Last-Minute Attempts Failed to Save Anti-Taliban Leader

The ambush was nearly perfect.

The Taliban militiamen waited in the dark as their prey, 19 men with only four rifles among them, picked their way through a narrow canyon in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan’s Logar province.

Then they opened fire into the night.

All 19 scrambled for cover in the rocks, but the Taliban’s main target was the big man on horseback: resistance leader Abdul Haq, who had slipped into Afghanistan hoping to rally support for a plan to replace the radical Islamic regime with a broad-based government blessed by former monarch Mohammad Zaher Shah.

Outmanned and outgunned, Haq and at least two of his companions held on for more than four harrowing hours before they were captured. Some reports indicate that as many as nine were killed by the Taliban.

At 10:07 p.m., shortly after the ambush began, Haq managed to make a desperate call on a satellite telephone to his nephew in Peshawar, across the border in Pakistan about 130 miles away.

His call triggered a frantic rescue effort via a U.S. businessman in Peshawar and Robert C. McFarlane, national security advisor to President Reagan, in Washington. Haq’s friends and family pleaded for a U.S. helicopter rescue. The CIA, which says it had no contact with Haq before the rescue plea, responded by firing a missile at the Taliban troops from a pilotless drone in the area.

But the missile apparently missed its target.

All hope of rescue gone, Haq had no escape route. Overweight and missing half a leg from a mine explosion during Afghanistan’s 1980s war against Soviet invaders, he couldn’t get away.

“He’s only got one foot,” said James Ritchie, the U.S. businessman here who had supported Haq’s efforts to build an anti-Taliban coalition. “He couldn’t get out.”

“He was probably compromised the moment he left Pakistan,” said McFarlane, who first met Haq when the Reagan administration was backing him as an anti-Soviet warrior.

Last-Ditch Effort to Save Haq’s Life

Accounts of Abdul Haq’s last hours--and the months of intrigue and planning that led to them--were pieced together from interviews with Ritchie, McFarlane and one of Haq’s relatives. All were directly involved in the last-ditch attempt to save him, and Ritchie talked to a member of Haq’s party who managed to escape.

All spoke with a mixture of frustration and bitterness about Haq’s death, blaming it squarely on the failure of the United States to back his efforts to forge a post-Taliban government or maintain long-term relationships with anti-Taliban figures among the Pushtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group.

Even before Sept. 11, when terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon focused Washington’s attention on Afghanistan, Haq sought to organize a military resistance to the Taliban among his fellow Pushtun tribal leaders.

After Sept. 11, Haq returned to Peshawar full time to build a coalition of military commanders in his home area of Nangarhar and Logar provinces.

His record as a successful military commander, his anti-Taliban views, his cordial relationship with the former king and his desire for a broad-based successor government should have given Haq ideal credentials for U.S. backing, his associates believe.

But despite repeated efforts, they said, the United States effectively ignored him.

“Abdul Haq has had no help whatsoever from the United States,” a clearly embittered Ritchie said. “One day the State Department said it would help him out with communications equipment, then a day or two later, they’d say they’d changed their mind.”

“The CIA seemed to regard him as a self-interested grandstander,” McFarlane said. “It seemed to view all the Pushtun leaders that way.”

Indeed, inside the U.S. government, Haq was widely viewed as over the hill and out of touch.

“He was a respected veteran of the Afghan war and had some clout in the Pashtun community,” a U.S. official in Washington said Saturday. “But he wasn’t the be-all and end-all to the opposition. . . . He didn’t command a large number of troops or anything like that.”

Haq had spent most of the year planning to launch a resistance movement against the Taliban. He took his plans to James and Joseph Ritchie, Chicago businessmen who grew up in Afghanistan as children of missionary teachers, and to McFarlane, who has acted as an advisor to the Ritchies in their attempts to support change in Afghanistan.

“He was ambivalent about American support,” McFarlane said. “He believed that he and his moujahedeen colleagues could bring the Taliban down without U.S. support. . . . But I thought we ought to be supporting him out of our own national interest.”

McFarlane said he went to the CIA with a proposal for U.S. support of Haq’s effort--and got nowhere.

“They weren’t interested. I said, ‘Have you met him?’ They said, ‘No, but we’ve heard about him.’ It was pretty offensive,” he said.

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said the agency wouldn’t comment on McFarlane’s account.

Terrorist Attacks Spurred Haq to Act

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Haq decided that the time for action had come. He went to Rome, met with Zaher Shah and his entourage, and won the exiled former king’s general blessing for his efforts. And he conferred again with McFarlane and the Ritchies.

