Massoud appeared to see the bloody conquest of Kabul as the climax of
Haq labored on. He still had his own resistance fighters and his unique underground network. In late 1988, he put the finishing touches on architectural plans for major new mujahidin bases west and east of Kabul, complete with caves, air ducts, fuel and grain stores, workshops, and a hospital, and all protected by antiaircraft cover.
“Grain stores are the most important thing,” Haq told me. “When Kabul does fall, there are going to be shortages of everything, maybe even a famine. We have to start planning now. I don’t want chaos, like in Kunduz, or else the Soviets will take it right back, like they did there.”
But ISI and the other resistance commanders in Peshawar were not thinking along those lines. Some American officials dismissed Haq as “yesterday’s man.” Haq sensed this. “The Pakistanis, the Americans… they don’t like me,” Haq muttered. When bitter, he could be pathetic, like an overgrown sulking little boy. When angry, he could be frightening; at such times, you thought only of what his fist could do.
As at the start of the war, when he left Khalis and his older brother in a huff and stalked off to launch a front in Kabul, Abdul Haq at the time of the Soviet withdrawal was once again completely on his own.
JUST AS Abdul Haq was, behind the scenes, the most respected of the Peshawar-based mujahidin, Rahim Wardak was the most laughed at.
Haq, having never served in a formal army, had no rank and did not psychologically require one. Wardak, a former general in the Afghan army who defected while a military attache in India, had a very impressive-sounding rank and title: major general and chief of the general staff of Mahaz-i-Milli Islami (National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, or NIFA), one of the moderate groups in the seven-party alliance. Haq’s English was often ungrammatical and full of swear words; Wardak’s was a polished, Sandhurst variety. Haq always wore the same gray
Wardak controlled no territory inside Afghanistan and rarely left Pakistani soil. He directed “battles” across the border with a frequency-hopping walkie-talkie given him by the Americans. But not even the Americans in Islamabad were fooled by him. Once when Wardak claimed to have rained two thousand rockets on Kabul, a check by the U.S. embassy revealed that only eight rockets had fallen on the city that week. Wardak called the December 1987 mujahidin siege of Khost, in Paktia province near the Pakistani border, in which he took part, “the biggest battle of the war.” But a few weeks later, Wardak said Khost was “a joke,” blown out of proportion by the media.
At the American Club bar, Wardak was considered “a goofy NIFA general.” He was the extreme, comic embodiment of the British military historian John Keegan’s dictum: “Generalship is bad for people…. The most reasonable of men suffuse with pomposity when stars touch their shoulders.”
When reporters, diplomats, and relief workers in Pakistan thought of NIFA, Wardak naturally came to mind. He was an apt symbol for a party of mujahidin who dressed slick, talked fancy, did less fighting, and held less territory than the rough-hewn, tea-slurping fundamentalists of Yunus Khalis’s party.
NIFA’s founder was Pir Syed Ahmed Gailani (a Pir is a hereditary saint). Gailani, in addition to claiming direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed, was the leader of the Sufi Qadirrya sect, which has small groups of followers throughout the Middle East. While this sounds pious and impressive, the Pir’s reputation on the Northwest Frontier was anything but. Some journalists, and mujahidin too, called him “the disco Pir.” In the mid- 1970s, while Khalis and others were fighting in the hills, Gailani ran a car dealership in Kabul. Rather than traditional robes, he preferred Savile Row suits, Gucci loafers, and silk scarves. John Fullerton, in a 1983 primer about the war in Afghanistan, described the Pir, in his late fifties, as “otiose, sedentary, sleepy-eyed and boastful.” Later he developed cancer, and this necessitated frequent trips to London. But during the fasting month of Ramadan in spring 1988, the Pir’s departure for London caused many to remark aloud, “Away from the eyes of the mujahidin, in England he doesn’t have to fast.”
Gailani’s troops were known as the “Gucci muj.” NIFA offices in Peshawar, Islamabad, and Quetta were staffed by mujahidin in designer sunglasses, running shoes, and sleeveless Banana Republic vests and fatigue pants. Some even wore expensive cologne and possessed Sony Walkmans, along with camouflage-patterned wallets and briefcases. They patronized the restaurants and coffee shops of expensive Pakistani hotels. NIFA offices were air conditioned, of course, and had refrigerators stocked with soft drinks. But the most significant physical characteristic of the “Gucci muj” was that their leading officials either had beards that were neatly trimmed… like the Pir’s… or had no beards at all.
To visit a NIFA office was to be bombarded with complaints about American and Pakistani arms supply policy. Apparently, Zia was shortchanging the NIFA commanders, just as he was Abdul Haq, in favor of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami. But instead of soldiering on, the NIFA mujahidin constantly whined about it. They saw themselves, correctly, as representing the Western values that America encouraged. Yet Pakistan’s intelligence service, with U.S. acquiescence, was giving NIFA only a pittance in weapons and supplies. This was why NIFA, according to its own officials, was not more active in the fighting. The American and Pakistani answer was: “If NIFA showed more fighting ability, then it would get more weapons.” To that, NIFA retorted: “If Hekmatyar takes power in a post-Soviet Afghanistan and turns the country into a version of Khomeini’s Iran, then America and Zia will have only themselves to blame.” (When Zia was killed in a plane crash, NIFA officials were quietly ecstatic.)
NIFA had only two leaders they could really boast about: Amin Wardak and Haji Abdel Latif, two commanders with strong local support in their areas who fought well… without cologne or matching berets and scarves.
Amin Wardak, who was unrelated and unconnected to Major General Rahim Wardak, had been the guerrilla chieftain of Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, since 1978. For two years, Amin Wardak and his men had no contact with the Pakistan-based resistance parties, and completely on their own they wrested control of Wardak province from the Afghan Communists. After the Soviets invaded, Amin Wardak sent a group of mujahidin to Peshawar to negotiate with the parties in order to get more arms. A deal was struck with NIFA, only because of an old friendship between Pir Gailani and Amin’s father. But the relationship quickly went sour. “We saw Gailani give power and money to people who weren’t doing any real fighting, while we were doing to Ghazni [a major town south of Wardak province] what Abdul Haq was doing to Kabul,” explained Amin’s younger brother, Ruhani Wardak. “Gailani,” he went on, “wanted a diplomatic strategy and we preferred to fight…And what about Rahim Wardak? Well, our people were getting killed while he was still a military attache in India for the Communist
