Soldiers of God

5 The Growth of a Commander

As WE ALL KNOW, memory is selective. Individuals, like tribes and nations, continually revise their own pasts to conform with current self-images. This was especially true for the Pathans. “Facts,” observed a British friend, “were so interwoven with fiction on the Northwest Frontier that one might as well unstitch all the carpets in the Khyber bazaar before finding a stitch of truth.”

Between trips inside, I fell into a pattern of seeing Abdul Haq at least two times a week. I have only Haq’s word for the seminal events of his youth. But that was all I wanted. It was his attitudes and image of himself, rather than the bare-bones literal truth, that I was after.

Haq’s headquarters in a guarded Peshawar villa was one of the few places in the Third World I’d seen where real work — rather than the usual conspiracy-mongering over endless cups of tea… seemed to be done, where I knew that I was taking up valuable time. In the waiting room I always saw a group of mujahidin nervously clutching notes, waiting to see “Haji Sa-hab” (Mr. Haji). One entered Haq’s private office only after removing one’s shoes. Apart from that, his office had a surface resemblance to that of any businessman or lawyer in the West. Haq would usually be talking on one of his two desk phones while simultaneously reading a report and writing notes on a separate sheet of paper. Next to the two phones were a small globe and a red desk lamp. Papers were stacked at neat right angles to the other objects on the desk and separated into “in” and “out” piles. Behind the desk on the wall was a large map of Soviet posts in Kabul. (In the adjacent “war room” was a nine-foot-high Soviet wall map of Afghanistan, with a sandbox that had markers for planning battles: this was the room where John Gunston’s pictures were displayed.)

Haq, always dressed in a gray shalwar kameez and vest… the equivalent of a pin-striped suit in the West… would be on the phone for a few minutes after I came in the office. Inevitably, a succession of mujahidin would file in, take seats opposite him, make a request, and give him a note to initial before being ushered out to receive a stack of money from Haq’s Tajik accountant. The tone of each man was submissive. Listening to their requests, Haq looked discerning, impassive, and slightly smug, as if he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could accurately size up the character and actions of every man under his command. His was a face that at times reminded me of Marlon Brando playing Don Vito Corleone in the opening scene of The Godfather.

Profusely apologizing for the interruptions, Haq would hobble over to the couch opposite me, order tea, and patiently submit to my queries about his life. He took only one lump of sugar in his tea and didn’t smoke… unusual for an Oriental male. Scratching his beard, he would joke: “The eyes of a journalist scare me almost as much as the eyes of a doctor with a knife about to cut into my foot.”

Abdul Haq was born Abdul Rauf on April 23, 1958, in Nan-garhar province west of Jalalabad. But he spent his first years in the faraway southern province of Helmand, near Iran and Pakistan, where his father, Mohammed Aman, was the representative of a Nangarhar construction company. A clash of wills between the two dominated Haq’s first childhood memories. In his mind, he and his father were the only actors on stage. The rest of the family didn’t exist. The eerie Helmand steppes provided a beautiful yet threatening background.

“I was on a bus with my father,” Haq said. “For hours I was asking him questions. I don’t remember about what, but I kept asking them. He got so tired of my questions that he started screaming and slapped me. Everybody on the bus was a stranger. We didn’t have any friends in Helmand. I was four. It is my earliest memory.

“Another time, my father was driving his jeep up a hill near our house. It was evening and he was tired. On either side of the road were mud walls. I stood in the middle of the road and refused to let him pass. He started screaming at me, but I wouldn’t get out of the road. I hugged the ground with my body. Finally, he drove around me and crashed the side of the jeep into the wall. I was five, I think.

“I wanted to go to school like my older brothers, but my father told me I was still too young. I was only five and you had to be seven. I got so mad that I tore up my brothers’ school books. So my father took me, unregistered, to the school. I remember once the teacher fell asleep. Maybe he was tired or sick, but I thought that rude and I went over to the teacher’s desk and hit him hard over the head with a stick to wake him up. The teacher ran after me but I got away. I was always a little devil.

“My father liked to see children fight. I remember he would throw a coin up in the air and my brothers and I would scramble for it. I worshiped my father. I was six when he died of kidney disease. He was fifty-one. We left Helmand and went back to Nangarhar. We had no family in Helmand. In Nangarhar we did… lots of aunts and uncles and cousins to play with. We owned land and a big house and garden, and everybody in the village knew us. We always had lots of guests. This gave me a great sense of security after my father died. I found that I was part of something. From then on I had no doubt who I was.”

Haq was wealthy by Afghan standards; nevertheless, when in Peshawar he lived in one room with his wife and two children in the same crowded house as the families of his two older brothers. Though he confided in foreigners and felt alienated from the rest of his family, he could not stand to live apart from any of them.

