[A-List] Afghanistan: the blowback continues

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

THE ROVING EYE
EXCLUSIVE: The last battle
Part 1: Exit Osama, enter Hekmatyar
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times, September 11 2002

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.