CounterPunch
February
14, 2003
Meet Mr. Blowback
Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, CIA Op and Homicidal Thug
By GARY LEUPP
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Pashtun warlord, former Afghan
prime minister, fundamentalist religious fanatic, and homicidal
thug, has been much in the news of late. The largest battle in
Afghanistan in recent months, in the mountains near Spin Boldak
on January 27, pitted US forces against guerrillas "most
closely aligned with the Hezb-i Islami movement, which
is Hekmatyar's military arm," according to US military spokesman
Colonel Roger King (Daily Times, Pakistan, Feb. 10). The
death of nine minibus passengers in an explosion near Kandahar
January 31 was also attributed to Hezb-i-Islami. It's
been widely alleged that Hekmatyar, who has been sighted in six
Afghan provinces in the last three months, has linked up with
Mullah Omar, remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Boston
Globe, February 9). This is plausible, although one must
note a history of sour relations between the Taliban and the
warlord. Few articles in the mainstream press mention the far
more substantial historical association: that between Hekmatyar
and the CIA. During the 1980s he received fully 90% the CIA-supplied
funds doled out via Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI)
to the Mujahadeen Islamic warriors (see Ahmed Rashid, Taliban
[Yale University Press, 2000], p. 91). These funds amounted
to some half-billion dollars per year throughout the 1980s, matched
by equal sums from that other enthusiastic Mujahadeen patron,
acting in close cooperation with the US: Saudi Arabia.
Hekmatyar is Mr. Blowback, among the
most vicious of former US clients now at odds with their one-time
paymasters. So his career deserves some study. Born
in Baghlan around 1950, Hekmatyar attended a military academy,
then Kabul University where by some accounts he was for several
years a member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA), a party aligned with the Soviet Union. At that time the
Kabul government was neutral in the Cold War rivalry between
the US and USSR, and the PDPA operated legally within a basically
secular environment. At the university, the PDPA adherents were
challenged primarily not by Islamicists (among whose ranks we
must surely now count Mr. Blowback), but by the Maoists of the
Shola Jawaid (Eternal Flame) movement. (The Maoists briefly
published a journal under that title.) In June 1972, Hekmatyar
assassinated Saydal Sokhandan, a Shola Jawaid leader,
on the Kabul campus. This was his first murder, and claim to
fame. To avoid prosecution, he fled to Pakistan, where he organized
against the PDPA (which would in 1978 execute a coup and align
Kabul with the Soviet Union), and founded Hezb-i-Islami (Party
of Islam).
Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in late 1979, Hezb-i-Islami played a leading role in the
Islamic jihad against the pro-Soviet regime and so naturally
went on the US payroll. Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, convicted of
responsibility for the first attack on the World Trade Center
in 1995, helped the CIA establish contacts with Hekmatyar. Meanwhile
the latter's forces in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan continued
a jihad against the Maoists, who were also playing a significant
role in the anti-Soviet resistance. Hekmatyar wanted to insure
that the opposition was thoroughly religious and anti-communist
in character. So in November 1986, in Peshawar, Pakistan, Hezb-i-Islami
forces assassinated Dr. Faiz Ahmad, founder and leader of the
Maoist Afghanistan Liberation Organization, and ten other key
ALO members. The next year, according to the Revolutionary Association
of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA, a secular, anti-fundamentalist
organization rooted in the Maoist movement), they were complicit
in the assassination of RAWA founder Meena (b. 1957) in Quetta,
Pakistan. (I doubt the CIA found any of this objectionable.)
So great was Hekmatyar's cooperation
with the CIA (then headed by William Casey) that he even, at
their request, launched rocket attacks from Afghanistan against
the Soviet republic of Tajikistan in 1987 (Rashid, p. 129). In
June 1993, following the Mujahadeen victory over the last government
installed by the Soviets, Hekmatyar became prime minister of
the country, serving under the new president, Burhanuddin Rabbani.
But he broke with the government in the fall, and in January
1994, in alliance with Abdul Rashid Dostum (the warlord who presently
controls much of northern Afghanistan) laid siege to Kabul.
In two months, 4,000 residents of Kabul (which had been an island
of stability and prosperity during the pro-Soviet period) were
killed. 21,000 were injured, and 200,000 were forced to flee
the city. For a time Rabbani's forces joined an alliance with
the Taliban against Hekmatyar, and in November, Pakistan broke
ties with Hekmatyar in favor of the Taliban. (As Benzadir Bhutto
explained in 2001, "We developed relations with [the Taliban]
because we were interested in routes to Central Asia" and
she felt that the Taliban could restore peace and order.)
Hekmatyar and Rabbani reconciled in 1995,
taking on a new alliance of Dostum's forces and the Taliban.
Hekmatyar was on the same side as Ahmed Shah Massoud (whom the
Northern Alliance continues to idolize), whose troops systematically
raped and killed members of the Shi'ite Hazzara community in
Kabul. In March, the Taliban decimated Hekmatyar's army, and
in September 1996, entered the capital, toppling the government
headed by Rabbani, Hekmatyar and Massoud. Hekmatyar had already
fled to Iran.
Since the Mujahadeen triumph in 1993
the US had paid little attention to Afghanistan, which had not
been considered of much strategic interest before the pro-Soviet
coup in 1978. After the Taliban's conquest of power, in all but
five or ten percent of the country, the US continued to recognize
the Rabbani regime, but did little to support it (in contrast
to Russia and Iran, which provided assistance to the Northern
Alliance forces fighting in the northern Tajik and Uzbek regions
under Massoud's command). The CIA perhaps severed ties with
Hekmatyar and his forces. In any case, one heard little more
from the warlord until November 2001, after the Northern Alliance,
abetted by US bombing, retook the city of Kabul. Rabbani was
back in power as president, but the US refused to recognize his
government, and urged the selection of a Pashtun president to
balance the overwhelmingly Tajik-Uzbek composition of the government.
