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THE ROVING EYE
EXCLUSIVE: The last
battle
Part 1: Exit Osama, enter
Hekmatyar
By Pepe
Escobar
ASADABAD, eastern Afghanistan - It's 7am
in dirt-poor, semi-devastated Martyr's Square in this
town in the heart of Kunar province. The sun is already
shining high and the big, brash  American anti-terrorist show is in town.
And what a show it is. Nine vehicles, ranging
from Humvees to Toyota HiLux vehicles customized with
machine guns, carrying as many as six soldiers each, all
engineered to raise serious hell, take possession of the
square. The whole town is watching. A commando group
climbs up the rickety stairs to the balcony of the
Istiqlal - the only hotel in town and whose unbelievably
filthy washrooms are crammed with graffiti of the new
jihad against America - and engages in a
search-and-destroy operation against two "culprits", as
the local Pashtuns put it: this Asia Times Online
correspondent and his companion, Pashto-speaking,
Peshawar-based journalist Majeed Baber.
The
Special Forces are relatively polite - but firm.
Identity documents are checked and then digital still
photos and video footage is erased - under severe
vigilance. Next time, the cameras will be confiscated.
Although the whole process is totally illegal, all is
justified in the name of the "tense" security situation.
Scott, one of the soldiers, is a little more affable
than the others, who share a uniform blank,
psychopath-style gaze. Scott confirms on the record -
and he will be the only one to do so - that the real
mission is "to get Hekmatyar", the former Afghan premier
and famed mujahideen warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
leader of the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (Islamic Party).
Scott argues the footage and photos might fall
into the wrong hands. "They might see how many we are,
what we are doing." As if "they" didn't know already.
Some intelligence information is exchanged and the show
departs with a bang to look for the bad guys. Later, the
whole town will keep coming back to ask in utter
perplexity, "What were the Americans telling you? Have
you done anything wrong?"
Make no mistake. This
is it. One year after September 11, this is the ultimate
frontline, the last, crucial battle in the new Afghan
war - as the best Pakistan-Afghanistan insiders have
been predicting for months. Or maybe the battle is just
beginning. The fact is that now between 300 and 400
American Special Forces - according to different
estimations of local Pashtun commanders - are now based
in Kunar in hot pursuit of the newly-promoted number one
"dead or dead" enemy in the war against terrorism in
Afghanistan: Hekmatyar, the Pashtun leader and the only
premier in history with the dubious distinction of
shelling his own capital, Kabul, in mid-1992, causing
the death of as many as 25,000 people, until his bases
were destroyed by the Taliban in early 1995.
Even though the war against terrorism costs
roughly US$1 billion a day, Osama bin Laden has not been
found. Ayman "The Surgeon" Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's
number two, has not been found. Taliban supremo Mullah
Omar - who escaped from B-52 bombing last November on
the back of a Honda 50cc motorcycle - has not been
found. So the new bogeyman is Hekmatyar, who is
gathering forces for his new jihad to drive foreign
troops out of Afghanistan.
Scores of
international journalists are gathering at the Tora Bora
to "commemorate" September 11 - perhaps hoping to shoot
a bin Laden video in one of the myriad caves in which he
was reputed to have hidden before escaping well before
the advancing US troops arrived. Asia Times Online,
instead, is trying to confirm privileged information
according to which Hekmatyar is hiding somewhere in
Kunar; former mujahideen leader "Professor" Abdul
Rassoul Sayyaf - renamed by his Arab patrons Abd al-Rabb
al-Rasul Sayyaf - has been to Kunar; and bin Laden and
al-Zawahiri may or may not have recently been in Kunar.
The American Special Forces - housed in a huge
compound that used to be the local jail on the outskirts
of Asadabad - have been camped since the end of June; in
the beginning they were less than a dozen, now they're
hundreds, but still they haven't found what they are
looking for. The search - for Hekmatyar, for al-Qaeda,
for supporters, for clues in the middle of ever-shifting
alliances, for escape routes - is a complex puzzle.
There's only one way to go - and it is to criss-cross
information volunteered by all the major players. What
we find is a dizzying web of political, military, tribal
and religious friction.
