Taking Lessons from the Prophet in Times of War

On 26 April 1978, the Leninist Khalq faction of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), led by former journalist Nūr Muḥammad Tarakī (assassinated 1358SH/1979), seized power in a coup against the government of Muḥammad Dāvūd Khān (assassinated 1357SH/1978), euphemistically called the “S̱awr Revolution”, and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.1 With this, the more than a decade-long tug-of-war between antireligious leftists and emphatically religious forces in the country had reached a first culmination point. Almost instantly, the PDPA forces started to quell any potential resistance to their regime with brute force, culminating in the massacre of over a thousand villagers in Keṛālah in the north-eastern province of Kunar nearly exactly a year after the coup. The armed resistance to the PDPA regime, which emerged in response,2 soon evolved into a complex mesh of traditional ad hoc militias in rural Pashtun communities (lax̌karūnah; sing. lax̌kar), well-organised Islamist organisations of urban3 provenance, and armed outfits with social as well as ideological ties into both of the former. Moreover, this mesh also became almost instantly – although to substantially variant degrees – a pawn in the geopolitical manoeuvrings of numerous governments in the Age of the Cold War, which became even more severe after the Soviet military intervention in the country on Christmas Eve 1979. This invasion, in turn, resulted in the installation of a president more subservient to the interests of the CPSU leadership, as well as a continuous presence of Soviet armed forces in Afghanistan for an entire decade.