As soon as he replaced Karmal, Najib… who would later change his name to Najibullah (ullah means “of God”) in an attempt to gain religious support… made a whirlwind tour of the government-controlled areas of the country, making resolute statements about “national reconciliation.” Despite the bullish, thuggish caricature the West had of him, Najib was more than just a secret police heavy. He was a talented political survivor, far more deft than any of his Communist predecessors in juggling the carrot of reconciliation and better economic conditions with the stick of absolute terror against the mujahidin and those who supported them.
“Najib was moving very fast,” Haq explained. “It was crucial that I break his spell quickly, to show the citizens of Kabul that he was just another Soviet puppet, no better than the previous ones at controlling the mujahidin.”
The last half of 1986 was to be the most spectacular season of Haq’s career as an urban guerrilla. Those months solidified his reputation as one of the big three mujahidin commanders in all of Afghanistan, along with the more senior Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley and Ismael Khan in Herat. Only Haq, however, had his main base of support inside the Afghan capital.
The first of his targets during that time was the Sarobi dam and power station, which supplied Kabul with much of its electricity. Haq’s planning started in late June, seven months after Najib had taken power. “I had lots of problems just to get over the mountains north and east of Kabul. The dam was protected by minefields and deliberate flooding. The bridge over the Kabul River and all the trails leading to the bridge were patrolled by government troops. We moved only at night. Everybody had to closely follow the man in front of him so only the lead man… who knew the trail well… was threatened by mines. We used layers of cloth and foam to cushion the horses’ hooves so they wouldn’t make noise and alert the soldiers. We walked for several nights like this. Because we had to travel light, we carried only tea, cucumbers, and some bread to eat.
“When we were a day and a half from the dam we stopped and sent out a recon team. They returned after three days without enough information. I got mad and sent out another team. Three more days went by before the second team returned to tell me we needed at least a thousand kilos of plastique to really do the job. Great. I had looked everywhere just to find two hundred fifty kilos.
“Next we had to clear a path through a minefield. We worked for twelve nights, from eight in the evening to three in the morning. I used a pocketknife, dragging it gently over the dirt. When the knife hit metal you heard a click and chills went up and down your back all the way from your fingernail… it was a mine. Every night we advanced another ten meters.”
Destroying the dam with 250 kilos of explosive was impossible. So Haq decided to put all of it in one place, a control room near the top of the dam. Getting in was easy: it was the only one of three control rooms that was empty and unguarded. After the minefield, security at the dam site itself was like everything else in Afghanistan… a mess.
The July 20, 1986, explosion did not destroy the dam, but it wrecked the control room, the bridge atop the dam, and the machine for lifting the gate of the dam. It also cracked one of the three pylons supporting the dam and killed about a dozen technicians and government soldiers. It plunged the city of Kabul into darkness that night and caused minor flooding in the surrounding area. For three months, until the dam was completely repaired, sporadic power blackouts plagued the capital. The damage was estimated at over $2 million.
Less than six weeks later, at ten in the evening on August 27, 1986, Abdul Haq struck again. His men blew up the ammunition dump at Qarga, west of the capital, the headquarters of the Afghan Eighth Army Division and the single largest Soviet munitions depot in the country. A massive fireball rose over a thousand feet into the air, and the concussions that followed made windows vibrate throughout Kabul. Smaller explosions continued into the morning.
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 hundr
ed 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 Wes
tern 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.
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