The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

major assaults, than they’d be in the Panjshir Valley, which had settled into a quiet lull. Ahmad Shah Massoud appeared to have established an undeclared cease-fire with the Soviet 40th Army and now spent much of his time shoring up his position politically across the north of Afghanistan.

As negotiators in Geneva inched closer to a political settlement, the Afghan resistance parties began to jockey for position for the post-Soviet period. Ahmad Shah Massoud was far ahead of the other major resistance leaders as he formed his Supreme Council of the North, a loose union of northern commanders that would one day become known as the Northern Alliance. But Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Massoud’s archenemy, would not be far behind in preparing for a showdown after the Soviet withdrawal, which he believed would soon come. As these and other commanders and party leaders sought their own advantages, I would become increasingly embroiled in the fractious politics of a war drawing to a close.

Islamabad, March 1987

Congressional criticism of the CIA’s perceived favoritism of the Afghan fundamentalist parties over the moderates had been manageable as long as successes continued on the battlefield and there was no clear end in sight. But as evidence of a developing Soviet exit strategy grew, Washington’s distaste for the fundamentalists mounted, and it was only natural that their attention should focus on the dark and mistrustful favorite of the ISI, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and his Hisb-e-Islami.

At least some of the stories about Gulbuddin’s idiosyncratic evil deeds were, I knew, traceable to black propaganda originating with the KGB’s disinformation teams in Kabul. Others could be traced to Indian intelligence operations or to moderate Afghan party leaders working Capitol Hill. To deal with the growing stream of congressional inquiries on Hekmatyar and our alleged favoritism toward him, I needed a better measure of the man—something more than the “group therapy” observations I had made up until then. I told Akhtar I wanted a meeting with Gulbuddin—just the two of us, I insisted.

A couple of days after my request, Colonel Bacha brought Gulbuddin into a small interview room at ISI headquarters, bare except for three chairs and a low table. On Bacha’s heels came a steward with a pot of tea, three cups, and a plate of cookies. As the colonel was about to take a seat, I laid my hand on his shoulder and said that General Akhtar had given me his assurances that the meeting would be a strictly one-on-one affair. Bacha’s services would not be needed, as the engineer spoke excellent English. The colonel muttered something to Gulbuddin in Pashto, which I assumed was a reassurance that he’d be standing by outside the door if needed, and grudgingly left the room.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s family were Ghilzai Pashtuns of the nomadic Kharotai tribe, who had migrated from Ghazni in the Pashtun east to Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Gulbuddin studied for two years in the military high school in Kabul, but he left before graduating. He entered the College of Engineering at the University of Kabul but failed to complete his studies there, too, and found his calling instead as a political activist and fervent Islamist, becoming involved in the Kabul campus Islamic Movement’s Muslim Youth branch. He took up violent opposition to the Communists, who were by then strengthening their hold on Afghan politics, and was jailed for two years for murdering a Maoist-Communist opponent. It was also during this period that he had his first of many confrontations with another student activist at the university, a young Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, Ahmad Shah Massoud. The two activists would vie for center stage in the Afghan drama for the next thirty years.

After his release from prison in the early 1970s, Hekmatyar fled to Peshawar, where, along with other Afghan Islamists, and with the support of Pakistan, he became a fundamentalist activist against the government of the Afghan Republic. In 1975, after the Islamist-instigated rebellion against the Afghan government failed, Gulbuddin formed his own radical party, the Hisb-e-Islami, the Party of Islam.

Gulbuddin pulled out his agate prayer beads and began to run the beads through his fingers, one at a time. He had come because he had been forced to and appeared in no hurry to open the conversation himself.

“I’d like to thank you, Engineer, for making yourself available to meet with me this morning,” I said, eager to get down to business. “I know how pressing matters are with you.”

There was the faintest nod, but no response.

I went directly to the point. “Engineer Gulbuddin, you know we’re committed to helping your people, but you go out of your way to irritate Americans. Is there something I ought to know, something I’m missing?” Gulbuddin wasn’t an engineer, and I knew it. But resistance party leaders came in only two categories—clerics and engineers. If a commander or party head wasn’t addressed by the clerical titles of “mullah” or “maulvi,” then it had better be “engineer.” So Engineer Gulbuddin it would be.

“I can’t answer for the irritation of the Americans,” he said with clipped impatience. “That would be your concern.”

This guy really doesn’t like us, I thought. “It started two years ago when you refused to meet with our President Reagan, and it continues. I don’t really care what you think of the United States, but your attitude makes it difficult for me to help your commanders in Afghanistan.”

“How so?” Gulbuddin heard a threat in what I’d just said. Perhaps I was going to tell him that I would see that his commanders were cut off from the supply lines.

“Because your reputation as a brutal fundamentalist,” I said, using the terminology to provoke him, “who hates the United States as much as he hates the Soviet Union is well known in Washington. The story is spread around Washington by your brothers in the jihad, with their complaints that you receive more support from your Pakistani brothers than you deserve. These complaints end up with me. Some in my government say we should provide you