In Hekmatyar America has
a formidable foe, as the Soviets found out to their cost
in their Afghanistan adventure in the 1980s. He issued
an anti-American fatwa in June, and last week he
reconfirmed a jihad against "American invaders" and the
"persecution of Pashtuns". His Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan
now runs the show and Hekmatyar can count on hundreds of
loyal and very experienced commanders - such as Maulana
Jalaluddin Haqqani, the former number one military
commander of the Taliban. Al-Qaeda is collaborating with
Hezb-i-Islami, but only in a supporting role.
The Hezb-i-Islami - 75 percent of it made up of
Pashtuns - is the most revolutionary and disciplined of
all the Afghan Islamist parties. It's nothing remotely
similar to a bunch of turbans roaming around in pick-up
trucks, as often the Taliban were. The Hezb is a modern
organization. Recruitment and promotion is based on
skill and merit - and not on social roles or how well
one can recite the Koran. Hezb leaders have all been
educated in Afghanistan - not in Pakistani
madrassas (religious schools). Hekmatyar is a
radical Islamist. During the anti-Soviet jihad his party
was the absolute favorite of the Afghan refugees in
Pakistan, where Islamabad helped the Hezb control 250
schools - from which 43,500 students graduated. These
students are the core of the party's new generation, and
they make up most of the soldiers of Hekmatyar's
conventional military force, the Lashkar-i-Isar (Army of
Sacrifice).
During the anti-Soviet jihad,
Hekmatyar received tens of millions of dollars from
Libya and Iraq. And prior to Saddam Hussein invading
Kuwait in 1990, the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments and
private donors had provided as much as a billion dollars
to Hekmatyar. The Hezb was also the darling of
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the
Islamic conservative wahhabis from Saudi Arabia. It was
also the favorite of moderate Pakistani generals and -
the icing on the cake - the operations wing of the US's
Central Intelligence Agency.
This went on until
late 1989, when Bush senior's administration realized
that the USSR was collapsing - and Afghanistan lost its
strategic importance. When the priority was to "kill
Russians" - according to the crude lingo of the times -
the US gave free reign to the ISI to distribute cash and
weapons in Afghanistan, with no American supervision.
The lion's share always went straight to Hekmatyar and
Sayyaf.
It is fair to say that practically every
Pashtun tribe or clan had or has a branch or faction
with a link to Hekmatyar. So it is no wonder that the
man is now skillfully playing the ethnic card. In his
most recent audiotaped address to people all over the
Pashtun belt to the east of the country he asks
rhetorically why only Pashtuns are being bombed,
arrested or killed by the Americans. Hekmatyar touches
the right chord in any tribal Pashtun heart when he says
that Pashtuns have been humiliated by Americans
searching their houses without any warning, confiscating
their weapons and - an unpardonable sin in Pashtunwali,
the tribal code of honor - physically searching their
women.
Pashtuns in Kunar and Nangarhar are
convinced the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance was
behind the killing of Haji Abdul Qadir - the only
Pashtun vice-president in President Hamid Karzai's
government in Kabul. Portraits of Qadir are ubiquitous
in Nangarhar while not a single Karzai portrait is to be
seen. Karzai, although a Pashtun, is widely despised as
an American puppet and a hostage of the powerful
Northern Alliance ministers, such as commander Mohammed
Fahim, the Afghan Defense Minister. Karzai's own
security service is totally infiltrated by experienced
Hezb-i-Islami operatives, possibly why he now relies on
US bodyguards for his personal protection.
Haji
Matheullah Khan Safi is the core commander of Kunar. In
theory, he is working with the Americans. He says that
he used to speak English - but adds, emphatically, that
"with this war I forgot everything". According to him,
the Americans have been in Kunar for at least two
months. "When they got here, we had problems with local
commanders in different checkposts. Now this is
finished. The province is under a single
administration."
Haji Matheullah is the first to
tell what will be a recurrent story of how a group of
high-ranking Arabs escaped from Jalalabad after the city
fell to the Northern Alliance on November 12. "There was
a huge compound full of Arabs. The most important
escaped to Kunar." The Arabs were helped by
Hezb-i-Islami people, by Haji Roohullah (a Kunar wahhabi
rising star, recently arrested and now in American
custody at Bagram air base on the outskirts of Kabul)
and Kashmir Khan (a high commander close to Hekmatyar
whom some define as a gangster). "There were only nine
Arabs at the time. But one of them was severely injured,
died, and was buried near Asadabad. The eight that
remained arrived in Daish and then the valleys of
Shigal. There were at least four important people among
them - maybe Abu Zubaida." Zubaida, an al-Qaeda
strategist, was later arrested in Faisalabad, Pakistan,
in late March.
