During the 1980s, Hekmatyar had received the greater share of the weapons and money that the U.S. government supplied for the mujahedeen’s war against the Soviets. The official party line from Washington has it that U.S. support for Hekmatyar was a basically innocent blunder, with naïve U.S. government officials unaware that Hekmatyar was not only the most virulent and anti-American warlord in Afghanistan, but also one of the world’s leading narcotics kingpins
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During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and China armed Hezb-e-Islami and the other mujahideen parties through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (I.S.I.). The Pakistanis gave Hekmatyar the largest share of weapons, which they justified to the C.I.A. with the claim that Hekmatyar “killed more Russians.”
That was good enough for the Reagan Administration. Washington was certain that the Soviets would never leave Afghanistan. Developing a strategy for the country’s future would be a distraction from the task of inflicting pain on Moscow. By the time the Soviets withdrew their last troops, in February, 1989, the damage had been done. Billions of dollars had built up Hekmatyar and other extremist groups.
When, in April, 1992, the collapse of the Soviet Union pulled down the formerly Communist regime of President Mohammad Najibullah, Hekmatyar intended to take power, but he was slow off the mark. By the time his troops entered Kabul from the south, his rival Ahmad Shah Massoud had already moved in from the north. Starting in June, 1992, Hekmatyar repeatedly shelled the city. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that fifty thousand people, almost all noncombatants, died from Hekmatyar’s rockets and the battles that raged among the multiple militias in Kabul.
In 1995, a new group called the Islamic Movement of Taliban swept out of southern Afghanistan and captured the base where Hekmatyar launched his rockets. Pakistan shifted its support to the Taliban, which accomplished what Hekmatyar never could: capturing Kabul, in September, 1996.
Seeking new allies, Hekmatyar moved to Iran, where he refused to join either the Taliban or the main resistance to the Taliban, led by Massoud. He opposed the American-led intervention in Afghanistan, as well as the new government formed at the Bonn Conference, in December, 2001, which was also dominated by Massoud’s followers. (The rival resistance leader, who was assassinated by Al Qaeda, on September 9, 2001, seems to have outmaneuvered Hekmatyar in death as in life.)
When President George W. Bush placed Iran on his “axis of evil,” in January, 2002, and charged the country with harboring the terrorist Hekmatyar, Tehran seemed only too glad to release him to Afghanistan.
