Soldiers of God (25 page)

To counter this bad public image, Haq increased the frequency and circulation of “night letters” (leaflets distributed by his underground network throughout Kabul). The first of these that he sent out after the start of the Soviet withdrawal said, among other things:

Haq's public relations campaign was not limited to the civilians of Kabul, but to the regime's soldiers and members of Najib's government as well. Eight years of building an underground network had yielded him many useful sources of information within Communist-controlled Kabul, allowing Haq to publish “situation reports” that were at times more informative than the weekly reports distributed by the U.S. embassy in Islamabad.

According to Haq's sources, the Afghan Communists were so bitterly divided that much of their time was spent plotting against each other rather than fighting the guerrillas. You would have thought that given the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the upsurge in mujahidin rocket attacks on Kabul during the summer of 1988 that the two factions of the Afghan Communist party … the working-class, Pukhtuspeaking extremists of Khalq and the more sophisticated Dari speakers of Parcham … would close ranks against the common enemy. But the hatred and treachery between the Khalqis and the Par-chamis were so fierce that the withdrawing Soviets had to spend considerable time and energy just to keep them from slaughtering each other.

As ruthless as President Najib's reputation was (he ran KhAD for five years), he was actually the leading moderate among the Communists. Najib, of middle-class origins and with a university education, was a typical Parchami. He was willing to negotiate with mujahidin commanders, if only to split the resistance further, as part of a deftly executed policy of trying to keep a pro-Soviet regime alive and functioning in
Kabul. Najib's nemesis was the Afghan interior minister, Sayed Mohammed Gulabzoi, who was a Khalqi. Like many Khalqis, he was semiliterate, from humble origins, and an extremist who believed that the soft, vacillating Parchamis had to be liquidated in order for the Afghan Communist party … officially known as the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA … to deal effectively with the guerrilla threat. To think that the Khalqis on their own could slug it out with the mujahidin after the uniformed Soviet troops left, without even the pretense of a diplomatic strategy to wean away disenchanted resistance commanders, was insane. “You can't explain it rationally,” said one Western diplomat who shuttled between Kabul and Peshawar and who backed up Haq's account. “Put it down to centuries of inbreeding.”

Taraki and Amin were Khalqis, and their rule of Afghanistan in 1978 and 1979 was so brutal that it sparked the original mujahidin rebellion that forced the Soviets to invade. A decade later, as the Soviets were pulling out, a Khalqi coup against Najib's regime was a Kremlin nightmare. Given the rude fact of Khalqi control over the Interior Ministry, which boasted its own elite paramilitary units known as Sarandoy, the Kremlin had no choice but to think on its feet and massage Khalqi ambitions, protecting Najib at the same time.

Haq's informers reported the following sequence of events: In early 1988, in an attempt to cut off a Khalqi coup plot against him, Najib had Gulabzoi removed from his post as interior minister and maneuvered to have the vacant Defense Ministry portfolio filled by a Parchami ally. Gulabzoi reacted by flying to the Soviet Union, where he lobbied the Kremlin for twenty-one days to dump Najib. The Kremlin appeared to go along, telling Najib to appoint Gulabzoi's Khalqi comrade General Shahnawaz Tanai as the defense minister. Najib refused. The first week in August, Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze had to travel to Kabul just to twist Najib's arm. When even that failed, the Soviets trotted out Major General Kim Tsagolov to give a press conference in Moscow, stating
that Najib lacked popular support and that his government could not survive the Soviet troop pullout. Finally, on August 16, Najib made the Khalqi general Tanai the new defense minister. But at the same time the Soviets gave Najib thirty new bodyguards. To try to keep the two Khalqis, Gulabzoi and Tanai, on speaking terms with Najib, the Soviets forced the three Afghans to meet with one another for two hours daily.

Even so, according to Haq, on September 9, 1988, the Soviets just managed to prevent a Khalqi coup against Najib. The Soviets clearly had had enough of Khalqi intrigue. In early November, Gulabzoi was taken at gunpoint from his Kabul home and put on a plane to Moscow, where he went into a kind of exile in reverse, as the Afghan ambassador to the Soviet Union.

With Gulabzoi out of the way, the Kremlin now tried to knock Parchami and Khalqi heads together and concomitantly improve the regime's image by appointing an Afghan prime minister who was not even a member of the Communist Party, nor associated with either of its two warring factions.

The new man, Hassan Sharq, was a laundered Communist … someone recruited years before by the KGB, as securely in Moscow's pocket as Najib or Gulabzoi. Yet, because Sharq was not officially a Party member, he was paraded before the world as the compromise figure needed to end the mujahidin siege. Only the most naive and sympathetic foreigners were fooled, such as UN special negotiator Diego Cordovez, who actually described Sharq as the most sensible man in Afghanistan. But Cordovez was alone in his judgment. The mujahidin rejected Sharq, as did the Pakistanis and the Americans. Even the media caught on to him rather quickly. In an early November column in the
New York Times,
A. M. Rosenthal labeled Sharq a Moscow-controlled appointee with absolutely no credibility. (Useless as a public relations tool, and with no power base of his own, Sharq was soon removed as prime minister.)

