Former Soldier Ready to Fight for Change

Abdul Haq’s medals are his many battle scars, but after he helped win the war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet occupation, he suffered his worst pain in the struggle for a lasting peace.

Two years ago, when the former guerrilla fighter was trying to persuade Afghans to end their relentless civil war, a pair of masked gunmen scaled the wall of his home in this city near the Afghan border and killed his wife and 11-year-old son and their bodyguard.

Haq was out of the country in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, but the intruders probably intended to silence a powerful voice for change, just as killers have eliminated several Afghan peace activists in Pakistan in recent years.

Haq, a leader of Afghanistan’s moderates in exile, shares the Pushtun blood of the country’s Taliban rulers--making him one of the biggest threats to an extremist regime condemned around the world for harboring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden and his associates.

Haq, a Cold War ally of the United States who led the single most destructive attack on occupying Soviet forces 15 years ago, is not easily frightened. But he tired of Afghanistan’s endless killing long ago, and when the blood spilled in his own home, he decided that it was time to give up and leave the region.

Last week, he returned to Peshawar from self-exile with a new fire in his eyes. Among the many effects the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes against the U.S. had in the world was that they helped convince Haq to come out of retirement and, if necessary, take up arms again to get rid of the rulers he sees destroying his country.

“You don’t want to fight just because you want to fight. You have to have an objective to fight for,” he said in an interview in his sitting room. “If people from the north don’t accept people from the south--if commanders don’t want a united system of government--then someone will have to find a way, even if you have to remove them militarily.

“We are in that stage now. I’m working on these things, and there are many questions I still don’t have answers for.”

Haq says he is in contact with Pushtun commanders in his homeland, trying to persuade them to break away from the Taliban and join a new coalition pressing for a government of national unity. It would be chosen by a traditional grand council of tribal chiefs, sitting with exiled King Mohammed Zahir Shah as its figurehead.

An estimated 40% of Afghans are Pushtun, and as the country’s largest ethnic group, they are crucial to the stability of any government that might replace the Taliban.

Dressed in a bright white shirt and pants outfit known as a shalwar kameez, Haq has an almost regal air. Though he is only 40--and still strong--he seems weighed down, weary of all he knows.

He was wounded 16 times in the war that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He lost his right foot to a land mine and knows he is taking yet another dangerous risk by stepping back into the Afghan morass. He was assisting United Nations peace efforts as a mediator, and pushing hard for Afghans to negotiate their own solution to the civil war, when the gunmen called on his Peshawar home.

No suspects in the attack were named, and Haq refuses to speculate about who was behind the slayings.

But the U.S. State Department concluded in a 1999 report on human rights abuses that the killers probably were trying to assassinate Haq in a dirty war against moderate Afghan leaders, “widely believed to be part of a wider Taliban campaign.”

Haq has known war most of his adult life. He became a rebel in 1977, at age 16, working with the anti-Communist underground in the Afghan capital, Kabul. He was jailed, but he says his family bought his freedom with a huge bribe.

When the Soviet Red Army invaded two years later, Haq joined the jihad as a commander for Hezb-i-Islami, one of several moujahedeen factions that were supplied with weapons by the CIA.

Haq formed the Kabul Front in 1981 and was the first moujahedeen commander to bring the war to the capital. On Oct. 19, 1986, he led three of his fighters across minefields, in the dark, to the Soviet base near Lake Karga, just outside Kabul.

They were armed with three 103-millimeter rockets and a heavy launcher, which they set up about a third of a mile from the front gate of the base. Their target was a bunker entrance to a massive weapons storage area. The gunner fired two rockets. Both were wide of the mark.

“I gave him a slap and said, ‘If you miss this time, I’ll kill you,’ ” Haq recalled, and the memory of that terrifying night made him chuckle.

The gunner fired a third time, an incendiary round, and scored a direct hit. After a few minutes, the bunker exploded, and a fire spread to the weapons dump. Someone caught the attack on videotape from the nearby British Embassy.

The sheer gall of the attack, and the precision of its execution, guaranteed Haq a prominent place in the lore of the moujahedeen war. He laid down his Kalashnikov assault rifle after he and other moujahedeen drove out Soviet forces in 1989, and then the Afghan liberators turned on one another in a relentless civil war.

“Up to that time, to have a gun in your hands was a matter of pride because you were defending your country, your homeland--your people,” he said. “That’s why I was the first to drop my gun after the withdrawal of the Russian forces, because one way or another, you would be involved in the killing of your own people.”

As a peacemaker, Haq may be helped by his family ties. His brother Abdul Qadir is a commander with the opposition Northern Alliance--dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks--and a former governor of the eastern province of Nangahar. Their elder brother, Haji Din Mohammed, was a senior commander in Hezb-i-Islami--one who can help twist arms.

Pir Sayed Ishaq Gailani, a Pushtun and longtime royalist, says he hadn’t spoken to Din Mohammed in 24 years until he came by to talk peace Wednesday.

“Now Afghans are breaking down these old walls,” Gailani said. “They sit together, talk together and, after one or two days, they are friends. This is a good sign.”

Haq hopes to work the same magic in his talks with “former colleagues and Taliban commanders.” It won’t be simple for an old soldier with little patience for politics.

“The easiest thing in the world is to take a gun and fight,” he said. “To talk, and convince people, is difficult. In war, if you don’t like someone, you just shoot him. But in diplomacy, whether you like him or not, you have to smile and talk to him.”

Haq got some early lessons in the art, and failings, of diplomacy.

In early 1985, midway through the war against the Soviets, he left Afghanistan for a tour of Western capitals that took him to Washington. He was invited to brief President Reagan’s national security advisor, Robert McFarlane.

The disagreements Haq had with McFarlane and other administration officials--and much of what has happened in Afghanistan since--left him convinced that foreign governments led by the U.S. used Afghans as pawns in the Cold War and didn’t care what happened once the Soviets were defeated.

It was U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia that sent holy warriors, including Bin Laden, into Afghanistan to fight alongside Afghan moujahedeen, and the U.S. is suffering the consequences for leaving others to clean up the mess, Haq says.

“Because of the Russian withdrawal, many people in the U.S. government got big medals, promotions and early retirement, because they did such a great job,” he said bitterly. “But these [foreign] people who they brought to Afghanistan are causing problems in my country.

“Now for that they are punishing us. How many of the CIA people were fired? None. Now we are paying the price for that.”