Abdul Haq and the ‘Afghan solution’
Just after September 11 2001, a piece appeared in the London Evening Standard under the headline: ‘Rebel chief begs: Don’t bomb now, Taleban will be gone in a month’. The accompanying photo showed a bearded man shaking hands with a beaming Margaret Thatcher. The man was Abdul Haq, perhaps the most famed Pashtun commander of the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad. Haq’s fabled exploits included blowing up the Soviet army’s seven-storey-underground munitions dump with two single rockets; an event that turned the war.
This time, Abdul Haq had a plan for how to win another war — the one that America had vowed to wage on al-Qa’eda and their friends the Taleban in Afghanistan. The first step towards victory, said Haq, was for Blair to ‘put the hand of restraint’ on America to delay or halt air strikes on Afghanistan. Haq’s urgent message for western leaders was that the Taleban regime in Afghanistan was toppling from within. He’d had clandestine meetings with renegade Taleban commanders, he said, and they’d pledged their support to him — but any hasty attack could unite the Taleban again against the West. Sadly for Afghanistan and for the West, Blair and Bush ignored Haq’s warnings. The bombing went ahead and Abdul Haq was, in October of that same year, captured and killed by the Taleban — who knew, even if we didn’t, how dangerous he was to them.
A decade later, our folly in not listening to Haq becomes more and more obvious. The situation is deteriorating daily, as evidenced by the recent bold attack on the British Council in Kabul and the steady picking off of Karzai’s allies by the Taleban: Ahmed Wali Karzai, Jan Mohammad, Mohammad Daoud and Mattiullah Khan — all those whom the western military and intelligence have paid off to protect routes, or provide compounds or irregular militia forces. Well, now they’ve gone, and the lack of a plan ‘B’ is suddenly very apparent.
The West’s decision to work with (and pay) Afghan strongmen or warlords was flawed from the start. It revealed a complete failure to understand the desires and needs of the ordinary Afghans who would in the end determine the outcome of the war. Ordinary Afghans wanted justice, security, good governance involving the local leadership, and services. Instead, the West is perceived to have delivered an unwanted regime, visceral corruption and spiralling insecurity. By ignoring ordinary Afghans, the West drove many of them back to the Taleban.
I spent several months in Kandahar a year before September 11 working on community development projects, and so when Abdul Haq spoke out in October 2001, what he said made complete sense to me. Later, as a journalist I met his remaining family in Jalalabad, and was shown letters he had written to western leaders in the early 1990s warning of growing fundamentalism in the tribal areas and even, prophetically, of ‘a cataclysmic event for the west’.
My own disappointment in 2002 with what was already looking to be the West’s Afghan failure inspired me to look further into Abdul Haq’s plan, into the actual details of what could have been our winning strategy. I uncovered the ‘structure’ he was recommending and the reasons he had undertaken what some later dismissed as an ‘impulsive’ mission to venture into eastern Afghanistan to start his rebellion.
I talked to senior Taleban figures, Haq’s own commanders from the Jihad period, members of the former King’s group, and the two groups of private individuals (in Washington and London) who tried to persuade our political leaders to take Abdul Haq seriously.
It turns out that by January 2001, Haq had announced that the Taleban were sufficiently unpopular that the regime was ready to be cracked ‘like a fissured crystal’. In July 2001 Haq had flown to Dushanbe and met Commander Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who (though usually feted as the man who could have united the country against the Taleban) by then was almost beaten. The two agreed to work together under the banner of the former King, whose 40-year reign symbolised a time of peace to many Afghans. If Massoud, ‘the Lion of Panjshir’, and Haq, ‘the Lion of Kabul’, had united under the former King, they would have attracted the support of both conservative tribal leaders and disillusioned, defecting Taleban.
By September 11, Haq already had widespread support. Some of his soviet-era commanders had, during the 1990s, become so disaffected with the Mujahedin infighting that they had joined the Taleban. They were decent Afghan nationalists rather than religious zealots, and it was these men — mid-level commanders now embedded within the increasingly unpopular regime — that Haq could turn. Crucially, some were even reputed, in 2001, to be providing the bodyguard to Mullah Omar. If the West had had the support of these men, the battle would have been over almost before it began. Abdul Haq was against the 2001 bombing campaign because he knew it would change the power structures overnight. His network of old allies and new supporters would return to protect their families, leaving the hardliners, mostly Arabs and Pakistanis, to man the guns. Haq had no ties with this more radical group.
Haq had not just the contacts but the skills to win as well. He had been schooled in guerilla warfare during the early 1980s by Jalaluddin Haqqani, leader of a network of fundamentalist tribal fighters straddling the ‘AfPak’ border — today Nato’s most insurmountable challenge. ‘Had they wanted to, the Haqqanis could have handed the US al-Qa’eda on a plate’ was the view of one veteran journalist covering the region. I remain convinced that if anybody could have brought the Haqannis in from the cold in 2001, it was Abdul Haq.
Recently, the US has emphasised its desire to negotiate with the Taleban’s reclusive leader, Mullah Omar. But even if Omar were willing, his defection would at this point provide just a symbolic fix. The rest of his gang would remain as ideologically driven as ever. By contrast, Abdul Haq was aiming at mid-level commanders, those he’d worked with in the fight against the communists but who also provided the foundation of the movement. This was the crucial group General Petraeus would later go on to target in his ‘capture and kill’ missions.
Another problem is that foreign intelligence agencies — many of whom have agents south of the Hindu Kush trying to engage in talks today — underplay the importance of historical and traditional legitimacy in tribal societies such as Afghanistan. Abdul Haq had this in spades, because his family are tribal leaders, and he became a national figure during the jihad. By contrast, foreign agents are outsiders.
With the government of Hamid Karzai becoming weaker by the day and the west lacking credibility, our agents and diplomats cannot now mobilise the defections needed to achieve a lasting political settlement of the type Haq envisaged in 2001. The environment now is more complex and challenging than it was then.
When I asked the Taleban Deputy Interior Minister why the Taleban had executed Haq so fast, he told me: ‘They killed him because they thought [if he were in prison] he’d start a revolution.’ In London, Sir John Gunston, who had tried hard to get British intelligence to take Haq seriously, underscored this when he said: ‘The irony was that in Kabul, Abdul Haq was deemed a real threat [to the Taleban], whereas in London and Washington, we were just blithely unaware.’
Lucy Morgan Edwards is a former political adviser to the EU ambassador in Kabul. Her book The Afghan Solution: the Inside Story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and how Western Hubris lost Afghanistan is published by Bactria Press and found at www.theafghan-solution.com.
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