s killer. Its religious leader was Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the “blind sheikh,” who had also studied under Azzam and ultimately played a key role in the MAK after Azzam’s death. He established close relations with Bin Laden and Hekmatyar. In 1990 Abdel-Rahmen traveled to the United States, where his preaching inspired a group of young Muslim radicals to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.6 Later in the 1990s, al-Gamaa al-Islamia launched a series of assassinations and terrorist attacks across Egypt that culminated in the Luxor attack of 1997, in which the group’s operatives massacred 62 people (mostly foreign tourists).
After Azzam’s death, Bin Laden and Zawahiri—the latter often characterized, with some justification, as the “brains” of al-Qaeda—presided over a remarkable expansion of global jihadist aspirations. Afghanistan-trained holy warriors dispersed to the four winds. They fought in Bosnia and Chechnya and lent support to the Islamist regime in the Sudan (where members of the Islamist camp had first joined the cabinet back in 1979). Muslim Filipinos returned home from the training camps in Afghanistan to found a revolutionary jihadi organization of their own, which they called Abu Sayyaf.
In Indonesia a veteran of the Afghan jihad named Jaffar Umar Thalib founded Laskar Jihad, a terror group that aimed to form an Islamic state in a far-flung corner of that sprawling country.7 Another Indonesian by the name of Riduan Isamuddin arrived in Afghanistan in 1988, where he also sought close ties to Bin Laden. Under the nom de guerre of Hambali, he later gained notoriety for his work as the operations chief of the Jemaah Islamiah, Indonesia’s most prominent militant Islamist organization. Aspiring to create a caliphate unifying the Muslim populations of Southeast Asia, he orchestrated a series of terrorist attacks that included the notorious Bali nightclub bombing of 2002, which took the lives of 202 people. Veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan also played an incendiary role in the brutal Algerian civil war that scourged that country in the 1990s, after the secular government annulled the results of an election won by Islamists. As many as 200,000 Algerians died in the fighting, which dragged on for years.
In Central Asia, still other alumni of the “University of Jihad” joined forces with the Islamists in the former Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, fighting on their side against ex-Communist secularists in another bloody civil war that tore that country apart in the 1990s. One of the men who participated on the Islamist side in that conflict went by the nom du guerre of Juma Namangani. Born in the Soviet Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, he had fought in an elite paratrooper unit on Moscow’s side during the war in Afghanistan. The experience had radicalized him, transforming him into a zealous holy warrior. He was among the founders of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, arguably the first transnational Islamist guerrilla group to emerge from the former USSR. His soldiers fought on al-Qaeda’s side in post-9/11 Afghanistan. In this way, too, Moscow’s 1979 intervention in Afghanistan unleashed surprising demons.
The mujahideen victory in 1989, when the last of the Kremlin’s troops finally vacated Afghanistan, did not actually end the war. The departure of the occupiers was followed by a surprisingly long struggle against Moscow’s last client leader in Kabul, the wily Mohammed Najibullah. Through a combination of shrewd maneuvering and cynical pandering to religious sentiment, he managed to keep his government alive longer than just about anyone had predicted—all the way up to 1992, thus outlasting even the USSR itself. He achieved this partly by playing on the divisions among the various Peshawar-based resistance groups, a rancorous bunch even at the best of times. But not even Najibullah could keep this up indefinitely.
It soon proved that the mujahideen were far more effective at fighting a guerrilla war against a vastly superior enemy than they were at governing their own country. Their failure had much to do with the immense destruction visited on the country by the Communist governments in Kabul and the Soviet invaders. But it was also a result of the determined attack on traditional society and its elites orchestrated by the Islamists, who undermined existing institutions wherever they had the opportunity. US historian Barnett Rubin writes that, for the first time in Afghan history, political parties succeeded in penetrating into even the most remote corners of society.8 Despite the allegedly universalist creeds they professed, these parties all too often turned out to be vehicles for the personal ambitions of their leaders, so they had little of value to offer when it came to filling the power vacuum they had helped to create.
No sooner had the holy warriors entered Kabul than their squabbling segued into open warfare. The old vendetta between Ahmed Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the two pioneers of the Islamist insurgency of 1979, occupied a central role in this drama. Massoud had spent the war years fending off Soviet attacks and patiently building up his alternate government in the Panjshir Valley. Hekmatyar, who did not receive as much as he had hoped for from the power-sharing arrangement agreed upon by the seven mujahideen parties, had spent years hoarding his weaponry. Now he unleashed it on his rivals within the resistance. During the years of Soviet occupation and the Najibullah regime, Afghanistan had retained at least had some semblance of centralized government. But now that broke down completely, condemning the country to a vicious internecine conflict that continued, at various levels of intensity, right up to the US intervention in the fall of 2001.
From this environment emerged the fundamentalist group that promoted its own brand of post-1979 Afghan Islamism: the Taliban. Actively supported by the Pakistani military and intelligence services (just like Hekmatyar and Massoud in the 1970s), the Taliban exploited the squabbling among the various established ji-hadi groups to startling effect. Within a relatively short time, the Taliban had established itself as the dominant power in the land, imposing its own sere brand of “Islamic justice” on a citizenry exhausted by years of war. His followers declared Taliban leader Mullah Omar to be the “Amir al-Momineen,” the commander of the faithful. He was also hailed as such by Osama bin Laden, who had returned from a sojourn in Islamist-controlled Sudan to seek a safe haven for al-Qaeda. It was, of course, from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan that Bin Laden launched the terror operation that led to the horrors of 9/11 and the consequences that derived from it. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who at first opposed the Taliban, returned to Afghanistan from Iranian exile after 9/11 and allied himself with Bin Laden. But it was, more than anyone, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Panjshir Valley insurgency, who showed what could be achieved by a charismatic Sunni warlord who was capable of combining the thinking of revolutionary Islam and the art of insurgency. Of all the jihadis, it was above all Massoud who achieved the greatest successes on the battlefield—despite the relatively modest logistical support that he received from the Pakistanis and their paymasters in the West. It was Massoud who perfected the use of sophisticated intelligence work, raids at enemy weak points, and exploitation of the possibilities of modern media as tools in the religious war against a superpower. Troughout the struggle, his movement remained relatively moderate in its aims and never succumbed to the vision of the West as inherently inimical to the Prophet’s cause. The new generation of Islamic radicals, above all Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, could not tolerate such a rival. Yet they never quite succeeded in subduing him by military means. And so it was that Bin Laden resolved to have Massoud assassinated, an effort that finally bore fruit two days before the attacks of September 11. The apprentice had supplanted his master, and the twenty-first century is still living with the consequences.