carrying out a successful and clean assassination. Moreover, according to this logic, whoever the other resistance groups believed had brought off such an assassination would see his prestige and clout rise sharply. Haq rejected this advice out of hand.
As a commander, Haq ultimately directed his wrath against the Pakistanis… specifically, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), Zia’s version of the Central Intelligence Agency, if you can imagine the CIA equipped with a conventional military force all its own. American taxpayers were footing the bill for the weapons the mujahidin were receiving, but ISI decided how those weapons were to be distributed among the various commanders and mujahidin parties. This was part of the bargain the United States struck with Zia for enthusiastically providing the guerrillas with a rear base in Pakistan. And it wasn’t just that Zia… and his clique that continued to run ISI for months after his death on August 17, 1988, in a plane crash… favored Hekmatyar. More to the point, ISI gave weapons to the commanders and parties it could control, and to the commanders who let ISI do their military planning for them. Haq wouldn’t stand for this. He held ISI in low regard: he thought its agents were a bunch of meddlesome Punjabis who were trained in military academies and knew nothing about guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan. Didn’t ISI spend time and money to blow up a bridge near Kandahar that the Soviets had stopped using months before? Wasn’t ISI gung-ho for attacking Jalalabad? As Haq, among others in Peshawar, pointed out: why should the Pakistanis, who never won a war, give orders to the Afghans, who never lost one?
The Americans were of no help to him, Haq told us over the long dinner that night. Despite bankrolling Zia to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the American intelligence community knuckled under to LSI, convincing themselves that Hekmatyar was not half as bad as everybody said he was. In the process Haq got shortchanged. (This was paradoxical, since he had been the first mujahidin commander ever to meet with President Reagan and with Prime Minister Thatcher, in the mid-1980s, a time when the fighting was not going well for the resistance.)
I sympathized with Haq. To travel from Peshawar to the American embassy in Islamabad… Pakistan’s make-believe modern capital, which resembles a sprawling American suburb… was to enter a world light-years removed from the war in Afghanistan. Here diplomats served up a defense of Hekmatyar built on nothing, it seemed, but a fragile edifice of cliches:
Sure, he’s ruthless. But killing Russians is nasty business, isn’t it?
True, he’s divisive. I’ll give you that. But that’s why people aren’t objective about him.
At least he’s charismatic. He has a vision of what he wants to do with Afghanistan, something the other mujahidin leaders lack.
Killing Russians was nasty business, sure. But the available evidence suggested that Hekmatyar was killing fewer of them than he claimed, while being responsible for killing other mujahidin… and Western relief workers and journalists too. The Paris-based group Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) reported that Hekmatyar’s guerrillas hijacked a ninety-six-horse caravan bringing aid into northern Afghanistan in 1987, stealing a year’s supply of medicine and cash that was to be distributed to villagers to buy food with. French relief officials also asserted that Thierry Niquet, an aid coordinator bringing cash to Afghan villagers, was killed by one of Hekmatyar’s commanders in 1986. It is thought that two American journalists traveling with Hekmatyar in 1987, Lee Shapiro and Jim Lindalos, were killed not by the Soviets, as Hekmatyar’s men claimed, but during a nrefight initiated by Hekmatyar’s forces against another mujahidin group. In addition, there were frequent reports throughout the war of Hekmatyar’s commanders negotiating and dealing with pro-Communist local militias in northern Afghanistan.
As to Hekmatyar’s vision of Afghanistan’s future, he and his lieutenants openly admitted wanting a centrally controlled theocracy dedicated to fighting both “Soviet and American imperialism” which bore a striking resemblance to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran.
The American diplomats, meanwhile, discounted Khalis’s organization because Khalis was just an “old man lacking Hekmatyar’s political talent.” As to Khalis’s frequent trips inside to visit his troops, one diplomat remarked, “I wonder what he does in there, talk to God?”
