First Draft Publishing

First Draft Publishing is an independent publishing house. We give researchers, professionals and the interested public access to primary and secondary sources. We introduce new voices and the next generation of leading authorities in their field, as well as accounts from individuals who have shaped events as participants themselves. First Draft Publishing was founded by Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten. http://www.firstdraft-publishing.com

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Fighting Extremism Through Education In Afghanistan

Afghanistan needs to invest in a public education sector that can prevent future generations from becoming cannon fodder for extremist organizations.

First Draft Publishing author Sharif Fayez writes about the role education has played in the history of Afghanistan's relationship with extremism

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David Kilcullen on 'Kandahar Assassins'

Author of 'Counterinsurgency', 'Out of the Mountains' and 'The Accidental Guerilla', David Kilcullen wrote the introduction to First Draft Publishing's latest book, Kandahar Assassins. He explains how learning about the 1980s war against the Soviet Union - and the tactics employed by the mujahedeen fighters - are essential to understanding the present-day conflict in Afghanistan.

The Pashtun word cherik can mean both “guerrilla” and “assassin.”  Mohammed Gumnam uses it in both senses in the account that follows—a tale of the conflict in Kandahar Province in the early 1980s, during the first years of what today we call the Soviet-Afghan War. One of the most striking things about Gumnam’s book, however, is how little the Soviets themselves feature in it. 

The Afghan guerrillas directed their main effort against local Afghan Communists (known to both Gumnan and the guerrillas he profiles as khalqis, from their presumed membership in the Khalq faction of the Afghan communist party). Gumnan’s account depicts an insurgent movement that mainly attacked local Afghan officials and military leaders and, like any guerrilla group, preyed on isolated or weak targets, though they sometimes attacked formed units of the Afghan Army. They also targeted government sympathizers and collaborators within the Kandahari population. As a secondary effort, the guerrillas attacked Soviet advisors and mentors working with the Afghan government, and occasionally targeted the Soviet Army directly. But the vast majority of attacks were directed at khalqis and their local supporters—indeed, out of dozens of incidents described in the book, Gumnam mentions only one attack against Soviet advisors and their families, and one combat incident directly involving Soviet troops. 

The guerrilla war in Kandahar province involved many different factions, operating in a loose and shifting series of temporary alliances of convenience. This dynamic insurgency included relatively large full-time mobile columns in the countryside, small hit teams in urban areas, underground intelligence and propaganda cells, and a vast and distributed network of financial and logistical support on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier.

Mohammed Tahir Aziz Gumnam was part of the support network on the Pakistan side, an Afghan refugee who worked as a medical orderly in a series of hospitals in Quetta, the major city of Baluchistan. Gumnam hated his life of exile, yearned to return to Afghanistan, and regarded Pakistan as a foreign country. He seems to have sought relief for his homesickness, and his sense of disconnectedness from the fight in his homeland, by seeking out the company, and transcribing the life stories, of the wounded fighters whom he and the medical teams were treating in the hospital wards. These fighters came from all over Afghanistan, sometimes brought in by a guerrilla comrade or a family member, and sometimes by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Gumnam mentions wounded fighters coming from Ghazni, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan in Afghanistan’s south and east, but also from Herat and Farah in the west. Nonetheless, he seems to have focused his attention on collecting tales of the jihad from convalescent guerrillas who had been operating in Kandahar, immediately opposite Baluchistan.

Gumnam’s book is a series of tales from two of these Kandahari mujahidin—Noor Mohammad, son of Abdul Zahir, from Dand district, Spin Ziyarat, in the rural south of Kandahar province, and Abdul Ghaffar, son of Hajji Sayyed Mohammad, from Kandahar City’s fifth district. Noor Mohammad, known as The Lame Ghazi, tells mainly of his own exploits in the rural districts around Kandahar and on the city’s outskirts. Abdul Ghaffar, whom Gumnam calls “The Martyr Ghaffari” (both he and Noor Mohammad were later killed) describes both his own activities and those of several other fighters in the urban guerrilla campaign—mainly taking the form of kidnappings, assassinations, ambushes and raids on government installations—in Kandahar city itself.