Haji Matheullah cannot or is not
willing to confirm a now famous meeting in the beginning
of August between Hekmatyar, Sayyaf and other key people
that took place in Kunar. "It is not easy for Sayyaf to
get into this area. But everyone knows their thinking is
the same." He comments with a Pashtun proverb. "If you
don't eat the onion, you don't smell." And then he adds,
"Some activities in this area might confirm that
Hekmatyar could be in the remote mountains northeast of
Asadabad." A few minutes later, though, comes a new
twist: "If all the people are thinking that Hekmatyar is
in Kunar, he may well be in Kunar. And if Hekmatyar is
in Kunar, Osama and al-Zawahiri may be as well, because
they are all in contact."
We talk about how
Hekmatyar - by satellite telephone, on the BBC Pashto
service - announced that he supported a new jihad
against the Americans, launched in Gardez and Khost, in
Paktia province. "Are you sure it was a sat-phone, or
tape?" He then switches to attack mode. "We did the
jihad 20 years ago against the Russians, for the
stability of the country and for the sake of Islam, and
then we gave Kabul to these people - Hekmatyar, [Rashid]
Dostum, [Burhanuddin] Rabbani, Sayyaf. What did they do
to Kabul and the country? They destroyed Kabul, they
destroyed the country and now they want it again."
The situation in Kunar is increasingly tense.
Two weeks ago, two missiles hit the American compound in
Asadabad. Haji Matheullah finally fires on all cylinders
and admits fighters, numbering about 500, are probably
hiding in the mountains. "It takes 48 hours to get
there, by walking. We heard they bought a lot of new
weapons, RPGs, rocket launchers." The route they most
likely took is from Nawaqui, a village on the Pakistani
border. On the Pakistan side lies the region dominated
by the fierce black-turbaned Sufi Muhammad, who sent
thousands of madrassa students in a jihad against
the Americans last October. Most were killed or captured
and Sufi Muhammad is now languishing in a Pakistani
jail.
Haji Matheullah notes that the Americans
in Kunar don't have helicopters. Anyway, that would not
help: "These people could stay in the mountains during
the whole winter. They collected food. They have a lot
of money. They have support from Pakistan, across the
border. The only way for the Americans is to go there on
foot, through the mountains and jungle."
Kunar
still holds a lot of sympathy to Wahhabism. "Twenty
years ago, the Arabs got here and started their aid to
widows, orphans, kids. There was a lot of money. When
people saw what we call 'load, coat and boot', they
converted to Wahhabism. The sheikhs, they wanted to
spread Wahhabism all over Afghanistan, starting from
Kunar. For this reason, the region still has a lot of
relations with the Arabs."
What Haji Matheullah
is actually saying is that in the community there's
still a lot of support for al-Qaeda. That's why people
in Kunar are so incensed by the arrest of Haji
Roohullah. But at the same time he is also saying that
"the common people support Americans, they think they
are helpful". The characteristically Pashtun twists and
turns of the conversation are spiced up: "Afghans never
liked foreign invaders." And then comes the punchline.
"Afghanistan has problems with Pakistan and China. The
Americans want to finish the influence of neighbors on
Afghanistan. They [Americans] created a nightmare for
us. When they create light, they can go."
Haji
Amanullah is the man responsible for Asadabad's
security. But, significantly, he is still a military
Hezb-i-Islami commander. This flagrant contradiction
requires extreme diplomacy. His basic judgment of the
American presence is "if they want to stay long, for
security reasons, and if they do not disturb the people,
they are welcome. But if they continue to search houses,
scare people - the people's temperament won't stand them
for any more than three months."
The security
commander confirms that at the beginning of July
Hekmatyar visited Kunar, and then went north into
Nuristan. He was in touch with local commanders, "But
people in Kunar told him they could not guarantee his
safety. He might be in Xinjiang [western China]." But
this is extremely unlikely as Beijing - ultra-sensitive
towards the Muslim Uighur region in western China -
would know it right away. In once again a
characteristically indirect Pashtun manner, Haji
Amanullah finally implies that Hekmatyar is alive - and
in the region.
