Commander’s Death Curtails Options on Afghanistan

The capture and execution of Afghan opposition commander Abdul Haq deal a devastating blow to a plan--put in place months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks--to create a credible alternative government to the Taliban regime, according to Afghan opposition officials and U.S. analysts.

The viability of the plan, which has been adopted by the United States as its political goal for Afghanistan, is now in question because the two men who hatched the idea at secret meetings in Tajikistan in June are dead.

Haq launched the effort during talks with Ahmed Shah Masoud of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, according to Peter Tomsen, the last U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan. Tomsen, who served in the post from 1989 to 1992, was present at one of the meetings in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, which was confirmed by Northern Alliance sources.

The idea was to form a broad-based government that would initially operate under the symbolic leadership of the former Afghan king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, Tomsen said. Under the plan, Haq, a charismatic former military commander who had turned to politics after losing his right foot to a Soviet land mine in 1988, would rally fellow Pushtuns, Afghan’s largest ethnic group. His role was particularly important because the Taliban draws most of its support from Pushtuns.

Masoud, a warrior-intellectual who beat back repeated Soviet invasions of his home region in the 1980s, would bring along the diverse Tajik, Uzbek and other ethnic minorities he had united in the Northern Alliance.

“Masoud and Haq were the two most able and accomplished commanders fighting the Soviet occupation,” Tomsen said. “With their standing and separate backgrounds, they were the two people capable of forging a truly broad-based alternative.”

The plan received its first blow when Masoud was assassinated in a suicide bombing just days before the terrorist attacks on the United States. The killers are widely believed to have been agents of Osama bin Laden, working on behalf of his allies in the Taliban.

But Haq remained committed to the coalition idea and recently had ventured into Afghanistan to rally Pushtuns in his own tribal area between the capital, Kabul, and the eastern city of Jalalabad to rise up against the Taliban, according to Tomsen and Afghan sources.

Although the Bush administration backed the same basic idea for a post-Taliban government, Haq had major differences with the United States, according to Tomsen and Afghan sources. Haq was particularly angered by the U.S. airstrikes against his country, which he recently condemned as counterproductive to his political efforts.

The United States had been in touch with Haq as part of efforts to reach out to all major Afghan opposition figures, the State Department said Friday.

But Tomsen, who talked to Haq by phone about his plans shortly before the commander traveled into 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. or Pakistani intelligence,” Tomsen said.

Haq had long-standing policy differences with the United States and Pakistan. In the 1980s, he openly criticized both nations and warned that their support for Islamic militants in their fight with Soviet invaders would perpetuate war and instability in Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Afghan sources.

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, he wrote a letter to the New York Times saying that “the United States was not supporting the people of Afghanistan for their freedom, but using these people to kill their enemy. The United States does not care about human lives, only pieces on their world game board.”

“We don’t want to be an American or Soviet puppet,” he added.

Haq, who became a legend among many Afghan moujahedeen when he kidnapped a Soviet general off the streets of Kabul, had major strengths that gave the plan for a coalition government a fighting chance, according to U.S. analysts and Afghan sources.

“He was a brilliant organizer and a brilliant manager,” Tomsen said.

Haq’s standing was such that in 1991 he mobilized a meeting of more than 1,000 commanders to discuss Afghanistan’s future.

Finding other leaders with enough credibility, connections and standing to force Afghanistan’s deeply divided factions to hold together may be difficult, U.S. analysts say. And his fate may also discourage similar efforts by other opposition figures.

“His death is likely to have a tremendous effect, as he’s the first well-known person to go inside Afghanistan to do some political work on behalf of supporting” a grand assembly of leaders to plot the nation’s future, said Barnett Rubin, an expert on Afghanistan and director of studies at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. “It’s a setback because it shows the strength of the opposition inside--he couldn’t even be protected in his own tribal area.”

Haq’s death is also a major boon to the besieged Taliban, providing the regime with a new tactical and psychological edge in its fight against the vast military superiority of the United States, according to U.S. officials and analysts.

“Capturing Haq is as much of a major triumph for the Taliban as a serious loss for U.S. efforts,” said a former intelligence specialist on Afghanistan who asked not to be identified.

“It will build the confidence of the Taliban and demonstrate that they are still very much in charge,” he added. “They caught a major military figure who helped defeat the Soviet Union.”