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The new Afghan jihad is
born
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
 KARACHI - While there is some truth in reports
that al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the radical Muslim group
Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) have formed an alliance
in Afghanistan, the motivating force and dominant player
in the country is the HIA, led by former Afghan premier
and famed mujahideen warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Driven by the burning desire to see the last
foreign soldier booted out of Afghanistan, Hekmatyar,
who made his name as a fighter against Soviet occupation
in the 1980s, earlier this week issued a jihad for the
expulsion of the unwanted soldiers from Afghan soil.
Hekmatyar was the strongest force during the years of
Soviet occupation, largely because his HIA was the main
benefactor of the seven official mujahideen groups
recognized by Pakistan and US intelligence agencies for
the channelling of money and arms.
In the new
political arrangement, a loose union has been
established in which the Taliban's religious clerics
will stay on the back benches, leaving the mujahideen
commanders to orchestrate events - which they are doing
from such centers as Peshawar in Pakistan, Berlin and
Tehran. At the core of their agenda is securing
international backing for a "freedom struggle against
foreign troops", rather than the pursuit of an al-Qaeda
program. In the new situation, the Taliban will play a
junior role to the HIA, which will be mastermined by
Hekmatyar and another former mujahideen and once
minister in the Taliban government, Maulana Jalaluddin
Haqqani.
Thursday's assassination attempt in the southern city
of Kandahar of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who
is widely despised in ethnic Pashtun circles (even
though he is Pashtun) for his pro-US stance, and the
fatal car bomb attack on a Kabul market on the same day
can be viewed as clear evidence that Hekmatyar is
calling the shots, and that his battle has begun with a
vengeance. The Kabul government is hated by Pashtuns for
being pro-American and dominated by rival Tajiks from
the north.
Just months ago, when Hekmatyar left
Iran, where he had been in exile during the Taliban
years, many Afghan analysts claimed that the moment he
set foot in his home country he would be a dead man. His
bombardment of the capital in 1994, after he fell out
with the mujahideen administration that ran the country
from 1992 to 1996, is said to have resulted in the
deaths of more than 25,000 civilians.
But his
support among the rank and file and veteran commanders
of the anti-Soviet jihad remains strong, and widely
underestimated. And while there have been many reports
in the Western media that Hekmatyar has been running
from pillar to post trying to find a safe haven in
Afghanistan, the fact is that he has been busy
organizing support among the HIA in Logar, Ghazni, Kunar
and Kandahar, which will become the center of his
guerrilla activities.
During the jihad against
the Soviets the HIA set up a successful intelligence
wing comprising Afghans, Pakistanis and Arabs. Later
they cultivated many members from Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan and extended their operations in these areas
to put maximum pressure on the then USSR. This is a part
of their strategy, and their speciality is to weaken
their opponents internally. They are known to have a
number of key Tajik "plants" within the Karzai
administration.
Sources in the Hezb-i-Islami
Afghanistan maintain that it has restructured its
command and control systems across Afghanistan, with key
commanders in Ghazni, Hekmatyar's home town, Gardez,
Logar, Kunar and Kandahar being given specific tasks for
action against foreign troops. Further, the local
administration in eastern Afghanistan, including the
police and the Afghan army, is completely at the mercy
of these HIA commanders. Even the powerful commander of
Jalalabad, Malik Hazrat Ali, who is a confidant of
Afghan Defense Minister General Qasim Fahim, has given
assurances to local HIA commanders that he will remain
neutral in the next offensive, which is likely to be
launched in Jalalabad and the southern Kabul region. The
HIA is also in the process of making contact with
commanders in northern Afghanistan, where new
"activities" can be expected to start soon.
The
new fight being led by the HIA will be named a freedom
struggle against the occupation of foreign troops and
tyranny against Pashtuns, and it is expected to gather
widespread support among different Afghan factions,
irrespective of their political affiliations. An
important strategy will be to fan the flames of Pashtun
dissatisfaction with the Tajik ascendancy in the Kabul
government.
Hekmatyar has also begun a campaign
to win hearts and minds with a taped speech released all
over eastern Afghanistan in which he queries why it is
that only Pashtuns are the targets of US bombing, and
not Tajiks and Uzbeks. He says that ordinary Afghan
people have been humiliated by US and other soldiers
entering their houses and taking away their personal
weapons - and even searching their women.
The
tape is backed up by other literature that is being
spread across the country, much of it originating from
Iran and being given a safe passage into Afghanistan by
the Governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, another famous
anti-Soviet mujahideen, even though he is Tajik.
Sources within the HIA say that the organization
has recently reestablished contact with the Chinese
government. In the past, Beijing has blamed the HIA for
stirring a religious uprising in in the northwestern
Muslim region of Xinjiang, but Hekmatyar made concerted
efforts to placate China, as well as to urge the Muslim
leaders in Xinjiang to stop their separatist agitation.
Beijing was said to be appreciative of these efforts,
but it is yet to be seen how far China will go in
supporting the new Afghan freedom struggle against
foreign troops, if at all.
As a part of the
changing patterns in the region, in the past month
Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders have been busy reviving
their links, not only in Afghanistan but also in
Pakistan. For instance, recently the former Afghan
counsel general in Karachi, Maulvi Rehmatullah Kakazada,
a most-wanted Taliban leader, secretly visited Karachi
to visit his ailing father in Ziauddin Hospital. He
stayed for almost 10 days until his father's death, and
he even offered funeral prayers in one of the city's
largest and best-known pro-Taliban Islamic seminaries
before returning to Afghanistan. Pakistani law
enforcement agencies apparently only learned of his
visit after after he had left the country.
Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, will continue its
operations with the help of the underworld, both in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the mainstream business in
Afghanistan is now firmly in the hands of the
Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan, not for an international
agenda, but to fight for the evacuation of foreign
soldiers.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co Ltd. All
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