Remembering Abdul Haq
SCHIFFREN, LISA
Remembering Abdul Haq The Taliban executes an Afghan patriot. BY LISA SCHIFFREN ABDUL HAQ, the legendary Afghan resistance commander, was captured and hanged on October 25 by the Taliban while on...
...Abdul Haq was born Humayoun Arsala in 1957, one of six sons of a prominent member of the rural aristocracy in Eastern Afghanistan...
...In those years, Abdul Haq was feted as a freedom fighter by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and others in the West...
...What must be considered one of Abdul Haq's most significant accomplishments, given the fractiousness of Afghan politics, came in 1989-91, when he organized a gathering of commanders, warlords, and tribal leaders and brokered an agreement to prevent looting and rampaging when Kabul finally fell...
...Indeed, any serious attempt to win or buy the alleigiance of local commanders would have required visible assurance of future American support...
...Well, yes...
...Eventually, he understood that his future lay in politics...
...In a war conducted largely on foot and horseback in some of the world's least negotiable terrain, this crippled his ability to lead guerrilla operations, though he initially resisted that conclusion...
...Lisa Schiffren, a Defense Department official in the first Bush administration, is a writer living in New York...
...The bombing, meanwhile, failed to destroy the main Taliban base in Kabul, which was in fine condition when Abdul Haq was executed there...
...We are not terrorists...
...All eyewitness reports place two or three Americans in the party traveling with Haq...
...Back in the 1980s, when Ambassador Robert Oakley and Station Chief Milt Bearden were justifying U.S...
...Back then, the Afghans seemed noble for their swashbuckling resistance, at great personal cost, to the Soviet colossus...
...When the Afghan Communists took power in 1978, a bribe secured his release, and he left home for good, fleeing to Peshawar, Pakistan, where refugees were massing and the Pakistani military had begun training promising young men in insurgency and guerrilla-warfare tactics...
...Early in my first trip to Pakistan, after the Soviets had butchered yet another village full of civilians, I asked Haq why the mujahedeen didn't take the war to the Soviets...
...He joined his brothers in the Hisb-i-Islami party, a centrist Islamic party affiliated with the moderate nationalists...
...As week three of the U.S...
...They know that there are no hidden reserves of leadership among Afghan technocrats in exile or among the commanders inside Afghanistan with whom we have no contact...
...This agreement fell through only when the celebrated Ahmed Shah Massoud sent his men in for a spree of pillaging and raping that would make the Taliban a welcome relief...
...He would not be bought, and the agency trusts only men who are on the payroll...
...The United States government knows that the Northern Alliance is made up of disgruntled ethnic minorities that cannot govern Afghanistan because the largest ethnic group won't let them...
...Of his five surviving children, the oldest lives in the United States...
...Even now, the CIA continues its sniping...
...Intelligent and articulate, Abdul Haq was a genuine political moderate...
...They know that the king is a useful symbol, but not the person of vigor and vision who will be needed to govern...
...Members of the CIA station in Pakistan took to disparaging Abdul Haq as "all talk, no action," "Hollywood Haq," and "the BBC commander," appellations disparaging the ability to persuade through speech, a hallmark of democratic politics—as opposed to, say, the willingness to assassinate any potential rival, a quality possessed by Gulbaddin Hekmat-yar, the Islamist mujahedeen leader they backed with U.S...
...The day Haq was killed, news anchors in New York pulled long faces and announced that the elimination of this resistance leader was a grave setback to the war effort...
...Though the details are unclear, the CIA was probably involved...
...When the mujahedeen took power, Haq was offered the job of minister of police...
...He was not, to be sure, the ideal agent of the CIA...
...BY LISA SCHIFFREN ABDUL HAQ, the legendary Afghan resistance commander, was captured and hanged on October 25 by the Taliban while on a mission inside Afghanistan to contact local Taliban leaders who wished to defect...
...In 1999, Taliban agents murdered his wife, Karima, and an 11-year-old son in their home in Peshawar...
...Why not knock off a Soviet envoy or two in Europe...
...With the Taliban already boasting that it has bested the CIA in this round of the Great Game, one should not bet on too many defections...
...Anonymous officials have rushed to make the case that Abdul Haq, a man who could be cocky but was always meticulous in assessing risks, threw his life away in a pathetic attempt to recapture the limelight...
...The CIA, with its blind reliance on the ISI, which is famously staffed by rabid Islamists, convinced itself and some at the State Department that only mujahedeen espousing the most virulent and repressive Islamic fundamentalism would successfully fight the Soviets, so that is where the agency directed arms, money, and training...
...These influences— the traditional conservatism, independence, and noblesse oblige of the rural khanate, along with a scientific and Western orientation—ran deep...
...You can't beat a horse with no horse...
...In the past decade, he had been a tireless, if sometimes despairing, advocate of the return of King Zahir Shah and the installation of a democratic political system in Afghanistan...
...He saw, too, that building an Afghan future required reconciliation, not vengeance—a statesmanlike view not universal among resistance leaders...
...It was then that he took the nom de guerre Abdul Haq, Servant of Justice...
...When the Soviet army marched into Afghanistan in 1979, Haq went to war...
...He was convinced that many Taliban commanders were ready to defect—but the ornery Afghan temperament would prevent their doing so once they were under attack...
