SOVIETS TRY TO RESHAPE AFGHAN CULTURE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605700005-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 2, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: January 13, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605700005-2
WASHINGTON POST
1RTIP , `119F '7 ` -;~ 13 January 1986
rim PAGE
Soviets Try to Reshape Afghan Culture
Second of floe articles
By James Rupert
SPecial to The Waah"ryltoo Pat
BABRA KHEL, Afghanistan-Last month Omar brought
his 8-year-old son from Kabul to leave him with relatives in
a village near here; the little boy will not go back to the city.
"In Kabul the Soviets are taking the children," Omar ex-
plained.
Omar is now a city man. He moved from the village years
ago to set up a business in Kabul. Even though life is bette?
there than here in the countryside, he said, his son will stay
here. In. Kabul, the Soviets are taking children out of the
schools and sending them to be brought up in the Soviet
Union, he said.
"They are teaching the children to be Soviets, like them,"
he said. The Soviet authorities had started the practice, he
said, soon after they invaded the country in 1979 to prop up
Afghanistan's communist government.
Afghans and western specialists say the education of Af-
ghan children in the Soviet Union is only one of many tools
the Soviets are using to try to remold Afghanistan's culture
along their own lines. Afghans say the Soviets are also ma-
nipulating Afghanistan's Islamic faith in their effort to "So-
vietize" the country.
The Sovietization program takes on added significance
with the apparent intensification of the peace process be-
cause it could allow the Soviets to leave behind a dedicated
cadre of Moscow-trained communists when they pull out. It
also complicates the return of the 3 million refugees in
AFGHANISTAN
THE NEW BATTLEFIELDS
Pakistan-one of the requirements for a settlement-as
they may not want to go back to a country that is under
such tight control.
Seated on the floor at his brother's house. Omir's west-
ern-style trousers and overcoat contrasted with the loose-
fitting clothes and blankets worn by his relatives and former
neighbors gathered to hear him. Surprised to meet a for-
eign journalist, Omar spoke impatiently and urgently, ask-
ing me repeatedly if I understood his story.
But he was also afraid. "Please," he urged, "you must not
write my name or the village's
name in the newspaper-or-we will
be in danger."
Omar said that many children
who had gone to the Soviet Union
were those of Afghan communist
party officials who he thought might
have. sent them willingly.
But, he said, "I know many fam-
ilies, who did not know their children
would be taken. The government
sent people into the schools, and
they took children away. The chil-
dren's fathers only heard when
someone came from school to tell
them."
The teachers in the schools help
the Soviets, and if people go to ask
where the children were taken, the
teachers. will not talk to them, he
said, adding that the parents after-
ward recaged letters from their chil-
dren mailed from the Soviet Union.
At one point, leaning forward, he
asked, "Do American people know
about this?"
Western diplomats and officials of
the,- Afghan Resistance Movement
based in Pakistan also have re-
ported similar stories.
A New Sovietlzed Elite
A 1984 State Department report
said the Soviets began near the end
of that year a mass program to
bring up thousands of Afghan chil-
dren in the Soviet Union. The chil-
dren, ages 7 to 10, reportedly are
to be trained there for 10 years in
an effort to mold a new Sovietized
elite.
Resistance commander Abdul
Haq from Kabul said in an interview
in Peshawar, Pakistan. that his re-
sistance units have seen the first
results of Soviet training of Afghan
children. During the past 2' years,
he said, his guerrillas have captured
about 15 boys who he said had been
trusted in the Soviet Union for mis-
sions against the resistance.
;He described one incident last
year in which resistance forces
found a 12-year-old boy in a rebel-
controlled village carrying a pistol
and a photograph of a local guerrilla
commander. He said the boy would
not give any information until they
staged his recapture by other re-
sistance forces posing as Afghan
government soldiers.
"His name was Zalmai; he was
the son of an Afghan brigadier,"
Abdul Haq said. "He told us he had
been trained [in the Soviet Unions
ftjr p1most five years, and now they
had-sent him to kill the resistance
commander."
-"He told us he liked his teacher
*re than his mother and father,"
Abdul Haq said. "What can we do
wjth these children? We cannot kill
them, but they are dangerous; so
we can only try to keep them with
us, and they mostly escape."