The conference held in Bonn that month was designed to establish
a new regime that would address Pashtun concerns, provide stability
and place the nation firmly within the U.S. orbit. From Iran,
Hekmatyar fumed that "Only groups fitting US requirements
and interests have been invited" to Bonn. The former CIA
operative now called for a jihad against the US.
Soon a deputy intelligence officer in
Jalalabad was telling the press that Hekmatyar was trying to
organize a force of former Taliban soldiers, Pakistanis and Pashtuns
to destabilize the new government. In January 2002, Afghan
police intercepted a bus headed for Kabul from Jalalabad, reportedly
carrying agents for a chemical attack. Some suggested this was
a Hekmatyar project; others blamed al-Qaeda. In March, press
accounts indicated that Hekmatyar had left Iran for Herat, either
because Iranian authorities had expelled him, or because he wanted
to militarily challenge the new government, with Iranian assistance.
300 people were arrested the next month in an alleged coup plot
in Kabul; again, Afghan sources blamed forces loyal to Hekmatyar.
The standard spin on such stories by
this time was that the former prime minister had formed an alliance
with his former Taliban enemies, and their al-Qaeda friends.
In July the Boston Globe reported that Hekmatyar had recently
met repeatedly with Osama bin Laden. It's hard to know what to
make of such reports. Hekmatyar is considered close to Shi'ite
Iran, and Iran and the fiercely anti-Shi'ite Taliban came close
to war in 1998.
The history of enmity between Hezb-i-Islami
and the Taliban would seem to rule out a close and comfortable
union, but perhaps the various forces have indeed worked out
a temporary marriage of convenience.
Last year, on May 6, the CIA fired a
Hellfire missile from an unmanned Predator spy plane in an effort
to kill their Frankenstein somewhere in Afghanistan. It missed.
(The warlord's son, at a news conference in Peshawar, indignantly
protested the assassination attempt, declaring that his father
supported the Karzai government and the upcoming Loya Jirga,
confident that his Hezb-i-Islami party would be well represented
at that event.) The failed attack, which was of course under-reported
in the corporate press, was significant for several reasons.
It was conducted by the intelligence agency that had created
him (by the Americans who know him best), rather than by the
coalition military forces sent to topple the Taliban and destroy
al-Qaeda. It was the first time that a target other than
the Taliban or al-Qaeda (and without any imaginable connection
to 9-11) was singled out for a lethal strike. It was an assassination
attempt on a foreign political leader, of the sort that up until
recently has been disallowed by US law. (It was followed by the
well-publicized US assassination in Yemen of alleged al-Qaeda
leader, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, and five other alleged operatives
with another laser-guided Hellfire missile, fired from an unmanned
drone aircraft, last November.)
The Afghan missile attack signaled that
US forces would treat as enemies any armed resistance
to the Karzai puppet regime (or what might be termed the Karzai/warlord
regime, since Karzai is really only Mayor of Kabul and the rest
of the country is ruled by the baronial administrations of Ismail
Khan, Qasim Fahim, Dostum, etc.), even as ever-widening sectors
of Afghan society grow disillusioned with that regime. It signaled
mission-creep, and the potential for a nation apparently "under
control" to morph into a Vietnam-style quagmire. There are
many forces in Afghanistan who for various reasons want to sabotage
Karzai and drive out the westerners, the successors of the infidel
Soviets. Hekmatyar, as long as he survives, will probably play
a big role in the opposition. Anyway it seems to me that he's
the man to watch.
Quite likely, the empire that chose to
subsidize some of the most reactionary, misogynistic, fundamentalist
scumbags on the planet to destroy the Soviet Union and to achieve
"full spectrum dominance" will continue (due to the
efforts of its erstwhile clients, like Mr. Blowback), to pay
for its sins. Support a brutal Shah? Watch his enraged victims
seize your embassy and take your agents hostage. Support Iraq
against Iran, to punish Iran for overthrowing your Shah? Watch
the Iraqi ally use the weapons you sold him against your client
oil-state of Kuwait. Finish off Saddam, in a splendid little
war? Watch how the world, recoiling in horror and outrage, will
prepare its answers. "For they have sown the wind, and they
shall reap the whirlwind" (Hosea 8:7). Imperialist sin is
system wide, having its own (evil) logic, at odds ultimately
with the logic, morality and interests of ordinary American people,
who alone, in the end, can excise it through the radical exorcism
of thorough-going regime change right here at home.
Yesterday's
Features
Jennifer Berkshire
Columbia
and the Signs from Above
Jason Leopold
It's
the Oil, Stupid
The Markets of Mass Destruction
Neve Gordon
Arabs
and Jews Unite for Peace
Charlie Clements, MD
A
Report from Iraq
Bombing the Starving, the Sick, the Homeless
Linda Heard
Oh What a Web They Weave!
Will Hans Get Blixed?
Jeremy Brecher
Alternative
to War
Democratic Protest Can Avert Calamity
Senator Robert Byrd
Bush Administration is Reckless
Ray McGovern
CIA Man on the Agency's Days of Shame
Kurt Nimmo
The Propaganda of Anxiety
Website of the Day
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Blue Collar Review
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February 8
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