The book might be considered a Thousand-and-One Nights of the Afghan jihad, since Gumnam structured it in a consciously classical tale-telling style, framing each story with a vignette from the hospital, and interspersing narrative prose with verse and song. Whatever its literary merits, however, his account is mainly of interest because of the continuities it illuminates between the tactics, organization and attitudes of guerrillas in the 1980s and those of the insurgents (loosely described as “Taliban”) who operate in the same areas today. 

As Lester Grau and Ali Jalali showed in The Other Side of the Mountain, their classic study of mujahideen tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War, the Afghan guerrilla is a creature of habit.  Grau and Jalali cited numerous instances of guerrilla groups using the same tactics, in the same places, again and again over a period of many years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Gumnam’s account shows a guerrilla movement using strikingly similar tactics to those the Taliban use today. These tactics included drive-by shootings, kidnappings, at least one beheading, pistol assassinations, ambushes, roadside bombings, night raids and rocket and mortar bombardments. Likewise, there was a strong overlap among locations that were dominated by insurgents in the 1980s (the urban Kandahar neighborhood of Mahalajat, for example, or the rural districts of Panjwai and Maiwand), and the places that are dominated by Taliban insurgents today. So-called “Taliban fronts”—composed of religious students fighting under the direction of their mullahs, or of recruits from madrassahs or refugee camps in Pakistan—were also present during the early 1980s, though they were by no means dominant actors in the guerrilla operations of that time.

Equally, however, there were significant differences from today’s conflict. The sophistication of roadside bombs, for example, is vastly greater today than in the 1980s. In the operations Gumnam describes, the guerrillas occasionally made use of mortar bombs or captured land mines, but did not employ the sophisticated triggers and improvised remote-controlled explosive devices used today. Nor did they conduct suicide bombings, raid and penetrate major military bases, or seize and hold government facilities or buildings within the city for any extended period, as today’s insurgents do. Rather, the guerrillas of the 1980s operated in both urban and rural variations of the traditional patterns of banditry—preying on government officials and rural road traffic, picking off isolated posts or individuals, and raiding the institutions of the state before disappearing again into the night, the countryside or the urban warren of old Kandahar.

In a broader sense, neither the guerrillas of the 1980s nor today’s Taliban operated within a conscious “insurgency” or “revolutionary warfare” frame of reference. Gumnam’s narrative focuses wholly within the framework of a defensive Islamic jihad against an infidel invader and a collaborationist regime of “country-sellers”, and thus fits much more neatly within traditions of Islamic warfare, on the one hand, and nationalist resistance warfare, on the other, than within an insurgency or People’s War paradigm. This tends to suggest that, whatever differences might exist between Gumnam’s “assassins of Kandahar” and today’s Taliban, one key similarity is the danger of mirror-imaging, projecting onto an opponent the same mental framework that an occupying military force uses. Whatever else it may be, Gumnan’s detailed and lyrical account of the war that he and his contemporaries fought against in Kandahar during the 1980s is a useful corrective for such errors.

Kandahar Assassins is available for purchase in paperback and electronic formats now. For more information and links to buy, visit our website.

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How the Soviet-Afghan War Made the Taliban | VICE United States

In a new book called I Am Akbar Agha, the former Taliban insider recounts memories of jihad and the 1980s that forged the militant group's identity. What follows is the book's foreword by Anand Gopal, whose own book—No Good Men Among the Living—was just nominated for a National Book Award.

You can now read the complete foreword to I Am Akbar Agha (just published by First Draft Publishing) on Vice's website.

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Interview with a Taliban Insider

Our first publication at First Draft Publishing is Akbar Agha's I am Akbar Agha. It is now on sale at Amazon, the iBookstore and other online outlets. Saba Imtiaz, another First Draft Publishing author, spoke to Akbar Agha last December about his book and what he hoped to achieve by writing it.

Can you describe your book?