Since Soviet and Afghan author-
ities have closed Afghanistan to
most foreign reporters, accounts
such as Abdul Haq's cannot be in-
vestigated directly. But a broad
range of diplomatic and Afghan
souxces say they are convinced that
Soviet training is aimed at produc-
ing young Afghans with unquestion-
ing Soviet loyalty.
Remaking a Country
Afghanistan's war, which most
observers initially thought would
end in a quick victory for the tech-
nologically superior Soviet Army
and Air Force, is now six years
old-and both sides appear to rec-
ognize the growing importance of a
new battlefield: the loyalties and
cultural identity of the next gener-
ation of Afghans.
"The Soviets are using every tool
they can find to remake this country
in *their image," said Prof. Sayd Maj-
rooh, a former dean of Kabul Uni-
versity now based in Peshawar.
Various observers said the So-
viets are using education-from
kindergarten to the university lev-
el-cultural exchanges, religious in-
sititutions and the mass media to
accomplish three main goals in Af-
ghanistan:
^ Prevent the growth of nationalist
sentiment by sharpening the splits
among the country's many ethnic
and linguistic groups and strength-
ening ties between northern Af-
ghans and their Soviet ethnic coun-
terparts.
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-l
d-Popularize a reinterpreted Islam
more amenable to communist doc-
trine. - `..
s- Build.a .;sew.. e#ite of pro-Soviet
Ugbana that . would be free of the
internal' rifts that have paralyzed the
current ruling communist party:: '
The ruling People's Democratic
ar y of Afghanistan has long been
bitterly divided between two fac-
thns: the Khalq (Masses), predom-
irtly urban, Persian-speaking and
seen as more politically pragmatic,
and the Parcham (Banner), domi-
dated by Afghans of rural origin who
speak Pashtu and are thought more
ideological. The, vendetta resembles
4 -civil . war, including assassinations
Jnd bombings, and hampers govern-
meet tffgtta'>;o:establah full control,
even oveK the capjtal.
Various .Afghan academics and
ptfIIt cians in Peshawar said the So-
viets' most important weapon in the
cultural battle is education-nota-
bly education programs in the So-
vaa? Union. Estimates.pf the num-
bers of Afghans who- go there for
study varied widely, although most
suggested it might number about
6,000 a year.
Abdulbaqi Mehraban questions
how well the Soviet education cam-
paign is working. He studied vet-
erinary medicine for nearly six
years in the Soviet Union before
returning to Kabul in 1981 and flee-
ing to Pakistan in 1984.
Mehraban said he believes most
Afghan university students continue
to go to the Soviet Union for the
same reasons he did: the better
technical education and living stan-
dards. "Many students also like it
because you can get vodka and
meet girls, unlike in Afghanistan,
[and] you can stay out of the Army,"
he said. "When we had been there a
short time, I was impressed: "Peo=
pie had jobs and weren't hungry."
"But after a year, I could speak
good Russian and talk to people and
found out that you can't talk about
your ideas," he said. "Studying a
long time in Russia doesn't make
everyone into a communist."
Reinterpreting History
Afghan exiles in Peshawar say
the Soviets have been unable to
consistently mold loyal function-
aries for the Afghan regime with
their university courses of training
programs for adult Afghani Not
only do some Afghans-such as
Mehraban-defect, but resistance
groups say they place their support-
ers in various programs in both Af-
ghanistan and the Soviet Union for
technical training.
According to Majrooh and other
Afghan academics, the Soviets have
retooled the Afghan education sys-
tem-installing Soviet teachers, a
Marxist-Leninist curriculum- and a
reinterpretation of Afghan history
that describes Russia hs the historic
friend of Afghanistan. Last March
authorities replaced the i French-
style program for primary and sec?
ondary education with the Soviet
system, including compulsory Rus-
sian-language study from the fifth
grade onward.
Last year at a conference on ed-
ucation at Kabul's teachers college,
most of the papers were by Russian
professors, according to a program
smuggled from the country. Ab-
stracts of the papers stressed the
need for a Marxist-Leninist orien-
tation in Afghan education, largely
to help overcome the influence of
Islam on Afghan students.