Haq’s family is of the Arsala Khel, a subdivision of the Jabbar Khel, which is a leading landowning clan of the Ahmadzai… the great Pathan tribe that historically has been in conflict with the Durrani kings (also Pathans), who ruled Afghanistan from the middle of the eighteenth century through 1973, when King Zahir Shah was deposed and went into exile in Rome. The Jabbar Khel consists of over fifteen hundred prosperous families, who in days gone by robbed travelers on the Kabul-Jalalabad road. Jabbar himself is buried near the main road, and his grave is, according to one legend, a place of evil and a haunt of robbers and wolves. Haq’s hometown of Fateh-bad is synonymous with the deaths of many British soldiers during the disastrous British retreat from Kabul in January 1842. But in the last hundred years the clan has gained a reputation for government service. Haq’s great-grandfather on his father’s side was Wazir Arsala Khan, a foreign minister of Afghanistan. Haq’s cousin Hedayat Arsala was until 1988 an officer of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The first time I met Haq, in his car after the mine injury, Hedayat Arsala was by his side, having flown over from Washington as soon as he heard about the accident. Haq, the maimed warrior in a shalwar kameez, and Hedayat in a gray suit and tie, looking like an international banker… it made for a deliciously interesting contrast and testified to the reserves of love, tradition, and talent in this Pathan family.

“I know little about the history of my family or my people,” Haq said. “I feel humiliated that it is foreigners like you who have to tell me about the history of the Pathans. The problem is that I spent so much time fighting and in jail that I never had a chance to read books. When this war is over all I want to do is read about my own culture, nothing but read, so that I’ll know what I was fighting for.”

As a little boy in the Nangarhar village of Fatehbad, Haq went with his older brothers every morning at 5:30 to pray in the local mosque. Then came six hours of Koranic school, followed by lessons with a private tutor. “The mullahs were strict and kept us busy till the evening. If we talked or were late, we’d get a hard slap across the face. There were only the mullahs. The government in Kabul didn’t exist for us.

“But we had a house in Kabul and spent the summers there. Kabul was cooler than Nangarhar. I love my village a hundred times more than the city. I hated to buy things from strangers and go into stores where we didn’t know people.

“Everyone in my village was Moslem. It was something that you didn’t think about or question. That’s why the fundamentalists are so strong now against the Communists. To destroy one ideology you need another. I remember when I was eight I started at the lycée. One of the teachers, who I now realize was a Communist, told us we must go to war against Pakistan for Islam. So I asked, ‘What about Panjdeh?’ [Russia had taken this town in northwestern Afghanistan in 1885.] I had seen it on a map. The teacher ignored me. So I kept asking the same question over and over. Finally, the teacher hit me, so I hit him back. Then my classmates and I dragged him outside and dry-shaved his head. I was taken to the principal’s office and suspended from school for a time. But my family didn’t punish me. This was my first political experience.

“When I was a little older, about twelve or thirteen, I was taken with some other boys to be tutored by Yunus Khalis, who was a close friend of the family. He joked a lot, made me laugh, and gave me little presents. Khalis was good with children. I adored him and looked up to him.”

Khalis, a renowned Islamic scholar and mathematician from the nearby town of Khogiani, ran a publishing house that printed the first Pukhtu translation of several Koranic commentaries from the original Arabic. The idea of such a scholar finding pleasure teaching unruly teenage boys was typical of Khalis, a salt-of-the-earth type with a ready sense of humor who was completely lacking in pretense. (Years later, Khalis would arrive barefoot to his first meeting with the natty UN special representative to Afghanistan, Diego Cordovez. In Khalis’s hand was a rusty nail, which he used as a toothpick.) I’ll never forget watching Khalis in his Peshawar headquarters while one of his commanders playfully yanked at his long red beard, which Khalis had just redyed with henna to impress his teenage wife. Khalis laughed loudly the whole time, slapping the man on the back. Afterward Khalis sat down next to me, smiled, and patiently answered my questions about Islam, which he lamented was “totally outside the thought pattern of the West, making it difficult for Americans to understand our struggle, even though they are helping us with arms.” This is an ayatollah? I asked myself. A foreign policy bureaucrat in Washington might say he was. But had Khomeini ever let an American reporter into his presence and behaved like that? The answer, of course, was no.

Back in 1973, when King Zahir Shah was overthrown by his first cousin and former prime minister, Mohammed Daoud, fundamentalists like Khalis and Haq’s older brothers, Din Mohammed and Abdul Qadir, cheered. Zahir Shah had held the throne for forty years, since he was eighteen, and to the fundamentalists he was a corrupt profligate who fiddled while Afghan Communists busily burrowed into the state bureaucracy. But the fundamentalists feared Daoud even more. He was known to be a friend of the Soviet Union and stood for a stronger, more efficient central government.