...And that is how Afghanistan came to be so congenial to Osama bin Laden...
...dollars...
...He said indignantly, "We don't have a guy," then added, "Every nation in the world is grooming and paying someone to be their guy...
...At 44, he was one of a tiny number of Afghans with the stature and ability to lead an effective opposition coalition against the Taliban and eventually to help constitute a successor government...
...His guerrilla operations, near Kabul, were known for their bravado and a level of organization unusual among the rather haphazard mujahedeen...
...Shortly thereafter, Abdul Haq left school to join the resistance forming in the villages, as the new regime attempted to enlarge the powers of the state by curtailing the powers of family and tribe...
...This would be an excellent time to dig those letters out of the files at Langley and read them...
...Oddly, the American government acknowledged no such thing...
...With his death, a satisfactory resolution to the u.S...
...In the late 1980s, when I was a reporter in Afghanistan, I had the privilege of knowing Abdul Haq as a friend...
...In 1989, as the Soviets prepared to leave Afghanistan and the mujahedeen had high hopes of taking Kabul, Haq drew up plans to keep the city he loved supplied with food, water, and electricity, even in battle conditions, though its population was largely not supportive of the muja-hedeen...
...His exploits included blowing up the largest Soviet munitions dump in the country, at Karga, with a handful of small rockets, and disabling the Sarobi Dam and power station for many months, depriving Kabul of electricity...
...He was disappointed that the United States chose to begin bombing before laying the political groundwork...
...Haq, though a member of an Islamic party and personally conservative, was no fundamentalist...
...Because he held the United States and its ideals in high regard, however shortsighted and stupid he deemed its actions, Haq in the late 1980s wrote a series of detailed letters to the American and British governments and the United Nations explaining how CIA money, filtered through the ISI, was being used to build terrorist training camps in Afghanistan that would destabilize Middle Eastern governments and ultimately threaten the United States...
...He gave me a sharp look to see if I was serious, then said coolly, "We are not the Palestinians...
...He turned it down three times because the new regime refused to allow him to disarm local militias...
...We could have done worse...
...He saw that the mujahedeen would never be able to govern if they couldn't win the confidence of the Kabulis...
...In the war against the Soviets, Abdul Haq had led large-scale operations in and around Kabul...
...After a few brushes with the police, he landed in Kabul's Pul-i-Charki prison, where he was tortured and condemned to death...
...His father was a senior engineer on the massive, U.S.-funded Helmand River irrigation project in the 1960s, a large American contribution to Afghan development in the Cold War years...
...After the Taliban takeover, Haq turned down a position in that government, too...
...One reason so many journalists admired him was that he was straightforward, sardonic, and often irreverent...
...Instead, he became a businessman in Dubai, though he kept a hand in politics...
...support for brutal and fanatical leaders such as Gulbaddin Hekmat-yar—who came out of the Muslim Brotherhood and helped bring Arab fighters to Afghanistan—their favorite line was, "It takes a tough guy to defeat the Soviets...
...government had never given much in the way of money or arms to Abdul Haq's party, and in the late '80s it stopped most of his funding...
...he found it unbelievable that the Clinton administration had discarded the Afghans, now that they were of no immediate use, and that it paid no heed to the terrorists overrunning the country...
...A policy, while desirable, is no substitute for a leader...
...If the CIA held it against him that he got good press—well, he understood that the fate of his people depended on the world's willingness to help...
...Haq's intelligence network in Kabul circulated "Night Letters," to instruct and bolster the city's captive population...
...He visited the United States from time to time in the mid '90s...
...A senior State Department official with whom I spoke last week pointed out that "Haq was not our guy...
...In 1973, the long-reigning, donothing King Zahir Shah was overthrown by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, with Soviet backing...
...Without a legitimate leader to take over from the Taliban, the United States will find itself mired in Afghanistan...
...Actually, we did worse...
...He believed he was fighting for the interests of the Afghan people, and the CIA had contracted the war out to the Pakistani government, which wanted to support only commanders who could be controlled by Pakistani military intelligence, the ISI...
...They mistook a willingness to brutalize Afghans and force on them an inhumane Islam foreign to Afghanistan for the staunchness that real leadership requires...
...In the last year, Haq was working with the exiled king to arrange a Loya Jurga, a traditional national assembly of tribal and religious leaders, to form a government that could succeed the Taliban...
...Sure, he exaggerated the magnitude of his operations, but that wasn't the most important thing about him...
...They could not conceive of a leader willing to do what it took to bring to fruition a moderate philosophy—one that stressed education and elections, instead of burquas and beatings, one that might have had sufficient legitimacy to preclude the advent of the Taliban...
...In 1987, when he was 29, Haq lost his right foot to a landmine...
...action in Afghanistan becomes even harder to imagine than it was before...
...The U.S...
...Should Abdul Haq have been our guy...
...If I were commander in chief, I'd want to know who lost Abdul Haq...
...His family were historic leaders of a major Pashtun tribe...
...But because the CIA, with its unforgivable lack of Pashto speakers, remains to this day dependent on Pakistan's ISI, its operations are riddled with spies, and one may suppose that ISI, and therefore the Taliban, know the CIA's every move...
...war on terrorism ended, then, we had dropped a lot of bombs, but the other side had scored the big victory...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 9
