they’re going to torture me. I knew this was where the special cases were brought. But they just held me for three months. I was treated better than in the prison. Then one night, around two A.M., they put me in a Volga and drove me to my sister’s house and released me.” As is so often the case in Afghanistan… where men keep in close contact all their lives with second, third, and fourth cousins through extended tribal networks; where blood is not only thicker than water but as persistent as the law and politics too… a distant relative was found who in turn had a relation at the Interior Ministry, and with their help, plus a $7,500 bribe, Haq was released. He was “young and just irresponsible,” Haq’s relative told KhAD officials during the negotiations.
“A few days later I escaped to Pakistan,” Haq said. “That’s when I really started fighting.”
Abdul Haq spent only two weeks in Peshawar before joining the forces of an older and already established mujahidin leader, Jallaluddin Haqqani, who had just opened a front against Taraki’s regime in Paktia, an eastern province south of Nangarhar, along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Jallaluddin taught Haq how to fire and repair all types of machine guns and other ordnance that Haq had not yet encountered.
But fighting with Jallaluddin had made Haq realize “how stupid the mujahidin were. We would build huts that leaked snow from the roof. We would start a fire and burn our faces while feeling cold on our backs. We would go for days without food, when a little planning would have allowed us to eat whenever we wanted. We suffered for no reason because we had no experience in surviving for long periods outside in the snow.”
Haq left Jallaluddin after a few months and started his own front in Nangarhar, where Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami enjoyed strong local support, thanks to the stunning personal example set by Khalis himself in the
Haq harbored deep love and respect for his older brother and Yunus Khalis, but he was not blind to their faults. Din Mohammed and Khalis both had plenty of faith and heart, but that’s all they had. In the eyes of Western diplomats they may have been fundamentalist radicals, but Haq saw them as overly conservative and hopelessly out of date when it came to developing a strategy that would allow the mujahidin to survive against a modern superpower’s army.
“I knew I must start a front on my own in Kabul,” Haq told me. “Khalis had nothing there at the time. All of our strength was in Nangarhar and Paktia. Khalis and my brother said, ‘No, the government is going to kill you. You are too young and don’t know what it is to fight the regime in Kabul. You are not ready to fight there.’ I had lots of arguments with them about it. It was the first time I ever fought with them. Finally I said, ‘Look, I’m going to start a front in Kabul whether you want me to or not. Can you help me with money or arms?’ They said no. I got really angry and told them that the machine guns and other arms I captured in Nangarhar were mine to keep, and I was going to take the guns with my friends to Kabul. I left Peshawar without saying goodbye. I was really mad. I felt deserted.”
Abdul Haq once claimed to have started his Kabul front with three other mujahidin and 300 afghanis (under $5 at the time). No doubt he exaggerated. Nevertheless, in his mind it was something he accomplished on his own, without the help or encouragement of those he had always loved and looked up to. He had at last broken away from the family fold. Years later, when Western analysts discerned that Haq had kept his distance from the family interest in Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami, they couldn’t have known how right they were.
Of the three original fighters who crossed into Afghanistan with Abdul Haq in the first weeks of 1980, two are now dead. One of the two was a Kabul police officer, Zabet Halim, who defected with arms, a car, and several other men and joined up with Haq in the forests of Paghman, west of the city. More weapons came from Haq’s other brother, Abdul Qadir, who had more confidence in Haq than Din Mohammed or Khalis had. Qadir had smuggled the guns across the border from the arms bazaar at Darra without Din Mohammed’s knowledge.
Haq’s mujahidin then numbered about a dozen. They lived in the fields, in the snow, and attacked small Communist posts in the outskirts of Kabul. Halim’s stolen car was used to make night forays into the city… easy at the time, since this was before the Soviets had established a formal security perimeter. Haq spent his time in the capital meeting with the few friends he could trust, to explain what he was trying to do and to ask for their help. He also sent messages to Khalis and Din Mohammed, begging them to reconsider. He needed more arms and more money. No answers came. He eventually cut off all contact with them.
The culture Abdul Haq was operating in, though riddled with treachery and intrigue, didn’t include a modern, sophisticated underground guerrilla network. Haq didn’t learn such a technique on his feet, either: even a few small mistakes in 1980 would have cost him his life. He just seemed to know instinctively what an intelligence network was. Later in his career he would use file cards for everything, but that was because his mind seemed to be divided into airtight compartments, each keeping track of a different underground operation simultaneously. His ability to think analytically was his single greatest asset, even more developed than his talent with explosives.
“I realized that not everyone can pick up a gun and fight. Not everyone was a tough guy like me. But everyone could do something. Those who had money could buy boots and field jackets for us. And those who couldn’t fight and didn’t have money could just work their way up behind desks in the government and listen… and tell us what was going on. You have to make even the weakest and stupidest people feel they have an important job to do. That way everyone will help you.”
The first months of 1980, as the Red Army was implanting itself in Afghanistan, parading up and down the main roads with tanks, showing the flag… in effect telling the citizenry that armed, popular resistance was a quaint, romantic notion that just didn’t work in the real world of massive Soviet arms… Haq spent more of his time talking than he did fighting. It was an elementary apparatus he was setting up: clandestine groups of five or less, all people he knew, who in turn would organize similar groups of people they could trust absolutely. One secret group did nothing but print leaflets. Another distributed them. Another passed messages between printer and distributor. One unit hid the explosives while another transferred them to a third, which carried out the operation. No group knew very much about what the others were doing. Haq invented a language of code words, coded clothing, even an umbrella code for street signals. One month, someone holding a black umbrella meant an operation was on, while the next month the same color meant it was postponed. Because such a basic intelligence system had never been attempted with any discipline in Afghanistan before, and because the Soviets weren’t expecting one, it was effective.
A confidant of the guerrilla leader said, “Haq knew that for such people to succeed they needed to live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods… like Chardihi, south of the city… and have nice cars and nice clothes, so they would look like people who had enough money to bribe their way out of the army and would never be stopped or suspected by the police. He also knew that such groups of people may go months at a time doing nothing at all for the network, yet still had to be maintained, still encouraged, still given pep talks… and still
The short time Haq was in Nangarhar before starting the front in Kabul, he had established a rudimentary network in Jalalabad that he had turned over to “Engineer” Mahmoud (another Khalis commander). Mahmoud did nothing with it: never contacted the people, never paid them. So that underground fell apart and Haq got very angry at him. The other mujahidin, including other top Khalis commanders, had no concept of what a network was all about.
Intelligence work took a good deal of money, since operatives had to be paid. Haq, because he was a clear thinker, was a good talker and persuader. With the coming of the Soviets, his reputation as a brawler and young rebel was suddenly converted into hard currency as someone with experience at what the Afghans needed most. So the money came. It came from Haq’s friends’ fathers who were merchants and traders. It came from Abdul Qadir, more sympathetic to Haq than Din Mohammed, who ran a smuggling network between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it came from a handful of wealthy, patriotic families willing to give money rather than fight or lose their business with the Communist government.
In July 1980 the BBC reported that a large number of mujahidin were harassing the Soviets in Paghman, west of the capital. “There were only thirteen of us in Paghman,” Haq told me. “The rest were in houses in Kabul. The BBC exaggerated, but it felt great. It felt like we were really doing something.” The same month Haq took shrapnel in the head and returned to Pakistan for the first time since he had argued with his oldest brother and Khalis. (It was the first of many shrapnel wounds Haq would suffer. In the mid-1980s, when he traveled abroad to meet President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, the fragments in his body set off airport metal detectors.)