In his view the Kunar Wahhabis
"got a lot of aid from the Arabs and Osama. They still
have a lot of money. But they are not more than 10,000
followers." Haji Roohullah, according to him, was and
still is receiving money from Pakistan's ISI.
The story of the Arab escape from Jalalabad
receives a new, savoury twist in Haji Amanullah's
version. "I saw nine Arabs at the time. Commander
Saburlal arrested them - and then he helped them to
escape. They left all their own vehicles and money."
Saburlal was also arrested a few days ago, and is now
under American custody at Bagram air base.
Raiz
Khan Mushwani is only 18. With his boyish good looks and
disarming smile he could be a heartthrob in a boy band
or a Hollywood television series. But he is the son of
Malik Zarin - the number-one core commander of Kunar (so
one assumes that Haji Matheullah is in fact number two).
Malik Zarin spends most of his time in crucial meetings
in Kabul. His son stays in Asadabad . Raiz says that
"more than 20 people" are working closely with the
Americans. And he, at only 18, is their commander.
Raiz is happy as "the Americans are bringing
peace". Americans, he says, "choose their own
informers", "have one American Pashto-speaker, an air
force soldier named Kay" and are not paying directly for
information, "only for expenses". The American morale,
according to Raiz, is "fresh, there is no tension".
Their commander is one "Captain Ryan, who came from
Bagram". Raiz thinks that the Americans will stay for
long. They have "no helicopters or tanks, but there is a
helipad in the compound". In fact, every night the
activity is feverish, for as long as three hours - with
surveillance by drones.
Raiz confirms that the
mission is to get Hekmatyar. Not surprisingly, he does
not know where bin Laden could be. "Sometimes, as a
joke, the Americans ask me if I know something."
Everybody in Asadabad talks about how in a patrolling
mission in ultra-sensitive Pech Dara a month and a half
ago, four men were shot and killed by the Americans just
because they were carrying a Kalashnikov. Another lethal
case of cultural misunderstanding. Raiz insists that
"the Americans recognized the mistake".
Gradually, in the Kunar puzzle, emerges the
crucial figure of another commander, Khan Jan. Khan Jan
is a distinguished Hezb-i-Islami commander, as well as
being the mayor of Asadabad. The Americans tried to
arrest him and they raided and, according to some, even
fired on his house. They think that he meets regularly
with Hekmatyar, Raiz admits. "Khan Jan has popular
support in the area." As we talk to Raiz, we finally
learn that none other than Khan Jan himself is in the
same compound. He came to meet Malik Zarin - or Raiz -
to complain about heavy-handed American tactics. But
Raiz does not want to meet him. He belongs to the
Mushwani tribe, while Khan Jan is from the Salarzai
tribe. Tribal enmity is deadly - especially now that one
of the tribes has been selected to work closely with the
Americans. Raiz admits, "It is clear there is a movement
among people to fight the Americans." But the "jihad is
over", says the son of the most powerful military
commander in Kunar - at least for the moment.
The plot thickens. Ahmadullah is a cousin of the
crucial character, the Wahhabi superstar Haji Roohullah.
He recognizes that Haji Matheullah and Malik Zarin are
"well-relationed with the Americans". But he quickly
adds, "Zarin is creating problems because he targeted
Haji Roohullah and his tribe." He stresses that "people
from all over Kunar demand the release of Haji Roohullah
because he fought against the Taliban and took over the
area. Americans have to tell us what charges they have
against him."
Last November, Ahmadullah was
fighting against the Taliban alongside Hazrat Ali - the
American's favorite commander in Nangarhar province.
After he came to the area, Haji Roohullah called him: he
needed people to take over Asadabad. Ahmadullah confirms
that commanders Sabarlal and Najinuddin Khan, among
others, took over Asadabad "under the supervision of
Haji Roohullah" and had been ruling the area ever since.
But now both Haji Roohullah and Sabarlal are under
arrest by the Americans.
Ahmadullah was an
eyewitness to the massive Taliban escape last November.