Resistance leaders and Afghan
intellectuals say Soviet radio broad-
casts and publications aim partic-
ularly at Afghanistan's northern
ethnic groups.
"We have seen increasing num-
bers of Soviet journals aimed at the
Tajiks, Turkmens, and Uzbeks, and
designed to show them how life is
better for people of the same
groups in the [neighboring] Soviet
republics," said Prof. Rasul Amin,
formerly of Kabul University's so-
cial sciences faculty.
Amin said he is especially wor-
ried that new programs to teach
regional languages-Baluchi, Turk-
meni and Uzbek-will lead to a de-
emphasis on Pashtu and Persian
(called Dari in Afghanistan), which
serve as the common languages
among ethnic groups.
But for most Afghans encoun-
tered during a seven-week assign-
ment in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
the most angering and worrisome
part of the Sovietization campaign
is the taking of children to the So-
viet Union.
"What will happen to these chil-
drenr asked Mehraban, the former
veterinary student. "When I was in
Kiev I had Islam and my own mind
to help me understand what I was
seeing-but these children will
have nothing."
"They will be robots," he said.
"Aqd when they come back, the
Russians will just use them, and the
Afghan people will hate them."
Harnessing Islam
"Islam'is the key to Afghanistan's
culture," said Akhtar Mohammed, a
young university graduate, "so to
change Afghanistan, they want to
change our Islam."
'They" are the Soviets. Like
many other Afghan intellectuals,
Mohammed worries about the So-
viets" efforts to harness Afghani-
stan's Moslem faith as a means of
controlling the country.
In their campaign to reshape Af-
ghanistan's culture, Soviet author-
ities have taken control of official.
religious institutions and are rein-
terpreting Islamic doctrine.
"The Soviets were very sophis-
ticated about using religion, said.
Fazle Akbar, an Afghan journalist
here. When the Soviets invaded Af-
ghanistan 'in December 1979,
Akbar was director of Radio.'Af-
ghanistan.
The Afghan communists who took
power in 1978 "were very anti-
Islamic," Akbar said. "They walked
into the mosques with their boots on
and smoked cigarettes inside."
"The Russians had to teach them
how to use Islam as part of their
propaganda," Akbar said.
Rasul Amin, a former Kabul Uni-
versity professor who now coordi-
nates an organization of exiled Af-
ghan intellectuals, said the Soviets
have stepped up efforts to control
religious life in Afghanistan. Last
year, the Soviet-dominated regime of
Babrak ,Karmal established a Reli-
gious Affairs Ministry, which, Amin
said, has two roles.
"The Soviets know they will nev-
er change the ideas of the older
generation" of Afghans," Amin said.
".So for them, the government just
wants to appear benign." Amin and
others said the new ministry had
made a great show of painting and
cleaning mosques, to demonstrate
its commitment to the religion.
"For young people," however,
Amin said, "they want to change the
very idea of Islam." During the past
year, he said, the authorities had
removed many independent mullahs
from their mosques, after having
tolerated them since the invasion. - -
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It has taken the government sev-
eral years to train its own mullahs.
Amin said, and only now are they
emerging to take over mosques in
the cities controlled by the Soviets
and the government. "The indepen-
dent mullahs had never opposed the
government in six years," Amin
said, "but the official mullahs are
more reliable for the authorities."
According to Afghan intellectuals
and political leaders here, the Sovi-
ets and the Kabul government rely
on the new mullahs to help spread a
"Sovietized" Islam that emphasizes
the obligations of a believer to the
Islamic community, but that omits
references to belief in God.
Amin said the Soviets would pre-
fer to limit the distribution of the
Koran, as they have done in their
own Moslem republics, leaving the
state freer to offer its own interpre-
tation of the Koran's teachings.
"They could not change the
Koran because too many Moslems,
even in the Soviet Union, can recite
it from memory," he said.
I A Key Part of the War Is Fought in the Schools
BABRA KHEL, Afghanistan-
Seated in rows on the dried mud
floor of the village mosque, the
young boys of Babra Khel shouted
their lessons. The high-pitched
cacophony stunned the ears.
The boys, between 6 and 12,
read texts that were designed to
teach them Persian and stressed
the themes of jihad, or holy war.