In truth, American analysts didn’t actually believe half the things they said about Hekmatyar, or about Khalis even. The U.S. government, specifically the CIA, was tied to Hekmatyar because all Washington really cared about was its future relationship with Pakistan. Washington had always thought of Afghanistan as a primitive tribal society of marginal importance that even in normal times fell within the Soviet sphere of influence. And once Soviet soldiers were physically out of Afghanistan, American policy makers were quite willing to see that primitive land and its tribal people again through the narrow lens of their ally Pakistan.
What hurt Haq was not that America should care more about Pakistan than Afghanistan; a clever analyst, he realized the logic of this. What hurt him was that, having personally led the struggle on the ground to eject the Soviets from Afghanistan’s capital city, he was a daily witness to the colossal waste of American money and weaponry, thanks to the narrow-mindedness, incompetence, and corruption of Zia’s henchmen in ISI. This is what should have bothered the average American taxpayer too, since the Reagan administration was spending billions on arming the mujahidin through Pakistan, compared to only tens of millions for the Nicaraguan contras.
Abdul Haq instinctively knew what it took a reporter several months of living in Peshawar and traveling inside to grasp: beyond President Reagan’s and President Zia’s basic determination to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan, many, if not most, of the individual policy decisions that came under the framework of that brave goal were wrong ones. Hadn’t the CIA station chief in Kabul, following the Soviets’ December 1979 invasion, declared that the Afghans had no chance; that it was all over but the shouting; that in six months the Soviets would control the whole country? Hadn’t the Americans dithered for years before providing Stingers and other sophisticated light weaponry to the mujahidin because certain elements of the American intelligence bureaucracy were convinced they had no chance? And hadn’t the Americans decided to throw the whole operation of the war in the lap of ISI, with little independent intelligence of their own except for satellite photographs and a handful of diplomats restricted to Kabul city?
In the end, the mujahidin’s willingness to suffer to a nearly unimaginable degree eventually overcame, and thus masked, the awful mistakes of American and Pakistani policy makers. As an angry Haq told a British official in Pakistan a few weeks after our dinner: “Don’t lecture me about why the Russians are leaving Afghanistan. They are leaving only because we spilled our own blood to kick them out.”
Something else regarding the United States hurt Haq. “None of my mujahidin ever hijacked a plane, killed or threatened journalists or relief workers, or in any way created headaches by extending the war to innocent foreigners.” Then why was the United States, he seemed to imply as we rose from dinner, allowing the Pakistanis to back the one leader of the seven who had been accused of doing all of those things except hijack a plane?
Believing himself to have been “abandoned” by the United States and Pakistan, Haq worked on his own to topple Kabul. As befitted a man whose forte was intelligence work and sabotage, his was an extremely subtle and fragile strategy that made relatively little use of violence. He was aware, unlike the men at ISI, that the citizens of Kabul did not automatically support the mujahidin, and that if the mujahidin were foolish enough to launch rocket attacks in heavily populated areas, the capital’s inhabitants could quickly turn against them. Another problem, as John Gunston confirmed right after his daring trip inside the city, was that Hekmatyar’s Pakistani-financed public relations machine… which the Soviet media did all it could to encourage… guaranteed that Hekmatyar had more name recognition among Kabul’s citizens than either Haq or Ahmad Shah Massoud. And since Hekmatyar’s image was that of a fundamentalist demon, the people of Kabul weren’t entirely sure they wanted Najib overthrown: better the devil you know than the one you don’t.
To counter this bad public image, Haq increased the frequency and circulation of “night letters” (leaflets distributed by his underground network throughout Kabul). The first of these that he sent out after the start of the Soviet withdrawal said, among other things:
We… have instructed our mujahidin groups around Kabul to be very precise in their [rocket] attacks, and we have strongly urged and ordered them not to attack any areas in which there are civilians. Despite that, there may be some groups that may have fired rockets at some areas by mistake, for which forces under my command are not responsible…. The objectives of our mujahidin are the military bases of the Soviets and the [Afghan] Communists. Because it is difficult to aim these rockets precisely, we are appealing to families who live near these
