Jihad

Jihad is the language through which the Afghan war’s fighters understand resistance to the Russian invasion, but the novel does not treat that language as a simple explanation of the conflict. For Abdel Khader Khan and Ahmed Zadeh, it names a duty to defend a homeland; for Khaled Ansari, the war also emerges from strategic rivalry and political manipulation. As the fighting advances, the declared cause is further tested by the realities of combat, where survival and attachment to home become more immediate than ideology.

Meaning and Immediate Grounds

For Abdel Khader Khan, the cause is personal as well as religious and political. He explains that the mujaheddin besieging Kandahar are his people, from his village, and that they also come from Nazeer’s village. His group has already assisted them in various ways; now, he says, the time has come to provide guns and, if necessary, his own blood. The appeal to jihad thus grows from obligations to a particular community and homeland, rather than from an abstract call to battle.

Khader’s explanation also determines what his mission will require of Lin. Lin asks why the group is going to Kandahar while suffering through heroin withdrawal, and Khader answers by identifying the fighters as people tied to his and Nazeer’s villages. He presents armed assistance as the next step in a sustained relationship of aid, not as an isolated act. His reassurance that Lin must first recover places care for his companion alongside the approaching military commitment: the cause may demand sacrifice, but Lin’s immediate condition matters too.

Ahmed Zadeh articulates the religious meaning more directly, describing resistance as a holy duty to liberate Muslim land from Russian invaders. Yet his politics complicate any assumption that the fighters’ religious identity makes them uniformly opposed to socialist ideas. Ahmed Zadeh identifies as a communist and invokes Marx, Lenin, and Mao as well as Allah. He acknowledges that the Russians built bridges, highways, schools, colleges, dams, and power stations, and says he supported such work when it helped people. For him, the decisive rupture came when Russia invaded to force change on Afghanistan: he sees that action as imperialism and as a betrayal of the principles the Russians claimed to represent.

A War of Competing Interests

Khaled Ansari offers a geopolitical account that broadens the conflict beyond the fighters’ stated religious commitment. Afghanistan, he explains, is strategically valuable despite lacking major reserves of oil, gold, or other resources that might attract outside powers. Russia wants influence over a neighboring country; it first pursued control through aid and a government Khaled characterizes as a puppet. During the Cold War, the United States opposed that alignment and supported religious leaders hostile to the changes being introduced in Afghanistan. When American money and weapons became available, those leaders took up arms; Russia eventually invaded, and the war followed.

This account makes jihad one force in a struggle also shaped by outside intervention and domestic political ambitions. Ahmed Zadeh adds Pakistan to that picture: he says the country wants Afghan land as it grows, and that its military leaders are aligned with the United States. He describes fighters being trained in religious schools, or madrassahs, across Pakistan, and calls them Talebs, who will enter Afghanistan after the existing fighters win. His confidence in victory falters, however, when he considers the war that might follow. The prospect of another conflict shadows the language of liberation: success against one invading power does not, in this account, guarantee a settled peace.

The fighters themselves reflect the international reach of the conflict. Ahmed Zadeh describes the group as including Khader from Afghanistan, Khaled from Palestine, Mahmoud from Iran, Lin—whose nationality has been changed by his American identity—and Ahmed Zadeh from Algeria. Khaled adds men from Morocco, the Gulf, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Iraq, alongside Afghans from different regions and ethnic groups. Their diversity does not erase the local basis of Khader’s appeal, but it shows how a defense of Afghan territory has drawn people from far beyond the villages at its center.

Historical Memory and Inheritance

Khader connects the contemporary struggle to an earlier Afghan war. In November 1878, he recounts, British forces crossed the Khyber Pass, beginning the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Lord Frederick Roberts captured Kabul and imposed martial law; Khader recalls the hanging of eighty-seven Afghan soldiers in a public square, the destruction of buildings and markets, the burning of villages, and the deaths of hundreds of Afghans. The detail makes resistance part of a history of invasion and occupation, not merely a response to the present Russian campaign.

Khader then links his family to that history. In June, Prince Ayub Khan announced a jihad against the British and left Herat with ten thousand men. Khader identifies Ayub Khan as his ancestor and says that many of his kinsmen served in the army he raised. The account gives Khader’s commitment a familial dimension: the cause he supports in the present is set beside an inherited history of Afghan resistance. His narration is not detached chronicle; at the mention of his ancestor, his expression remains controlled but his jaw tightens, marking the personal force of the story without turning it into a guarantee that history will repeat itself.

The Battle of Maiwand and the ensuing Siege of Kandahar supply the older campaign with specific stakes. Khader recounts that Ayub Khan’s army met a British and Indian force led by Burrows at Maiwand. The British lost half their number; the Afghans lost two thousand five hundred men, but won, forcing the British to retreat to Kandahar. Ayub Khan then surrounded the city. From the group’s mountain vantage, Khader can point toward the historical battlefield and the contemporary Kandahar below. The landscape binds the two wars together, while the people fighting in the present are described as having once lived in the city as teachers and merchants before becoming exiles who attack their former homes.

Principle Under Pressure

Lin’s path into Khader’s organization carries a different motive from the collective cause Khader describes. After torture in Arthur Road Prison, Lin wants to discover who placed him there and why, and he wants revenge. He understands joining Khader’s branch of the mafia as the safest and fastest route to that vengeance. Khader’s instruction, including sending Lin to Khaled to learn the black-market money trade, turns Lin from a man who has committed crimes into a professional criminal. This background does not make Lin’s participation identical to the Afghan fighters’ claim of defending their homeland; it places his personal grievance within the same organization and mission.

The novel also shows how principle can be overwhelmed by war’s immediate demands. Its reflection on men fighting for land and loved ones describes causes and justifications losing force as death and survival take over. In the later retreat, Lin and the others descend from the mountains as enemy mortars find their range, followed by exchanges of fire from AK-74 rifles. The scene puts the campaign’s arguments into physical danger without resolving them: the fighters have spoken of faith, invasion, and liberation, but now must escape a battle that threatens their lives.

Jihad therefore remains both a sincere account of resistance and a term caught within a larger, contested history. Khader grounds it in village, kinship, and the defense of Afghanistan; Ahmed Zadeh joins it to anti-imperialism without abandoning communist thought; Khaled traces the forces that turn local opposition into an international proxy struggle. As war narrows the fighters’ attention to survival and home, the novel preserves the weight of their declared ideals while showing that ideals alone cannot contain the conflict they have entered.