France’s Afghan fundamentalist heroes
© Getty Images Taliban fighters guard a checkpoint in Kabul
There was a time when the French press lauded the mujahideen who fought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and romanticised their land and traditions
by Denis Souchon
[Ed.: some parts omitted for brevity]
etween the resounding US defeat in Vietnam in 1975, and the first creaks in the Soviet satellite regimes of Eastern Europe (a state of emergency was declared in Poland in 1981), the United States and Western Europe believed, or made people believe, that the Soviet Union had launched a major global offensive. In Africa, newly independent Angola and Mozambique seemed to reach out to the Soviets; in Central America, Marxist guerrillas overthrew a pro-American dictatorship in Nicaragua; in Europe, a pro-Soviet Communist party briefly steered the politics of Portugal, a founding member of NATO. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was taken as a sign that Moscow was on the move, and revived the cold war. The resistance of the Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors) was welcomed as a check to the hegemonic ambitions ascribed to the Soviet Union, and was widely celebrated.
No matter that almost all the fighters presented as heroes were traditionalist or even fundamentalist Muslims. At the time, religion was not necessarily seen as a negative unless, as in Iran, it opposed strategic western interests. (This was not the case in Catholic Poland, encouraged by Pope John-Paul II, former bishop of Krakow, nor in Afghanistan itself.) Because geopolitical priorities required that Afghanistan should become for the Soviet Union what Vietnam had been for the US, the media, almost in unison, praised the mujahideen as loveable rebels, deeply attached to their faith, and viewed the life of Afghan women through the naive and magical prism of popular arts and traditions.
Looking back 30 years at the generalisations and stereotypes in the French press — from hard-right Le Figaro Magazine to leftish Le Nouvel Observateur — between 1980 and 1988, we can see how almost everything that aroused admiration when it rallied support for the struggle against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union (Ronald Reagan’s phrase) has since become an object of loathing and fear. The press applauded the exploits of the mujahideen, but since the 1990s their ideological cousins in Algeria (the Groupe Islamique Armé, GIA), Afghanistan (the Taliban), and in the Middle East (Al-Qaida and Islamic State or ISIS), have been portrayed as fanatics, religious maniacs and barbarians.
Though the mujahideen of the 1980s, who carried out no attacks in other countries, differ in important ways from the Algerian GIA or ISIS, Afghanistan incubated their successors. The Jordanian father of ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, arrived there as the Soviets were withdrawing and stayed until 1993. Osama bin Laden, founder of Al-Qaida, was sent to Peshawar in Pakistan by the Saudi secret services, to support the mujahideen. Algeria’s Moktar Belmokhtar, whose organisation Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has claimed responsibility for the attack on the Splendid Hotel in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, also went to help drive out the Soviet Union’s Afghan allies in the late 1980s. He returned to Algeria during the civil war and fought with the GIA (Algerians who had been to Afghanistan were known as “the Afghans”) before joining Al-Qaida. These men, and many others, were viewed favourably by the West while they served its strategic interests. When they turned against the West, the way the European and US press depicted their motivation, their religious extremism and their ferocity changed completely.
Islamic fundamentalism, a strategic ally of the West
On 3 February 1980, soon after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan motivated by the failure of the local Communists, in government since 1978 (1), Zbigniew Brzezinski, then US national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, travelled to Pakistan, and told mujahideen who had taken refuge there: “That land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again. Because your cause is right, God is on your side.” In the 1980s, the French media line on Afghanistan supported the US’s geopolitical objective.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, TF1 News, 29 December 1981: “We must believe, we must accept the idea, that like all resistance movements throughout the world, the Afghans can only win if they have weapons. They will only be able to beat tanks with automatic rifles; they will only be able to beat helicopters with Sam 7s; they will only be able to beat the Soviet army if they have other weapons [...] than those they manage to capture from the Red Army, in short, if the West agrees to help them. [...] I believe we are now in a situation very similar to the situation we faced during the Spanish civil war. [Then,] we had a duty to intervene, a duty to interfere. [...] Today, I believe the Afghans only have a chance of winning if we accept that we must interfere in Afghan internal affairs.” Lévy supported the Afghan war after 9/11 with the same fervour.
A society of free men and their helpers
Marek Halter, Le Monde, 30 June 1981: “To allow Afghans to talk to Afghans, the way the French spoke to the French during the German occupation, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has decided to help the Afghan resistance to build a radio station on its territory: Radio Free Kabul. [In] December 1979, one of the world’s major powers had just invaded a weak and defenceless neighbour. [...] Old rifles were got out of chests, pistols from under the straw. A poorly armed resistance rose up.” (Halter was referring to the Chant des Partisans, a hymn of the French Resistance: “Get your rifles, your machine guns, your grenades from under the straw.”)
Patrice de Plunkett, Le Figaro Magazine, 13 September 1980: “What is dying in Kabul, under the heel of the Soviet boot, is a society of free and upright men.”
The exotic mujahideen and their beautiful country
The French, who were decreasingly religious and often culturally liberal, and the Afghans, who were traditionalists, didn’t automatically get on. It was important to present the mujahideen as simple folk who had faith and valued their ancestral customs and village loyalties. The often deadly clashes between anti-Soviet clans and tribes were presented as being like the chaotic resistance of Gaulish villages against the Roman legions (a reference to the Asterix comic books).
Pierre Blanchet, Le Nouvel Observateur, 7 January 1980: “Let’s be clear: in Tehran, fundamentalism emerged with the joyful and uncontrolled liberation of the urban lower classes after 20 years of megalomania, waste and garish westernisation. In Afghanistan, it is purely a matter of tradition, nothing but tradition. It is not hyper-politicised, as in Iran, nor overheated. The fervour has always been there. [...] God’s mountaineers and resistance fighters put their faith in him.”
The problem of women
All this courage, resistance, community solidarity, exoticism and beauty were not enough to distract fromthe issue of the status of Afghan women — a problem, particularly for the French, whose political consciousness had been transformed by the feminist struggle. The difficulty could not be denied, since the Afghan Communists had banned child marriages and reduced the importance of dowries. But warnings against taking too western a view got around this. It was suggested that behaviour and symbols had different meanings in different countries. The suggestion was not false in itself, but cultural relativism vanished as soon as the fighters turned from allies to adversaries.
Emmanuel Todd, Le Monde, 20 June 1980: “The ‘oppression’ of women is just one part of the system. Total Eurocentrism does not help us in any way to understand how this society works, since ‘oppression’ often weighs as much on men as on women, for example, in the case of arranged marriages.”
Muhammad Najibullah’s Afghan Communist regime survived for three years after the Soviet troops left in 1989. In 1996, after several years of deadly clashes between rival clans, Kabul fell to the Taliban. They captured Najibullah, who had taken refuge in a UN building, tortured, castrated and shot him, and hung his body from a lamppost.
In 1998 Le Nouvel Observateur asked Brzezinski: “Do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?” He replied: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”