Both McFarlane and the former king’s advisors said they urged the 43-year-old Haq to be cautious.

“I didn’t discourage him, but I did challenge him: ‘Are you sure you’re going to be able to operate without being compromised and taken by the Taliban?’ ” McFarlane recalled. “He said, ‘Bud, don’t worry.’ He had been in touch with 40 or more commanders asking them to be ready. He had spent four weeks mapping it out. He was going to go in and coordinate their operations in the Pushtun areas, from Kandahar all the way to Kabul, in a classic guerrilla struggle.”

In Rome, the former king’s advisors also worried that the time wasn’t right.

“Everyone in Rome told him not to do it,” an advisor to Zaher Shah said. “They said it’s too risky to go inside [Afghanistan] now. The groundwork has not been prepared.

“Haq was impatient,” the advisor said. “He was telling the other commanders, ‘What are you doing waiting here? Why don’t you come down with me?’ ”

Haq believed that he could raise an anti-Taliban guerrilla army. And he thought U.S. bombing raids would only get in the way of recruiting rebels on the ground. He sent a message to Zaher Shah: “Please hold off the attack, I need two to three more days.”

Finally, last Sunday, Haq decided to slip back into his homeland and raise the flag of rebellion.

According to James Ritchie, Haq’s plan on this initial mission was to ride from village to village, persuading tribal elders to join his cause, until he neared the city of Jalalabad on the second day. Then he would head back to Pakistan before the Taliban could find him.

But the journey took longer than he expected--2 1/2 days to reach Haq’s home village of Azra, only a quarter of the way to Jalalabad.

At each stop, Haq drew large gatherings, but the discussions were heated. According to one of Haq’s comrades on the trip, people were bitter about the killings of civilians by U.S. bombings and skeptical about any plan that the U.S. supported. Haq was winning support, but only one or two people at a time. And the burly, one-footed commander was far too visible.

“He wasn’t in there hiding himself,” Ritchie said. “It’s not like he’s a skinny little kid who can hide in a crowd.”

Whether by coincidence or plan, a unit of about 35 Arab and Taliban militiamen arrived just west of Azra late Thursday. Alarmed, Haq and his men decided to head east for the border. They had traveled only a few miles when a second Taliban force attacked.

“They were surrounded when the Taliban opened fire,” said one of Haq’s aides in Peshawar, Abdul Rahim. “Everyone scattered.”

Carrying only four Kalashnikov rifles among them, the group was immediately outgunned.

Haq’s satellite call to his Peshawar home sent Ritchie scrambling on a rescue effort. He telephoned McFarlane in Washington. McFarlane connected him with the CIA’s operations center in suburban Virginia. The CIA put on the line a liaison officer from U.S. Central Command, which is running the campaign in Afghanistan.

Over the next four hours, Ritchie said, he switched between the call to Haq’s beleaguered group and the call to U.S. officials in Washington “every 10 to 15 minutes,” he said.

When Haq’s group realized they were next to a hilltop once used as a helicopter landing point by the Soviets, they asked for a helicopter rescue attempt.

“They [the U.S.] had surveillance on the scene in two to 2 1/2 hours, and I continued to ask for a helicopter,” Ritchie said. “I told them if we can get a helicopter in, we can get him out.”

But as the night wore on, Ritchie said, “it became apparent they weren’t going to do that.”

Finally, the decision reportedly was made to call in an airstrike, apparently to generate chaos that might give the rebels a chance to flee.

A U.S. official in Washington said the military, with no advance warning, simply didn’t have the right equipment in the air.

“Unfortunately, the appropriate capabilities, helicopters and fighter jets, were not close enough to provide assistance,” he said.

Instead, the CIA redirected a nearby Predator pilotless drone to the scene. The Predator fired a laser-guided air-to-surface Hellfire missile at Taliban troops as they rushed toward Haq’s column, the official said.

Ritchie said the missile landed several miles from Haq’s location about 3 a.m. Friday. It didn’t matter, anyway: Haq had already been captured.

Accounts of what happened next remain sketchy. Ritchie said he believes that Haq, along with a nephew and a cousin, were taken to Riskor, near the capital, Kabul. All three were subject to a brief trial, he said, then executed as American spies by gunshot to the back of the head.

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Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Rome, Paul Watson in Jabal os Saraj, Afghanistan, and Bob Drogin and Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this report.