Daoud’s coup was made possible by the assistance of cells of junior officers controlled by Parcham (Banner), the less extreme of the two branches of the Afghan Communist party. Parcham’s influence in the army’s lower echelon complemented Daoud’s own clout among the generals. The combination made for a bloodless coup, in which all potential resistance was snuffed out. Because the Parcham Communists were crucial to Daoud when he first assumed power, he let them dominate the ruling revolutionary council. Eventually, Daoud purged the Parchamis from the council and tried to steer a less pro-Soviet path. As a result, not only were the disaffected Khalqis… the more extreme of the Afghan Communists… busy plotting against Daoud’s government, but the Parchamis were too.

To Khalis and Din Mohammed especially, the Kabul government under Daoud was a godless force seeking to extend its dominion into the countryside in order to subvert age-old religious and tribal traditions. As reactionary and paranoid as this vision may have seemed in 1973, subsequent events were to bear it out completely, when the more extreme Khalqis overthrew Daoud. The most powerful mujahidin groups in the 1980s were the fundamentalist ones, simply because the fundamentalists were the first to decipher the course of events in the 1970s, and therefore the first to act.

Abdul Haq continued his story the next time we met: “Just after Daoud came to power, I remember we had a teacher at our school who, like the other one, tried to introduce Socialist ideas into the class. I objected to this.” Haq formed a delegation that protested to the headmaster and demonstrated outside the school. “My family had a few acres of land, so I had a little money to spend on making posters and placards. I was arrested.” That was the end of Haq’s formal education.

“I learned how to use a Lee-Enfield rifle and explode dynamite at an early age. It was an easy way to hunt and fish and kill cats. I once killed a hundred fifty cats with dynamite,” Haq bashfully admitted. “I attacked my first police station when I was sixteen. It was easy, but we didn’t know what to do once we were inside. One of us was captured and tortured. I promised myself that I would never do anything like that again without planning every detail in advance. It was about then that I took the name of Abdul Haq, so I wouldn’t get my family into trouble. But for months at a time I would use the name Saleh to confuse the police. I had other names too during that period. I can’t remember them all.

“The first time I was caught with plastic explosive I told the policeman it was soap. He said, ‘All right, light a match to it. We’ll see if it’s really soap.’ I lit the match, and of course it didn’t explode. It was a type of plastique called kama, which only explodes if it is lit from inside. You can hold a match around the edges all day and nothing is going to happen.

“I used to hide large amounts of it in a shop. Then one day the police came and took away the shopkeeper. The plastique was taken too. Nobody ever saw the shopkeeper again. I never knew exactly what happened, whether the police had found the plastique or whether the shopkeeper was arrested for something unrelated. No, I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t will the police to arrest him. If I was the one arrested, who was going to weep for me? By this time… it was 1976… my family was split up and Khalis and Din Mohammed and Abdul Qadir were all in hiding or already in Pakistan. No, never in my life have I known any self-doubt.”

Before his twentieth birthday, Haq was involved at the fringes of two coup attempts against Daoud, shuttling messages and explosives between various rebel officers in the Afghan military. Haq was an early bloomer: a roughneck who thought quickly and clearly on his feet, undoubtedly blessed with an extraordinary natural intelligence… the quintessential guerrilla. He was becoming every bit an equal to those who had once inhabited the jungle of Algiers and were now dismantling Beirut, places where the competence of the inner-city combatants was much higher than the crude, comic-opera attempts of the Pathans, who fought well only in their mountains.

In April 1978, Haq slipped and fell off a friend’s roof. So when the police caught up with him near Mirwas Maidan in downtown Kabul, with an unloaded gun he had just purchased, it was impossible for him to run away. “I just said, ‘Bullshit,’ and threw the gun at one of the policemen as hard as I could and then punched him in the face.”

Haq was thrown into Pul-i-Charki. (Daoud had built the prison, and there, as fate would have it, Daoud would spend his last days, together with his family.) In the cell across from him was the infamous Khalqi leader Nur Mohammed Taraki. Haq studied his face for hours at a time. “So that’s Taraki, I said to myself, the top Communist. Everybody in the prison knew who he was. No, I never spoke to him. I only stared. He was old. I thought, He’s not so goddamned tough.”

One overcast day the soldiers came to remove Taraki’s handcuffs. It was the morning of April 27, 1978. Haq would never forget the moment. The Khalqi’s expression was fixed in stone. One minute a prisoner, the next the keeper and tormentor of other prisoners. Taraki inhabited a world of power and violence and terror; maybe it was all the same to him. Whatever his emotions were, he kept them hidden. The eighteen-year-old fundamentalist guerrilla, who to the new Communist ruler of Afghanistan was just another prisoner, read nothing in the old man’s face. Taraki was murdered the next year by fellow Communist Hafizullah Amin, the same man who had let him out of prison that morning.

