The Political Significance of Weapons

The new religious leaders set themselves above the locals and acted in an authoritarian manner because they had the ability to acquire weapons and thus to enforce their wills. The possession of weapons was, of course, necessary for waging jehad. The matter of weaponry was especially critical in this conflict. At no time before had the gap been so wide between the Afghans and the invaders in the quality, quantity, and range of weapons. In contrast with the past, when the Afghans provided large numbers of high-quality weapons to their combatants, they could now provide very few weapons, and those of poor quality. But to wage jehad the mujahideen must have weapons. They obtained weapons from two sources: from the army of the Kabul regime and through their own Peshawar-based organizations.

To acquire weapons, the mulla commanders of Logar, particularly of the Mohammad Agha front, would ambush enemy forces when they were in their locality. In addition, troops from the Kabul regime sometimes assisted them by defecting, bringing their advanced weapons with them. The commanders would submit such weapons to their headquarters as spoils, in contrast to the tribes of Paktia (Gurbuz, Tanay, Zadran, Mangal, and Zazay), who either quarreled over weapons or received some concessions from the regime in return for weapons.^[31] The Logaris were successful in acquiring weapons from the regime forces. During the twenty months following the Soviet invasion the Kabul regime lost 25,000 Kalashnikovs to the mujahideen in Logar.^[32]

The other source of weapons was beyond the border. From there weapons were sent to the mujahideen from two places: from the Darra-e-Adam Khel in the Afriday land where the Peshawar-based organizations made the purchase, and from Peshawar itself, to which the governments that supported the Afghan cause sent weapons. Jan Goodwin donned a disguised to visit this first place, a town forbidden to foreigners: “Of the 250 or so arms dealers in Darra, half that number are engaged in copying any kind of weapon from anywhere in the world you require.…In this dusty maze-like town, where the sound of gunfire is continuous as guns are tested and demonstrated for customers, it is possible to purchase light and heavy machine guns, mortars and rocket launchers in addition to ordinary rifles, all of which have been skillfully copied.”^[33]

Of the foreign sources of weapons, the United States and Egypt were the major ones during the first two years of the invasion. The United States and some Muslim countries began to support the mujahideen, “cautiously channeling limited amounts of small arms and other military equipment to them.”^[34] In January 1980, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Carter administration appropriated about $30 million to supply the resistance. In December 1982 President Reagan’s administration reportedly ordered the Central Intelligence Agency “to provide the Afghan insurgents for the first time with bazookas, mortars, grenade launchers, mines and recoilless rifles of Soviet origin, and possibly also shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.”^[35] But not all the aid reached the mujahideen: published estimates said between one-third and one-half of the aid was diverted by Pakistan or sold by representatives of the mujahid groups in Peshawar. Edward Girardet, who visited the mujahideen territory, wrote in September 1984 that the American military aid that was “seeping through.…tend[s] to be of poor quality or insufficient quantity” and that he and other visitors had not found published accounts of “a highly effective” CIA program to be true.^[36] Although for many years the mujahid commanders did not receive enough weapons to fight the enemy, they still got enough to enable them to push out traditional elders from their areas and to rule over the territories under their control in an authoritarian manner. Emboldened by the moral force of the jehad that they were conducting against an atheist invader and strengthened by weapons, the new leaders acted like independent rulers, showing little or no regard for the people whom they ruled.