"The Taliban crossed to Pakistan in Marawara" - the
direction of Bajaur agency in the Pakistani tribal
areas. Hazrat Rahman was another commander at the time
in Marawara who supported the Taliban. Ahmadullah saw 48
trucks coming, carrying at least 12 men each, a mix of
Arabs and Taliban: "Hazrat Rahman took all their weapons
and helped them escape." Then came another convoy of
Pakistani Taliban, who also profited from the services
of Rahman.
Ahmadullah fiercely criticizes "those
people who are collaborating with the Americans" -
meaning Haji Matheullah and, most of all, Malik Zarin:
he is implying that the arrest of Roohullah is a power
game between commanders of different tribes. Ahmadullah
also stresses that "we are ideological enemies of the
Arabs because they killed our leader in '92, Maulvi
Jamil Rahman Salafi." The portrait of Salafi is
displayed at most of Asadabad's businesses. One
Abdullah, an Egyptian, went to Bajaur agency and shot
Salafi in a mosque in 1992 because he was against Arab
proselytizing in the region.
Ahmadullah adds an
extremely ironic twist to the American presence in
Kunar. He says that five British, not American, special
forces were the first to arrive in Kunar a little more
than two months ago. They came escorted by none other
than Roohullah, and his first cousin Haji Wali Ullah,
the president of the World Relief Committee, an Arab NGO
very much active in the region.
Personally,
Ahmadullah claims "not to know if Hekmatyar is here".
But he assumes that Hekmatyar and Kashmir Khan are
working together. Kashmir Khan "disappeared" a month ago
and remains one of Hekmatyar's top commanders.
Presiding over the Kunar puzzle is the governor
of the province, Sayed Muhamad Yusuf. But he is not from
Kunar: he is from neighboring Laghman province. He was
appointed by Hamid Karzai's central government and
spends most of his time asking villagers to support
Kabul - an unenviable task, as Pashtun houses are being
permanently raided by bullish American soldiers. He
insists that "all the nation is behind the Karzai
government". The recent assassinations in Kabul and the
attempt against Karzai in Kandahar are dismissed as "the
usual". "President [John F.] Kennedy was assassinated,
General Zia [ul-Haq of Pakistan] was killed."
A
long white beard disguises the steely character of
Yusuf, a former jihad commander in the 1980s. The
governor is playing a tremendously skillful diplomatic
game, trying to accommodate the anger of local
populations against American methods, the demands of the
Americans themselves, and the conflicting interests of
powerful and sidelined commanders. He insists that "all
the people here are fed up with war. There is no chance
of a battle in Kunar."
The governor thinks that
the Americans came "under the flag of the UN to create
peace in the land of the Afghans. Kunar is too
sensitive, a border province, the geographic situation
is too important". He does not think that Hekmatyar, bin
Laden or al-Qaeda are in Kunar. He says "there's only a
5 percent chance" of Hekmatyar and some Arabs being in
the province. He hasn't heard of any eyewitnesses: "The
ideal place for them would be Nuristan." This is a huge
mountainous enclave between Laghman and Kunar, northwest
of Asadabad.
The governor recognizes the
mesmerizing cultural shock between America gung-ho
culture and Pashtun culture. "I asked, why are you doing
like this. They said because we receive information in a
hurry, we don't want to waste time. But they are not
checking anything. I was in a jirga [meeting] and
I told the people the Americans are coming to your
villages because of your informers. And they are giving
bad information." So how do the Americans gather
intelligence? "They ask us sometimes. But most of the
time they do it on their own. Some teenagers, they told
them they had seen Hekmatyar in Dangan. The Americans
went there, stayed the whole night. They got into a
house, they only saw women and kids." He denies that the
Americans armed eastern Afghanistan commanders, although
"they did arm commanders in Kandahar".
And then,
in a slip, the crucial word "invasion" comes up. "The
Taliban, they were Afghans, but they always made
mistakes. Due to the Taliban we are now facing invasion
of these forces." If even the ultra-diplomatic governor
commits a Freudian slip of this nature, in the dusty
streets and tea houses of Asadabad there is widespread
talk about "invasion".
Ghulam Ullah, the head of
education in the province, warns in a soft voice, "We
all think Americans came here with the support of the
UN. We don't look at them as invaders. But we do not
accept Americans as rulers of this country."
This sums up half of the popular perception in
Kunar. The other half is already involved -
surreptitiously for now - in an anti-American jihad.
Part 2: Special forces, ordinary people
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