There are a lot of things in the book. Mullah Mohammad Omar and a lot of the senior [Taliban] leadership were part of my mujahideen group. This is the first time I’m telling the real story of what happened with the Jaish ul-Muslimeen in Kabul – which, as you remember, a lot was published about.

Another important thing is that I have refused to tell stories in the book that other people told me. The only things in the book are those things that I saw with my own eyes, because other people’s stories can be untrue.

It is also a story of firsts. In the 1980s, mine was the first mujahideen front, a lot of other fronts came later. They all started from that, particularly in Kandahar.

After 2001, after the Taliban government fell, my group - the Jaish ul-Muslimeen - was the first to attack foreigners. People said I should have done it under the Taliban name. But mine was the first group to fight against the Americans.

There have been a lot of books written about the Taliban, such as My Life With the Taliban by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef and by people like Ahmed Rashid. How is yours different?

The differences come from two things. Some people were only there for a short period and were telling stories that they could not confirm. 

Some of the people who wrote/told things to other journalists were my mujahideen or under me (such as Mullah Zaeef etc.) These were all people I was financing or supporting or were part of my front. Their perspective is different but I, as the leader of the group, have a broader perspective. Others can only see a smaller part of the picture.

Who do you want to read your book? What audience are you hoping for?

The most important thing is that it is read by people outside Afghanistan, especially with its publication in English. People here know these stories already. People outside of Afghanistan need to hear this, especially because of the injustices by Americans and Pakistanis and Iranians (who are giving money to various Shi’ite groups). Essentially I am writing these stories for foreigners so that they know about the injustices.

For Afghans as well, this is a chronicle – it is a piece of history.

What do you think about Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan? Have they learnt from the past or do they still want to interfere in the country’s future?

Pakistan has specific goals it wants to carry out in Afghanistan and it isn’t necessary that the Taliban carry out these goals. They can be carried out by others. Pakistan locked up a lot of senior Taliban leaders; it’s clearly not a case of them being supportive all the time. They bring their own conditions. A lot of people say that the Taliban were created by the government of Pakistan but that’s not really the case. A lot of this was circumstantial. A lot of them [the Taliban] were refugees and couldn’t go elsewhere, especially [people] in the south. I don’t think at all that the government of Pakistan now wants the Taliban to come to power.

How long did the book take to write?

The book took nine to ten months to write. I found time around my other appointments.

The book contains very detailed accounts from the 1980s, from your time on the frontline. How did you recall these episodes? Was it through interviews with other people or from memory?

All from memory. I was very young at the time [of jihad] and remember most things. I am working on a new book about the things I saw and interesting things from other groups.

What is Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan? 

What is going on is that we have interference both ways. We also have to remember that the situation at the moment is not like it was in the past. Pakistan is busy with internal issues. There is interference in Balochistan and Waziristan, just as we know there is interference by Pakistan in Afghanistan. There won’t be deep interference from Pakistan as before – it is not as strong and effective as it was in the past – and there have also been complications by foreign hands.

In your book you describe your treatment at the hands of Pakistan’s security apparatus when you were detained there… 

There were lots of things that I didn’t write about the relationship with Pakistan and how I was treated. The main reason to include it was that there was a need because people didn’t know about these things. It stems from a concern for people [from the Taliban] currently being held in Pakistan, to let outsiders know that this treatment is against human rights and Islamic principles.

Why is it that there is little documentation and first-hand knowledge written down from the 1980s?

There was a big shura in eastern Afghanistan attended by Haqqani and very senior people at the end of the 1980s. It was a big gathering and it was meant to be photographed but I opposed it and got other people to oppose it. In the 1980s, a foreign journalist wanted to write about a mujahideen front and all of the mujahideen were very angry. People didn’t like it because they wanted to carry out pure jihad. If you start talking about it, you boast about it and take away its value. I also opposed it but I am writing about it for personal reasons.

For example, there’s the Jihad museum in Herat, which has memorabilia from the war…

In Herat, people have money for this kind of material. In Kandahar we were so poor, the mujahideen, all of the money was spent on guns, ammunition, tanks and we were occupied with battles. There is no evidence because we didn’t spend money on photos.