“A few hours later we were all freed. The warden said, ‘Everybody out and fight the Daoud regime.’ The next day I was arrested again and taken back to Pul-i-Charki. This time I was not allowed a radio or my Koran. I had to sleep on the cement floor. That’s where I pissed, since I was no longer permitted to use the toilet.” Others were soon being tortured. A broken Fanta bottle rammed up the anus was the most common method. Months later, when Soviet advisers came, the guards were taught how to wire the rectum, in addition to the ears, nose, and testicles, so they could administer electric shocks. When they came to take a man away, he gave his clothes and whatever else he had to the other prisoners. The man then simply vanished. The family was told nothing, not even that the man had been arrested in the first place. All that remained of him were his clothes, worn by other men who would give them away a second time when their turn came. Whenever the prisoners heard the rumble of trucks and buses outside, they knew that a lot of men were to be taken away at once to the “firing range.” Sometimes they were killed with machine guns in the courtyard. Over a seventeen-month period, Taraki killed roughly twenty thousand people in this manner, more than the number of Egyptians and Israelis who died in the 1973 Middle East war. To Afghan Communists, this was the Saur Revolution, named for the Moslem month that corresponded with April 1978, when they removed Ta-raki’s handcuffs.

When guards came to take away Haq, they placed a black hood and sheet over his head and body. “I gave one man my watch and another my shalwar kameez. I figured they were going to kill me.” Instead, they shoved him into an automobile, and after driving for about forty-five minutes they took the hood off. “I was in the parking lot behind the Interior Ministry and KhAD headquarters. Okay, I said to myself. Now they’re going to torture me. I knew this was where the special cases were brought. But they just held me for three months. I was treated better than in the prison. Then one night, around two A.M., they put me in a Volga and drove me to my sister’s house and released me.” As is so often the case in Afghanistan… where men keep in close contact all their lives with second, third, and fourth cousins through extended tribal networks; where blood is not only thicker than water but as persistent as the law and politics too… a distant relative was found who in turn had a relation at the Interior Ministry, and with their help, plus a $7,500 bribe, Haq was released. He was “young and just irresponsible,” Haq’s relative told KhAD officials during the negotiations.

“A few days later I escaped to Pakistan,” Haq said. “That’s when I really started fighting.”

Abdul Haq spent only two weeks in Peshawar before joining the forces of an older and already established mujahidin leader, Jallaluddin Haqqani, who had just opened a front against Taraki’s regime in Paktia, an eastern province south of Nangarhar, along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Jallaluddin taught Haq how to fire and repair all types of machine guns and other ordnance that Haq had not yet encountered.

But fighting with Jallaluddin had made Haq realize “how stupid the mujahidin were. We would build huts that leaked snow from the roof. We would start a fire and burn our faces while feeling cold on our backs. We would go for days without food, when a little planning would have allowed us to eat whenever we wanted. We suffered for no reason because we had no experience in surviving for long periods outside in the snow.”

Haq left Jallaluddin after a few months and started his own front in Nangarhar, where Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami enjoyed strong local support, thanks to the stunning personal example set by Khalis himself in the jihad: here was a man in the seventh decade of life, with one kidney, who nevertheless sported a pistol in his belt and had lived outside in the snows of Nangarhar with Din Mohammed since the first year of the fundamentalist revolt against the Daoud regime.

Haq harbored deep love and respect for his older brother and Yunus Khalis, but he was not blind to their faults. Din Mohammed and Khalis both had plenty of faith and heart, but that’s all they had. In the eyes of Western diplomats they may have been fundamentalist radicals, but Haq saw them as overly conservative and hopelessly out of date when it came to developing a strategy that would allow the mujahidin to survive against a modern superpower’s army.

“I knew I must start a front on my own in Kabul,” Haq told me. “Khalis had nothing there at the time. All of our strength was in Nangarhar and Paktia. Khalis and my brother said, ‘No, the government is going to kill you. You are too young and don’t know what it is to fight the regime in Kabul. You are not ready to fight there.’ I had lots of arguments with them about it. It was the first time I ever fought with them. Finally I said, ‘Look, I’m going to start a front in Kabul whether you want me to or not. Can you help me with money or arms?’ They said no. I got really angry and told them that the machine guns and other arms I captured in Nangarhar were mine to keep, and I was going to take the guns with my friends to Kabul. I left Peshawar without saying goodbye. I was really mad. I felt deserted.”

