Taliban Captures, Executes Key Opposition Commander

In a major setback to the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign, Afghanistan’s Taliban regime on Friday executed a prominent opposition military commander who had secretly entered the country on a mission to gain support for a new government.

The Taliban’s Bakhtar News Agency reported that Afghan war hero Abdul Haq had been arrested near his home village of Azra southeast of the capital, Kabul, on Thursday evening after being stalked for two days by Taliban militia units. He was taken to Kabul along with two companions, where all three were tried and summarily executed Friday.

Although there was no immediate independent confirmation of the events, the news was taken as fact by the Pakistani government, aides to Afghanistan’s exiled former king in Rome and members of Haq’s family at his home base in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar.

There were several accounts of Haq’s capture, some of which included descriptions of him desperately trying to call for a U.S. rescue helicopter, but none could be verified. There also were conflicting accounts of the method of execution.

A senior Pakistani government official described the events as “a disaster.” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, though not confirming Haq’s execution, said that “his death would be very sad and regrettable.”

Haq was a legendary figure in the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s. He left the region in disgust several years ago, only to return to Peshawar after last month’s terrorist attacks in the United States. In the weeks since, he was a powerful and respected anti-Taliban voice among Afghans and was seen as a key player in shaping a post-Taliban future for his country.

Haq shared the Pushtun blood of the Taliban rulers--making him one of the biggest threats to their rule and a valuable ally to the U.S. effort to bring down the extremist regime.

His death marks the second slaying of a major anti-Taliban commander in the last two months. Just days before the Sept. 11 attacks, Ahmed Shah Masoud, the leader of the opposition Northern Alliance, was assassinated by men posing as reporters.

The loss of Haq is a blow to the U.S. efforts to bring down the Taliban and smoke out Osama bin Laden. But the larger message of his capture--one of continued Taliban strength--makes the development potentially devastating to the Bush administration’s efforts to help form a government-in-waiting for Afghanistan.

In Rome, aides to the former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, said Haq had gone into Afghanistan to promote the ex-monarch’s efforts to form a post-Taliban government and to seek Taliban defectors.

“We are all shocked,” spokesman Hamid Sidig said. “Commander Haq was a missionary of peace, not of war. He wasn’t going to fight anyone but to talk to tribal elders to inform them about his majesty’s peace initiative.”

Although 87, Zaher Shah is one of the few figures who draw allegiance across a broad spectrum of Afghanistan’s many geographic and ethnic factions. As such, he has been a focus of U.S. efforts to build a credible successor government to the Taliban.

The State Department said Friday that the U.S. had been in touch with Haq as part of efforts to reach out to all major Afghan opposition figures. But Peter Tomsen, the last U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, said he doesn’t believe that Haq was operating at the behest of either the CIA or Pakistani intelligence.

“To the best of my knowledge--and I’ve talked to him within the past two weeks--he had support of neither U.S. nor Pakistani intelligence,” Tomsen said.

At a news conference in Peshawar, Haq’s brother Hasid bin Mohammad said the commander had been accompanied by seven or eight people on his mission. Pakistani government sources said that “a couple” of those were believed to be Taliban commanders who had sought out Haq, allegedly because they were prepared to abandon the regime.

Kurt Lohbeck, a former CBS reporter who said he considered Haq his best friend for 19 years, said Haq told him of his plans when they last spoke by phone Saturday.

“He was working to arrange the defection of some top Taliban people,” Lohbeck, who spent nine years covering the war in Afghanistan, said by telephone from Las Vegas after speaking with Haq’s family. “One or two, he thought he would have to buy them out.

“Our speculation at this time is that one of the Taliban people that he had contacted to defect set up a double-cross. This was the only way this could have happened. They had a huge force that surrounded him, probably about 200.”

Prince Mostapha Zaher, a grandson of the former king, said in Rome that Haq and his companions were surrounded by unseen figures on rocky terrain Thursday night but managed to remain hidden until daybreak.

During that time, Haq used a portable satellite phone to report his plight and appeal for help to a fellow Afghan opposition activist in a nearby country, Zaher said without identifying the activist. Haq first phoned at 10:07 p.m. Thursday, Zaher said, and “stayed in touch during the night” until the line went dead at 7:04 a.m. Friday.