The roll of events in Kabul told Haq that, given the fragility of Najib's regime, the time had come to do what he had done when he first set up the Kabul network: meet with people, argue, negotiate, and persuade. On weekends (Thursday afternoon through Saturday, since the Moslem Sabbath was Friday), Haq began disappearing from Peshawar, traveling with his bodyguards over roads the guerrillas controlled, to meet with regime army commanders who wanted to defect. Haq argued that they should stay in place, listening and passing on information to the mujahidin, and bolt only when he gave the word. Haq also met with disgruntled Communist Party members who were Khalqis. Such meetings were not difficult to arrange. The level of treachery between Khalq and Parcham was so deep that for one to conspire with the mujahidin against the other was natural.

Haq kept up the military pressure during the middle of 1988 through a series of surgical rocket strikes on Kabul airport, which further demoralized the Communist Party and military establishments. In the third week of June, Haq's men bombed eight Su-25 fighter jets on the ground, a loss valued at roughly $80 million … the most costly destruction of equipment in any single attack during the war. The mujahidin had got lucky: one of the rockets struck a jet dead-on, igniting a chain reaction of fires and explosions that engulfed the seven other planes.

“We could fire thousands of rockets everywhere in the city every night and then march in and take over,” Haq said. “But you would kill hundreds of thousands that way.” He figured that, considering the political situation in the capital, the best way to take Kabul was not to take it at all: better to let it implode through the cumulative weight of KhalqParcham infighting, well-timed rocket attacks and defections, and the picking off of all the government posts circling the city, blockading it step by step. Lack of food and electricity was something the population would not like but would understand. Indiscriminate
rocket attacks, however, they would not understand. And mass support for the mujahidin was crucial if the Communist power structure was to cave in. When that collapse looked imminent, then … and only then … should the guerrillas negotiate with the regime. The regime might be expected to accept any kind of a deal at that point. Of course, had Haq's advice been taken, the mujahidin would likely have made better military progress than they did immediately following the Soviet withdrawal. (Haq was naive in only one respect: he didn't foresee that the Soviets would spend billions … rather than the anticipated hundreds of millions … of dollars to keep the regime in power, while the Americans would deliver only a fraction of that amount to the mujahidin in 1989.)

Haq argued that Massoud, who had a military plan of his own for taking Kabul, had less support and fewer contacts in the capital than he did. It wasn't that Haq, a Pathan, was resentful of Massoud, a Tajik. After news arrived in Peshawar that Massoud had ejected the Soviets from the Panjshir Valley, Haq offered a self-deprecating smile and said, “Good for Massoud. Maybe I'm just a wimp and he really is a better commander.” But Haq genuinely felt that Massoud's strategy forced him to rely more on conventional military means, which meant a greater loss of civilian life. Nevertheless, after years of shortchanging Massoud and Haq, ISI suddenly decided to become more generous toward the Tajik commander.

In early 1989, Haq's weapons supply was cut off completely. Without weapons to dole out, he began to be deserted by mujahidin. Even Gunston, sensing the growing importance of Massoud over Haq, began making trips inside with the Tajik instead. Haq turned out to be the Afghan Cassandra, whose prophecies were always right but never believed by those charged with spending American taxpayers’ money. Haq not only suffered but was punished because of the truth he uttered.

ISI, whose policy and personnel remained the same for
months after Zia's death, was evidently taking no chances. Its men mistrusted both Haq and Massoud for their audacity in running their own wars. But at least Massoud appeared to see the bloody conquest of Kabul as the climax of
the
war. Haq's position was too subtle for ISI. He held that the war was, to a certain degree, already over, even though the mujahidin lacked the capability for an all-out conventional assault on Kabul … as well as on Jalalabad and other cities … without a heavy loss of civilian life. Haq believed the end would come through patience, sabotage, and careful, surreptitious manipulation of the Kabul regime. But ISI, echoed by the Americans, was thinking more along the lines of events in Berlin in 1945. They wanted
Götterdämmerung
in Kabul and Jalalabad (the city closest to the Pakistani border) to be bloody and humiliating for the Communists. Indeed, the Americans were willing to let the Pakistanis install Hekmatyar as their surrogate afterward if that was the price to pay for the pleasure of seeing the Soviets “clinging to their helicopters,” after the fashion of forces departing from Vietnam. Of course, that's not how it turned out.

Haq labored on. He still had his own resistance fighters and his unique underground network. In late 1988, he put the finishing touches on architectural plans for major new mujahidin bases west and east of Kabul, complete with caves, air ducts, fuel and grain stores, workshops, and a hospital, and all protected by antiaircraft cover.

“Grain stores are the most important thing,” Haq told me. “When Kabul does fall, there are going to be shortages of everything, maybe even a famine. We have to start planning now. I don't want chaos, like in Kunduz, or else the Soviets will take it right back, like they did there.”

But ISI and the other resistance commanders in Peshawar were not thinking along those lines. Some American officials dismissed Haq as “yesterday's man.” Haq sensed this. “The
Pakistanis, the Americans … they don't like me,” Haq muttered. When bitter, he could be pathetic, like an overgrown sulking little boy. When angry, he could be frightening; at such times, you thought only of what his fist could do.

As at the start of the war, when he left Khalis and his older brother in a huff and stalked off to launch a front in Kabul, Abdul Haq at the time of the Soviet withdrawal was once again completely on his own.

6
Haji Babà and the Gucci Muj