Abdul Haq once claimed to have started his Kabul front with three other mujahidin and 300 afghanis (under $5 at the time). No doubt he exaggerated. Nevertheless, in his mind it was something he accomplished on his own, without the help or encouragement of those he had always loved and looked up to. He had at last broken away from the family fold. Years later, when Western analysts discerned that Haq had kept his distance from the family interest in Khalis’s Hizb-i-Islami, they couldn’t have known how right they were.

Of the three original fighters who crossed into Afghanistan with Abdul Haq in the first weeks of 1980, two are now dead. One of the two was a Kabul police officer, Zabet Halim, who defected with arms, a car, and several other men and joined up with Haq in the forests of Paghman, west of the city. More weapons came from Haq’s other brother, Abdul Qadir, who had more confidence in Haq than Din Mohammed or Khalis had. Qadir had smuggled the guns across the border from the arms bazaar at Darra without Din Mohammed’s knowledge.

Haq’s mujahidin then numbered about a dozen. They lived in the fields, in the snow, and attacked small Communist posts in the outskirts of Kabul. Halim’s stolen car was used to make night forays into the city… easy at the time, since this was before the Soviets had established a formal security perimeter. Haq spent his time in the capital meeting with the few friends he could trust, to explain what he was trying to do and to ask for their help. He also sent messages to Khalis and Din Mohammed, begging them to reconsider. He needed more arms and more money. No answers came. He eventually cut off all contact with them.

The culture Abdul Haq was operating in, though riddled with treachery and intrigue, didn’t include a modern, sophisticated underground guerrilla network. Haq didn’t learn such a technique on his feet, either: even a few small mistakes in 1980 would have cost him his life. He just seemed to know instinctively what an intelligence network was. Later in his career he would use file cards for everything, but that was because his mind seemed to be divided into airtight compartments, each keeping track of a different underground operation simultaneously. His ability to think analytically was his single greatest asset, even more developed than his talent with explosives.

“I realized that not everyone can pick up a gun and fight. Not everyone was a tough guy like me. But everyone could do something. Those who had money could buy boots and field jackets for us. And those who couldn’t fight and didn’t have money could just work their way up behind desks in the government and listen… and tell us what was going on. You have to make even the weakest and stupidest people feel they have an important job to do. That way everyone will help you.”

The first months of 1980, as the Red Army was implanting itself in Afghanistan, parading up and down the main roads with tanks, showing the flag… in effect telling the citizenry that armed, popular resistance was a quaint, romantic notion that just didn’t work in the real world of massive Soviet arms… Haq spent more of his time talking than he did fighting. It was an elementary apparatus he was setting up: clandestine groups of five or less, all people he knew, who in turn would organize similar groups of people they could trust absolutely. One secret group did nothing but print leaflets. Another distributed them. Another passed messages between printer and distributor. One unit hid the explosives while another transferred them to a third, which carried out the operation. No group knew very much about what the others were doing. Haq invented a language of code words, coded clothing, even an umbrella code for street signals. One month, someone holding a black umbrella meant an operation was on, while the next month the same color meant it was postponed. Because such a basic intelligence system had never been attempted with any discipline in Afghanistan before, and because the Soviets weren’t expecting one, it was effective.

A confidant of the guerrilla leader said, “Haq knew that for such people to succeed they needed to live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods… like Chardihi, south of the city… and have nice cars and nice clothes, so they would look like people who had enough money to bribe their way out of the army and would never be stopped or suspected by the police. He also knew that such groups of people may go months at a time doing nothing at all for the network, yet still had to be maintained, still encouraged, still given pep talks… and still paid.”

The short time Haq was in Nangarhar before starting the front in Kabul, he had established a rudimentary network in Jalalabad that he had turned over to “Engineer” Mahmoud (another Khalis commander). Mahmoud did nothing with it: never contacted the people, never paid them. So that underground fell apart and Haq got very angry at him. The other mujahidin, including other top Khalis commanders, had no concept of what a network was all about.

Intelligence work took a good deal of money, since operatives had to be paid. Haq, because he was a clear thinker, was a good talker and persuader. With the coming of the Soviets, his reputation as a brawler and young rebel was suddenly converted into hard currency as someone with experience at what the Afghans needed most. So the money came. It came from Haq’s friends’ fathers who were merchants and traders. It came from Abdul Qadir, more sympathetic to Haq than Din Mohammed, who ran a smuggling network between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it came from a handful of wealthy, patriotic families willing to give money rather than fight or lose their business with the Communist government.

In July 1980 the BBC reported that a large number of mujahidin were harassing the Soviets in Paghman, west of the capital. “There were only thirteen of us in Paghman,” Haq told me. “The rest were in houses in Kabul. The BBC exaggerated, but it felt great. It felt like we were really doing something.” The same month Haq took shrapnel in the head and returned to Pakistan for the first time since he had argued with his oldest brother and Khalis. (It was the first of many shrapnel wounds Haq would suffer. In the mid-1980s, when he traveled abroad to meet President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, the fragments in his body set off airport metal detectors.)