Hamdullah, a benign-looking mul-
lah, sat at the front of the room,
where boys occasionally came for
help with difficult passages.
Here and in similar village
schools throughout Afghanistan,
the resistance forces fight the cul-
tural war. "We must teach the
children the Moslem way of
thought," Hamdullah said. "Only
this will help them resist Soviet.
propaganda."
Like their military battle
against the better equipped Sovi
ets, the resistance movement's
educational campaign must be
fought guerrilla style: in small-
scale operations with few material
resources. One of, the. resistance
commanders in Wardak Province,
Amin Wardak, can send only a few
books and supplies for the 16 boys
of Babra Khel. Girls traditionally
are not sent to school in Afghan-
istan.
As some resistance leaders con-
cede, the education is often not
even basic. When they leave the
schools to begin training at a guer-
rilla base, rural Afghan boys may
not yet be able to read.
The 'response of the guerrillas
to Sovietization also has been
splintered by cultural differences
that emerged as Afghanistan's
elite began to encounter western-
style modernism early in the cen-
tury. These differences are now
-reflected in the resistance move-
ment, especially at its top.
Some of the resistance leader-
ship springs from the same small,
westernized, largely urban class
that spawned Afghanistan's com-
munist leadership. Such men, of-
ten educated by foreign teachers
in Kabul's western-style schools,
generally favor more secular and
technical education to improve the
resistance movement's ability to
handle both sophisticated weapons
and civil administration.
But many fundamentalist Mos-
lem Afghans, regarding their
faith-rather than technical
skills-as the key to victory, ar-
gue for an almost exclusive em-
phasis on religious training.
"It was, after all, a lack of re-
ligious training that enabled the
communists to take over in Af-
ghanistan," . said Mohammed
Salim, a press officer of the Hezb-
i-[slami (Islamic Party) led by Gul-
buddin Hekmatyar.
"We will be able to teach the
physical and natural sciences after
the liberation of our country,"
Salim said, "but for the jihad, we
must study Islam."
The Afghan political parties
based in Peshawar, Pakistan, each
with its own education committee,
fight bitterly over religious issues
in education.
"We're trying to write a science
textbook, and we can't even dis-
cuss the structure of matter, or
decide whether to have pictures in
the book," said Stephen Keller, an
American professor helping to
design education programs for
Afghans. "Some of these guys are
saying it's un-Islamic," he said.
Alongside the disagreemedt
over how to combine religious tra-
dition and western modernism,
Eontinued
Soviet and Afghan broadcasts
argue that Islam as a religion is un-
der attack from the corrupting val-
ues of western imperialist powers,
from the "medievalism" of Iran's
Islamic revolution and from Israeli
expansionism. Adopting a theme of
Moslem fundamentalists, Soviet
propaganda for years has portrayed
western aid workers in Afghani-
stan-especially women-as anti-
Islamic and corrupting influences.
Last fall, when the Jamiat-i-Islami
Party turned back a French medical
team that included women, western
aid workers feared the Afghans had
succumbed to Soviet propaganda.
Jamiat-i-Islami leader Burhanud-
din Rabbani denied that his party
had stopped accepting women but
he acknowledged that "we do have
problems with the Soviet propagan-
da about the women."
But western aid workers from
various regions of Afghanistan
agreed that Soviet propaganda is
combining with the influence of con-
servative Iranians and Arabs who
play supporting roles in the jihad,
and making the westerners' pres-
ence in Afghanistan more difficult.
One British nurse said she met
Arabs from the Persian Gulf states
and Syria while working last sum-
mer near Mazar-i-Sharif, in north-
ern Afghanistan.
"They were very negative about
westerners," she said in an inter-
view here. "They said non-Moslems
didn't belong in a jihad."
Washington Post staff writer Stuart
Auerbach contributed to this story.
Next: Attack on a Soviet-held town
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Afghanistan shares a problem of
many Third World countries*
whose borders were drawn by co-
lonial powers: the lack of a uni-
form culture. Before the Soviet
invasion, American anthropologist
Louis -Dupree identified 21 dis-
tinct ethnic groups, speaking nu-
merous languages and dialects, in
Afghanistan.
