Soldiers of God

Haq and his men set off the explosion with only two 107 mm Chinese-made rockets, mounted on crossed sticks and attached to two taped wires hooked up to a plunger. But the planning took three weeks.

“I had to find out exactly where the ammo dump was on the base,” Haq said. “We didn’t have aerial photographs, which meant we had to find out from contacts in the Afghan army. Then I had to measure the distance to a launch site, since all we had were four rockets that weren’t guided by radar.” Finding a launch site was difficult because the free-flight range of a 107 mm rocket is only about two miles before it starts angling. There was no place that close to the dump that was very far from a government post.

“I sent out ten people to walk the distance, counting their steps in their heads. They all came back with different numbers. I added them all up, divided by ten, and went with the average. I had four rockets. All I really needed was one hit.

“Because government posts were all around, we couldn’t just set up a rocket launcher. We needed diversions.” So Haq’s men initiated small attacks on government posts in the Paghman region near Qarga. “When there was shooting everywhere, we brought in the rockets.”

The first two missed the target. Then his men fired the second two, and still nothing happened. Later, black smoke started to rise in the distance. “The black turned to green, and then to bright yellow, lighting the whole sky. We were five miles away, but it was difficult to breathe because of the smoke. I was scared and laughing at the same time. ‘Oh, my God,’ I said to myself. ‘What did I do?’

“We ran away. Everybody was watching the blasts. Nobody noticed us.”

The Qarga base reportedly housed a number of surface-to-air missiles, and Haq suspected that these caused the huge yellow fireball. He took color photographs of it and hung them in his office. Haq had tipped off a British diplomat in Kabul who had a video camera. He recorded the explosion from the roof of the British embassy; the video made the rounds in Peshawar in 1987.

What Haq did not do was take one of the handful of television cameramen resident in Peshawar with him on the operation. This allowed several other mujahidin groups and commanders also active in the Kabul area to claim credit for the Qarga blast. And a British documentary highlighting the exploits of Ahmad Shah Massoud included the video footage of the Qarga explosion without mentioning Haq’s name. In the rumor-filled, conspiracy-ridden atmosphere of Peshawar, and in the American Club and the Bamboo Garden in particular, different stories emerged about how the attack was actually carried out. One hyped version had it that mujahidin had dispatched trucks filled with plastique to crash through the gate of the army base protecting the ammunition dump. When Haq claimed that he was responsible for the blast, and did it with 107 mm rockets, most people… given his reputation… believed him.

After the Qarga operation came other attacks. On November 23, 1986, a bomb made of gasoline, fertilizer, and gunpowder exploded near the Ministry of Education, where Najib was attending a party conference. Five members of his entourage were reported killed. On December 14, a tunnel leading to the turbines of the Sarobi dam and power station was blown up, causing power cuts in Kabul. In addition, there were periodic downings of Soviet and Afghan military aircraft over the Kabul region through the end of 1986. Haq either planned or played a role in all of those incidents. In 1987, the Communist regime’s military situation kept getting worse, until October, when Haq stepped on a mine.

Peshawar, May 18, 1988. Abdul Haq was walking barefoot up and down the stairs of his office, exercising his legs and trying to build calluses on the stump of his right foot. Eid el Fitr, the great feast that ends the month-long Ramadan fast, had just concluded. Three days earlier, the Soviets had started their withdrawal from Afghanistan, and foreign correspondents who had flooded into Peshawar to cover the story were already leaving: Afghanistan was again being forgotten. Haq looked tired. He had been in his office most of the holiday, the second most important feast in the Moslem calendar, and had seen little of his family and only one or two visiting journalists. He was in the process of sending fifteen hundred new men into the field over the coming days, and that meant meeting with dozens of subcommanders, issuing orders, and handing out money… in other words, starting new underground operations. Haq had bought no new clothes, something Moslems traditionally do for Eid el Fitr. On this night, however, he had arranged a dinner in the carpeted room above his office for a few friends. We all reclined against cushions and talked for almost four hours. We were served plates of grilled meat and chicken, yogurt, fimi (custard flavored with ground pistachios, almonds, and cardamom), mantu (pasta filled with meat and spiced with cumin, chili peppers, and coriander), many salads and cooked vegetables, and heaps of Kabuli rice sprinkled with raisins and scented with saffron and black cardamom seeds. There was plenty of Coca-Cola too, something you rarely got from the Khalis mujahidin. In the sky Venus formed an equilateral triangle with the tips of a crescent moon, evoking Islam’s most powerful and mysterious symbol. The details of that night are hard to forget.