“I shouted at my brother. I was very rude. I was supposed to respect him but I didn’t. I was full of pride because I had proved him wrong. Hizb-i-Islami asked me to come to the headquarters. I refused. Khalis called me. I shouted at him too. Then one day I was sitting on a carpet drinking tea with Qadir when Khalis came into the room and sat down. I didn’t say hello to him. He grabbed me hard and shouted at me and told me not to be so proud. He admitted he had been wrong about me. I agreed to go with him for two days up to Swat [a mountain valley and resort area in northern Pakistan]. It was my first vacation since I was a child. I felt better. That was when Khalis said, ‘All right, whatever you need, the party will help you.’”

Haq gradually built up an underground network of several hundred safe houses involving thousands of Kabul citizens, who with little advance warning could distribute leaflets throughout the city within hours. And this was in addition to the seven thousand fighters Haq had in Paghman and the other mountain regions overlooking the capital. Haq pioneered the technique of using dummy mujahidin convoys as decoys to ambush Soviet armored troops. He taught his men how to hold their rocket fire until the helicopter gunships were practically on top of them. Wherever he moved in the mountains around “Russian Kabulistan,” he sent out lateral… as well as forward and backward… patrols to make certain he himself was never ambushed. Any of his men who wasted ammunition shooting at birds or other wild game… an Afghan tradition… had their rifles confiscated. Mujahidin who aroused his wrath often got his big, hairy fist in their face. Haq was still very much the little devil who had smacked the teacher. His short fuse made him at once feared, loved, hated, and respected.

Haq’s underground units made their reputation with the kidnapping in Kabul of General Yevgeny Nikolaivich Akhrimiyuk, a relative of the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. General Akhrimiyuk was reported to be the head of the KGB in Afghanistan during the Daoud era and, in 1983 when he was captured, was one of the senior advisers to the Afghan puppet ruler Babrak Karmal… though officially he just advised the government “on geology.”

General Akhrimiyuk’s Afghan driver of four years secretly worked for Zabet Halim, the police officer who defected to Haq when the latter first organized the Kabul front. One morning, the driver picked up the general outside the entrance of the Ministry of Mines and Industry in Kabul and headed for the airport to meet the general’s wife, arriving that day from the Soviet Union. On the way, the driver casually asked the general if it would be all right to give his brother a lift to the bus station, since his brother had to go to Jalalabad. General Akhrimiyuk said no, it would not be all right. The driver expected this and had thought of something else.

The driver mentioned to the general that he had accidentally left the trunk open. Before the general could protest, the driver pulled over to the side of the road on a street near the Ministry of Defense. As the driver got out to close the trunk, another man jumped into the car through the open door and pointed a cocked pistol at the general’s head. The driver, who had not left the trunk open at all, quickly got back into the car and drove out of the city, to a rendezvous with Haq’s men in Paghman. After three days there, they took General Akhrimiyuk to an area bordering Pakistan, where they held him for eight months.

There was talk of exchanging him for fifty of Khalis’s mujahidin being held prisoner in Kabul. But as the talks stalled, Haq said he began to feel a little sorry for the general, who was old, sick, and had been badly wounded in an antipersonnel mine explosion during World War II. General Akhrimiyuk whimpered constantly about his wife and family, but despite continued questioning, stuck to his cover, refusing to discuss anything except “gas and petroleum.” The mujahidin allowed the general to write a letter to a high-level Soviet official, begging him to negotiate a release, but nothing happened.

“I was always against torture,” Haq said to me. “And this guy was old. I went to Strasbourg, where I told the European Parliament that we don’t kill prisoners. Then I picked up a newspaper and read that my party had killed him. It was Khalis who ordered him killed. I got really mad at Khalis but he just said, ‘He was dying anyway.’ I should never have let Akhrimiyuk get out of my hands. They held him for months and didn’t even get any information out of him. What did I have him kidnapped for?”

Within Afghanistan and among the Afghan refugee community on the Northwest Frontier, Abdul Haq’s reputation grew. On November 21, 1985, Dr. Najib replaced Babrak Karmal as Afghanistan’s Communist ruler, and Haq faced a new challenge. Najib, born in 1946, was almost twenty years younger than Karmal, more lethal, and more dynamic. A medical doctor trained in security work by the KGB, and head of KhAD from 1980 to 1985, Najib had been described by the Afghan prime minister at the time, Sultan Ali Keshtmand, as a “strong and penetrating weapon of the Revolution.” Najib, more than any other Afghan, was responsible for making KhAD the feared and effective enterprise it was. Under his command, KhAD grew into a force of twenty-five thousand, with a budget larger than that of the Afghan regular army. KhAD took over all aspects of the arrest and interrogation of political prisoners, with the jurisdiction of the police restricted to common criminals.

