Soldiers of God (24 page)

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, 1 g88.
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 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 Médecins sans Frontières (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.