Much of Afghanistan's indige-
nous elite is not even in the fight
to build and keep. its own cultural
identity. .. Prof. Sayed Majrooh
ticked off a long list of former col-
leagues who were killed or impris-
oned soon after the first Afghan
communist government came t6)
power in.April 1978:
The Soviets and. the Afghan
communists "wanted to eliminate
anyone who could have-built an
alternative cultural model (to
their ownl for Afghanistan." Maj-
rooh said.
Even among the survivors,
many of Afghanistan's educated
elite are scattered through l i~
rope and North America, an&.re-,
main reluctant to help the resis-
tance in Pakistan or Afghani-
stan-partially because of the po-
litical bickering among the Afghan
parties, according to several Af-
ghan intellectuals in Pakistan.
Not. only the Afghans and the
Soviets, but conservative Arabs
and Iranians seem involved in the.
battle for Afghanistan's future
identity. A number of Afghan in-
tellectuals and resistance com-
manders complained that, in the
rivalries -among the Afghan par-
ties, Arabs and Iranians are favor-
ing fundamentalist Afghan leaders
whose political line they approve.
In addition to discreet official
aid from Arab governments,
wealthy Arab businessmen give
cash to pay for arms and supplies,
and their transportation into Af-
ghanistan, but several. command-
ers said the Arab donors pressure
the Afghans to adopt fundamen-
talist practices.
"The Arabs are using their aid
to promote, in Afghanistan, their
own interpretations of Islam,"
Wardak said.
The Afghan elite, which lived in
Kabul before the war, had strong
cultural links with.European coun-
tries, notably France. One exiled
Afghan academic said this- part of
the resistance leadership worries
about the cultural effects of the
Arab aid: "They are trying to
break our ties with the West," he
said.
Fundamentalist Arabs working
with the Afghan resistance denied
that there was any organized Arab
pressure, and argued that Afghans
themselves are choosing to limit
their contacts with the West. Iran
reportedly tries to exert its own
influence on the Afghan resistance
through its domination of ethnic
Hazara factions in the center of
the-country. The Hazaras, a Shute
Moslem minority in predominantly
Sunni Moslem Afghanistan, long
have had close links with Iran.
The central Hazarajat region is
controlled mainly by. two groups
that identify with Iranian leader
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and
that long have fought more
against the traditional Hazara
leadership than against the
Soviets. A Hazara commander of
the traditionalist Shoura faction
said his group has captured Iran-
ians fighting within the pro-Kho-
meini Sepah and-Nasr factions.
Last summer, a senior Iranian,
Ayatollah Hossein All Montazeri,
hosted a meeting of six Afghan
Shiite factions, directing them to
unify against the Soviets instead
of fighting other resistance
groups.
It is not only the Islamic loyal-
ties of the Afghans that are being
fought over in this war.. The Af-
ghan resistance forces explain
proudly that they are campaigning
actively for an Islamic revival in
the Moslem Soviet republics north
of their border.
In the rhetoric of the jihad, the
struggle is not for the liberation of
Afghanistan, but for the elimina-
tion of Soviet atheistic rule over
all Moslem lands. The Soviets'
"inevitable retreat from [Moslem)
Asia will begin with its military
defeat at the hands of the Afghan
resistance forces," senior com-
mander Jalaluddin Haqqani de-
clared, in an interview with a
Pakistani magazine.
Matthew Erulkar, a former pro-
resistance lobbyist in Washington
who is now organizing a private aid
program for the rebels, explained
in Pakistan last month how he had
visited the Afghan-Soviet border in
Kunduz Province with guerrillas
who, he said, run a cross-border
missionary campaign.
"A, couple of times each week,
they would go to the border to
give Korans and religious pam-
phlets to Soviet Tajiks who would
come to meet them," Erulkar said.
"For them,, this was the most
important thing they did," he said.
"They.would walk around singing
songs about liberating Tajikistan
and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan."
Rupert
- ."
? KUNDI/Z
lye
Mazar..Sharf
`
BALKH
AFGHANISTAN ri' n
'\q n T
~ WAR *Kabul
DAK
Babra Khel?~
Hazaraiat region
50 GHAZNI PAKTIA E a
MILES
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