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 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:

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.

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:

Haq’s public relations campaign was not limited to the civilians of Kabul, but to the regime’s soldiers and members of Najib’s government as well. Eight years of building an underground network had yielded him many useful sources of information within Communist-controlled Kabul, allowing Haq to publish “situation reports” that were at times more informative than the weekly reports distributed by the U.S. embassy in Islamabad.

According to Haq’s sources, the Afghan Communists were so bitterly divided that much of their time was spent plotting against each other rather than fighting the guerrillas. You would have thought that given the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the upsurge in mujahidin rocket attacks on Kabul during the summer of 1988 that the two factions of the Afghan Communist party… the working-class, Pukhtuspeaking extremists of Khalq and the more sophisticated Dari speakers of Parcham… would close ranks against the common enemy. But the hatred and treachery between the Khalqis and the Par-chamis were so fierce that the withdrawing Soviets had to spend considerable time and energy just to keep them from slaughtering each other.

As ruthless as President Najib’s reputation was (he ran KhAD for five years), he was actually the leading moderate among the Communists. Najib, of middle-class origins and with a university education, was a typical Parchami. He was willing to negotiate with mujahidin commanders, if only to split the resistance further, as part of a deftly executed policy of trying to keep a pro-Soviet regime alive and functioning in Kabul. Najib’s nemesis was the Afghan interior minister, Sayed Mohammed Gulabzoi, who was a Khalqi. Like many Khalqis, he was semiliterate, from humble origins, and an extremist who believed that the soft, vacillating Parchamis had to be liquidated in order for the Afghan Communist party… officially known as the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA… to deal effectively with the guerrilla threat. To think that the Khalqis on their own could slug it out with the mujahidin after the uniformed Soviet troops left, without even the pretense of a diplomatic strategy to wean away disenchanted resistance commanders, was insane. “You can’t explain it rationally,” said one Western diplomat who shuttled between Kabul and Peshawar and who backed up Haq’s account. “Put it down to centuries of inbreeding.”

Taraki and Amin were Khalqis, and their rule of Afghanistan in 1978 and 1979 was so brutal that it sparked the original mujahidin rebellion that forced the Soviets to invade. A decade later, as the Soviets were pulling out, a Khalqi coup against Najib’s regime was a Kremlin nightmare. Given the rude fact of Khalqi control over the Interior Ministry, which boasted its own elite paramilitary units known as Sarandoy, the Kremlin had no choice but to think on its feet and massage Khalqi ambitions, protecting Najib at the same time.

Haq’s informers reported the following sequence of events: In early 1988, in an attempt to cut off a Khalqi coup plot against him, Najib had Gulabzoi removed from his post as interior minister and maneuvered to have the vacant Defense Ministry portfolio filled by a Parchami ally. Gulabzoi reacted by flying to the Soviet Union, where he lobbied the Kremlin for twenty-one days to dump Najib. The Kremlin appeared to go along, telling Najib to appoint Gulabzoi’s Khalqi comrade General Shahnawaz Tanai as the defense minister. Najib refused. The first week in August, Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze had to travel to Kabul just to twist Najib’s arm. When even that failed, the Soviets trotted out Major General Kim Tsagolov to give a press conference in Moscow, stating that Najib lacked popular support and that his government could not survive the Soviet troop pullout. Finally, on August 16, Najib made the Khalqi general Tanai the new defense minister. But at the same time the Soviets gave Najib thirty new bodyguards. To try to keep the two Khalqis, Gulabzoi and Tanai, on speaking terms with Najib, the Soviets forced the three Afghans to meet with one another for two hours daily.

Even so, according to Haq, on September 9, 1988, the Soviets just managed to prevent a Khalqi coup against Najib. The Soviets clearly had had enough of Khalqi intrigue. In early November, Gulabzoi was taken at gunpoint from his Kabul home and put on a plane to Moscow, where he went into a kind of exile in reverse, as the Afghan ambassador to the Soviet Union.

With Gulabzoi out of the way, the Kremlin now tried to knock Parchami and Khalqi heads together and concomitantly improve the regime’s image by appointing an Afghan prime minister who was not even a member of the Communist Party, nor associated with either of its two warring factions.

