Night Letters

4 ideas

1. The failed 1975 Islamist uprising

   In July 1975, years before the Soviet invasion, the young Kabul University Islamists launched coordinated armed uprisings against President Daoud in the Panjshir valley and other districts, with Pakistani backing from their exile base in Peshawar. The local population did not rise, and government forces crushed the revolts within days. The recriminations over who was to blame split the movement into Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami and Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami, whose commander Ahmad Shah Massoud became Hekmatyar's lifelong rival.

2. The jihad predated its foreign sponsors

   The Afghan Islamist insurgency was not created by the CIA, Pakistan's ISI or the Soviet invasion. It grew out of a homegrown revolutionary movement built on Muslim Brotherhood ideas on the Kabul University campus in the 1960s. Foreign patrons later armed and amplified an organisation that already existed, with its own leaders, goals and rivalries, and those goals did not match the patrons' plans.

3. Campus rivalry forging mirror-image vanguards

   At Kabul University, Islamist and communist student groups competed for the same small educated elite. Each organised as a disciplined, secretive vanguard aiming to seize the state, and the two movements shaped each other through that competition. Their campus fights turned lethal early, including a 1972 killing for which Hekmatyar was jailed. That habit of treating political opponents as enemies to be eliminated carried directly into the wars that followed.

4. Decades of war as classmates' feuds

   View the Afghan wars as fought largely by a small cohort of men who knew each other as students and young activists in the 1960s and 70s. Their personal loyalties, betrayals and grudges drove events as much as ideology or superpower strategy did. The Hekmatyar–Massoud feud that began in the 1970s explains why the mujahideen turned on each other after 1992 and rocketed Kabul into ruins.

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