Lohbeck said he believed that Haq made at least one satellite phone call asking for help from one or two helicopters to try to break up the Taliban siege. “I think his phone call was to a covert American,” Lohbeck said.

There were reports that one of those captured and executed with Haq was a close aide to Abdur Rasool Sayyaf, the only Pushtun commander in the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance.

The timing of Haq’s capture, which came amid growing disquiet in the region about a U.S.-led bombing campaign that appears to many Pakistanis to be bringing little but suffering to innocents, could hardly be worse.

The fact that the well-known Soviet-era resistance commander was captured and executed in his home area is a depressing development for those hoping that nearly three weeks of bombing had weakened public loyalties to the regime.

The event appears to be a confirmation that the Taliban remains in firm control of the areas it ruled before Sept. 11. Two weeks ago, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar issued an edict that anyone pledging loyalty to the former king would be punished by death.

“They just want to show that you just can’t come in and talk about peace, that you can’t talk about the king, that you can’t talk about anything,” said Ahmed Rashid, author of the authoritative book “Taliban.”

Haq’s execution is the most visceral piece of anecdotal evidence suggesting that the bombing campaign has brought those under attack closer together. That leaves many convinced that the Taliban’s grip on power is stronger today than before the bombing began.

In Islamabad on Friday, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said the U.S. military action in Afghanistan, which he had hoped would be concluded in a matter of days, now shows signs of becoming a much longer campaign. One of Musharraf’s original conditions in allowing the U.S. to use Pakistani airfields and to fly missions through the country’s airspace was that the campaign be “short and targeted.”

But with the Taliban remaining intact after nearly three weeks of U.S. air attacks, Musharraf has been forced to redefine his terms.

“I did say it should be short and targeted,” Musharraf said in an interview Friday with foreign journalists. “But when I say ‘short,’ obviously I do understand the duration is directly proportional to the achievement of objectives. Any military campaign has to set objectives, and those objectives have to be obtained. You can’t cut an operation midway without obtaining those objectives, because then the military operation would be a failure.”

Also meeting with reporters Friday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar said there is no evidence that the Taliban hold on Afghanistan is slipping.

“I question the assumption that the Taliban is going to fall,” Sattar said. “I hope it does, but nothing is certain. To bring a government down from the outside you must have an uprising from the inside. There is no evidence that is happening.”

Sattar also acknowledged that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the ISI, has lost many of its sources inside Afghanistan after Pakistan’s decision to join the international effort to bring down the Taliban. “The flow of information from inside Afghanistan has been slowed to a trickle,” Sattar said.

For a number of reasons, the timing of Haq’s execution is especially bad news for the anti-terrorism drive.

In a culture where people fight bravely but always sniff the wind to make sure they are on the winning side at the end, the Taliban’s success in capturing Haq constitutes a highly visible signal of its continued strength. It is a signal that won’t be lost on so-called moderate regional commanders who might be thinking of deserting the Taliban.

It hasn’t helped that Zaher Shah’s 4-week-old bid to form an Afghan government-in-waiting has bogged down under the strain of ethnic rivalry and renewed mistrust between his Rome-based advisors and their well-armed partners in the venture, the Northern Alliance.

The strains are complicated by what some royal advisors say is meddling by Pakistan; opposition by Iran, India and Russia; and reluctance by the Bush administration to embrace the former king’s plan.

Haq’s capture and execution also coincided with a subtle but important shift of mood in Pakistan, one in which mainstream citizens--those who so far have not taken to the streets--are becoming increasingly upset by what they have come to regard as a senseless bombing campaign that has caused misery to innocents yet left the Taliban unscathed.

That disenchantment is reflected in the media. Pakistanis on Friday awoke to front-page photos of a 4-year-old wounded in an American bombing raid and headlines about U.S. attacks on a hospital, mosques and a bus depot.

Despite public opposition to the airstrikes, Musharraf said in the interview that he has put no time limit on Pakistan’s backing of the international anti-terrorism coalition.

“We haven’t set any limits,” he said. “We are part of the coalition. The realities on the ground need to be assessed, and then, only then, can one take decisions. But my assessment is that we will go along until objectives are achieved.”

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Marshall and Tempest reported from Islamabad and Boudreaux from Rome. Times staff writers Kimi Yoshino in Orange County and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.