The new man, Hassan Sharq, was a laundered Communist… someone recruited years before by the KGB, as securely in Moscow’s pocket as Najib or Gulabzoi. Yet, because Sharq was not officially a Party member, he was paraded before the world as the compromise figure needed to end the mujahidin siege. Only the most naive and sympathetic foreigners were fooled, such as UN special negotiator Diego Cordovez, who actually described Sharq as the most sensible man in Afghanistan. But Cordovez was alone in his judgment. The mujahidin rejected Sharq, as did the Pakistanis and the Americans. Even the media caught on to him rather quickly. In an early November column in the New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal labeled Sharq a Moscow-controlled appointee with absolutely no credibility. (Useless as a public relations tool, and with no power base of his own, Sharq was soon removed as prime minister.)

The roll of events in Kabul told Haq that, given the fragility of Najib’s regime, the time had come to do what he had done when he first set up the Kabul network: meet with people, argue, negotiate, and persuade. On weekends (Thursday afternoon through Saturday, since the Moslem Sabbath was Friday), Haq began disappearing from Peshawar, traveling with his bodyguards over roads the guerrillas controlled, to meet with regime army commanders who wanted to defect. Haq argued that they should stay in place, listening and passing on information to the mujahidin, and bolt only when he gave the word. Haq also met with disgruntled Communist Party members who were Khalqis. Such meetings were not difficult to arrange. The level of treachery between Khalq and Parcham was so deep that for one to conspire with the mujahidin against the other was natural.

Haq kept up the military pressure during the middle of 1988 through a series of surgical rocket strikes on Kabul airport, which further demoralized the Communist Party and military establishments. In the third week of June, Haq’s men bombed eight Su-25 fighter jets on the ground, a loss valued at roughly $80 million… the most costly destruction of equipment in any single attack during the war. The mujahidin had got lucky: one of the rockets struck a jet dead-on, igniting a chain reaction of fires and explosions that engulfed the seven other planes.

“We could fire thousands of rockets everywhere in the city every night and then march in and take over,” Haq said. “But you would kill hundreds of thousands that way.” He figured that, considering the political situation in the capital, the best way to take Kabul was not to take it at all: better to let it implode through the cumulative weight of KhalqParcham infighting, well-timed rocket attacks and defections, and the picking off of all the government posts circling the city, blockading it step by step. Lack of food and electricity was something the population would not like but would understand. Indiscriminate rocket attacks, however, they would not understand. And mass support for the mujahidin was crucial if the Communist power structure was to cave in. When that collapse looked imminent, then… and only then… should the guerrillas negotiate with the regime. The regime might be expected to accept any kind of a deal at that point. Of course, had Haq’s advice been taken, the mujahidin would likely have made better military progress than they did immediately following the Soviet withdrawal. (Haq was naive in only one respect: he didn’t foresee that the Soviets would spend billions… rather than the anticipated hundreds of millions… of dollars to keep the regime in power, while the Americans would deliver only a fraction of that amount to the mujahidin in 1989.)

Haq argued that Massoud, who had a military plan of his own for taking Kabul, had less support and fewer contacts in the capital than he did. It wasn’t that Haq, a Pathan, was resentful of Massoud, a Tajik. After news arrived in Peshawar that Massoud had ejected the Soviets from the Panjshir Valley, Haq offered a self-deprecating smile and said, “Good for Massoud. Maybe I’m just a wimp and he really is a better commander.” But Haq genuinely felt that Massoud’s strategy forced him to rely more on conventional military means, which meant a greater loss of civilian life. Nevertheless, after years of shortchanging Massoud and Haq, ISI suddenly decided to become more generous toward the Tajik commander.

In early 1989, Haq’s weapons supply was cut off completely. Without weapons to dole out, he began to be deserted by mujahidin. Even Gunston, sensing the growing importance of Massoud over Haq, began making trips inside with the Tajik instead. Haq turned out to be the Afghan Cassandra, whose prophecies were always right but never believed by those charged with spending American taxpayers’ money. Haq not only suffered but was punished because of the truth he uttered.

ISI, whose policy and personnel remained the same for months after Zia’s death, was evidently taking no chances. Its men mistrusted both Haq and Massoud for their audacity in running their own wars. But at least Massoud appeared to see the bloody conquest of Kabul as the climax of the war. Haq’s position was too subtle for ISI. He held that the war was, to a certain degree, already over, even though the mujahidin lacked the capability for an all-out conventional assault on Kabul… as well as on Jalalabad and other cities… without a heavy loss of civilian life. Haq believed the end would come through patience, sabotage, and careful, surreptitious manipulation of the Kabul regime. But ISI, echoed by the Americans, was thinking more along the lines of events in Berlin in 1945. They wanted Götterdämmerung in Kabul and Jalalabad (the city closest to the Pakistani border) to be bloody and humiliating for the Communists. Indeed, the Americans were willing to let the Pakistanis install Hekmatyar as their surrogate afterward if that was the price to pay for the pleasure of seeing the Soviets “clinging to their helicopters,” after the fashion of forces departing from Vietnam. Of course, that’s not how it turned out.

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.