Throughout the meal, Haq massaged his foot. It had not healed well, he complained. A recent jaunt across the border into Kunar province revealed that he still had difficulty climbing mountains: “After five hundred yards I begin to feel pain.” Haq was not in a good mood. He felt frustrated and tied down. His real reason for inviting us was to hold court, to unburden himself of his fears, and to lecture us about how the Pakistanis and the alliance of mujahidin political leaders… including his brother Din Mohammed and Khalis… were playing into Soviet hands by contemplating an all-out attack on Jalalabad.

Despite exercise, Haq was still overweight, and with his beard, his gesturing, outstretched hands, and the mounds of food on the table, I had a vision of an angry Henry VIII. “You want to know why it’s dumb to attack Jalalabad?” Haq thundered. “Because it’s dumb to lose ten thousand lives. There’s no way the mujahidin can take the city now. It’s surrounded by a river, mountains, and minefields. And if we do take it, what’s going to happen? The Russians will bomb the shit out of us, that’s what.” Which is exactly what was to happen after the mujahidin captured the northern city of Kunduz that summer; the Soviet air force bombed Kunduz until the guerrillas withdrew to their previous positions a few days later. “And if they don’t bomb the shit out of us, then we have Jalalabad and they have Kabul… parity, two Afghan governments. Then there will be pressure for us to negotiate. No, we must take no cities. Take everything but.” Haq shook his fingers. “Jalalabad should fall last, not first. Abdul Qadir and ‘Engineer’ Mahmoud know this. Only the politicians don’t. It’s so stupid…You want me to show you what’s going on in Jalalabad? Come on, I’ll show you.” Lumbering down the steps, he dragged us into his war room, with the wall-size map of Afghanistan stolen from the Ministry of Defense in Kabul.

“Yeah, the Russians withdrew from Jalalabad.” Haq bashed his fist against the map. “All the Western journalists covered that. And after, five hundred Russians were sent back there from Paktia. Where were the stupid journalists when that happened, huh? The Russians may be withdrawing, but they’re also moving troops around. They want everyone to think they’re out of Jalalabad, so the mujahidin will be expected to take it. They’re bluffing us, and the alliance is going for it.”

Haq hated the seven-party alliance, officially known by the misleading title Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahidin. “I’ve never been to alliance headquarters. I shed blood in Afghanistan, not in a conference room in Peshawar.” Someone at the table asked Haq what he thought of the alliance’s cabinet-in-exile, in which his oldest brother, Din Mohammed, was the defense minister. Haq was silent, then said, “I guess it’s better than Najib’s cabinet.”

It wasn’t just a matter of temperament, of being a soldier accustomed to action all his life and scorning a bunch of squabbling politicians. It was something deeper, something Haq didn’t much like to talk about but couldn’t help talking about once you got him going on the subject. Haq just wasn’t comfortable with Moslem fundamentalism. “I don’t think we need it,” Haq had once told John Gunston. “Always in the history of Afghanistan the people have resisted any kind of force. The British learned this, and now the Russians have. If our people are forced into something they don’t want, the fighting will continue. What we need instead is a broad-based government.”

However, the seven-party mujahidin alliance was dominated by four fundamentalist groups… those of Yunus Khalis, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jamiat leader Burhanuddin Rabbani (for whom Ahmad Shah Massoud fought), and Rasul Sayyaf. Relations between these men were not always easy. Hekmatyar was genuinely hated by the other three leaders, and especially by Haq. Haq said, “Gulbuddin’s problem is that he kills more mujahidin than Soviets.” Though he would never openly admit it, Haq was disappointed at the failure of an August 1987 assassination attempt in which Hekmatyar was nearly blown up by a car bomb in Peshawar. (It was never clear who the perpetrator was; the Soviets, the Afghan Communists, and every mujahidin group besides Hekmatyar’s own had strong reasons for wanting Hekmatyar dead.) Some people tried to persuade Haq that, for the good of Afghanistan, he had to be the one to kill Hekmatyar, for only he had the skills for