Taliban (32 page)

He was in despair in that respect about the state of higher education among Pashtuns. Last year, he said, just twenty-six students from the four main provinces around the capital had enrolled for courses at Kabul University. By contrast, 1,200 Hazaras had signed up at the university in Bamiyan, the capital of the Hazarajat.

‘If this goes on, we won’t have enough people to fill high office!’

His complaint had an edge to it. Like others I spoke to he was deeply troubled by the growing influence of Iran in Afghan affairs.
Iranian financial support to their brother Shi’a, the Hazaras, was undoubtedly on the increase. They had channelled money into the Hazarajat for years, building hospitals, the university, even an airport. Now there were reports that Hazaras had been offering to buy up Pashtun land and property in the north of the country at ten times the market rate. To Pashtuns this was an affront to the natural social order, for they were the country’s traditional rulers while the Hazaras, the ‘wrong’ kind of Muslims, had historically comprised its peasantry. It was a clever form of proxy warfare by Iran that threatened to upset Afghanistan’s delicate ethnic status quo, which in turn raised the possibility of renewed ethnic civil war in the future.

‘The Pashtuns are stupid. They are only interested in fighting and smuggling, and are satisfied with anyone who provides them with guns and bombs, while Iran gives the Hazaras roads and schools and libraries. Yet when the Pashtuns are given schools, the Taliban destroy them.’

While unsympathetic to the Taliban, Arghandiwal was still in favour of finding a way to negotiate with them. He was encouraged by Karzai’s approach to the Saudis, the ‘obvious choice’ of peace-broker – although the US would have to take the Taliban’s potential mediators off the UN Consolidated List before dialogue could begin. Intriguingly, he did not hold America exclusively responsible for the lack of progress on that front, for in his eyes the British were equally to blame.

‘I’m sorry, but I won’t make that distinction,’ he said. ‘The US implements Western policy in Afghanistan, but it is the UK that formulates it.’

There was something in what he said. The ongoing reconciliation and reintegration programme espoused by General
McChrystal was originally a British idea, as was the ‘comprehensive approach’ to counter-insurgency, now being applied under a different name in the south. At the same time, the idea that Britain and America were secret partners in some Machiavellian compact – brains and brawn, the clever servant to a powerful master – was also typical of the way Hekmatyar viewed the Special Relationship. This was a sharp reminder that there wasn’t necessarily as much difference between HIG and HIA as Arghandiwal claimed. There were those in Kabul who suspected that, far from disapproving of the setting up of a purely political wing, Hekmatyar secretly saw it as a Trojan horse, a means of seizing political control again when the military ousting of the West was complete.

‘Hekmatyar looks irrelevant now, but you should never write him off,’ one seasoned observer told me. ‘He’s a consummate politician, and he’s very clever.’

Was Hekmatyar playing the long game? It was a scary thought. There were many Afghans who considered him a psychopath. Arghandiwal insisted that his (supposedly former) friend was a passionate advocate of women’s rights and education, though I had my doubts that such a fierce leopard could ever change its spots. His alleged crimes went far beyond throwing acid in the faces of liberated students. During and after the Jihad, he had allied himself and fought against almost every other group in the country in his ruthless quest for power, bringing death and misery to thousands. He was accused of helping bin Laden escape from Tora Bora in 2002, and of trying to assassinate Karzai in 2003. No wonder the news that Karzai was talking to his son-in-law Ghairat Bahir had caused such a stir. An amnesty extended to such a treacherous man would have to be a profoundly generous one.

It would, however, be necessary eventually if Afghanistan was
ever to find peace. Bahir, it emerged later, had presented Karzai with a fifteen-point peace plan on behalf of his father-in-law. He told reporters that while Hekmatyar had no formal ties to Mullah Omar, they still ‘influenced each other’. Bahir’s main argument was that the US’s attempts to reconcile junior insurgency commanders were pointless, and that if they were serious about reaching a political settlement they needed to speak to the leadership.

‘In our culture if you are talking to anyone and ignore the head of the party, whoever it is, you will get nothing,’ Bahir told reporters. ‘Hizb-i-Islami minus Hekmatyar means nothing. The Taliban without Mullah Omar means nothing. They have no option. This is the reality of our culture, it’s not something to like or dislike.’
⁴

His argument, interestingly, mirrored that of the former UN envoy, Kai Eide, who remarked shortly before the 2009 presidential election: ‘If you want significant results [from the reconciliation programme], you have to talk to important people.’

Talking directly to Hekmatyar, a ‘global terrorist’ with
25 million on his head, was next to impossible these days. But I had interviewed him before, for the London
Times
in Mazar-i-Sharif in February 1998. It was something of a scoop even then: the first interview he had given to any Western journalist in over two years. After his capitulation to the Taliban in Kabul he had fled into exile in Iran, and had hardly been seen or heard of since.

Mazar was a tense place in early 1998. It was the only city in the country that had not yet fallen to the Taliban, who had captured and then been ejected from it twice the previous year at the cost of thousands of lives. Truckloads of heavily armed men cruised the muddy streets by day, and enforced a shoot-on-sight curfew by night. Burhanuddin Rabbani, still the nominal President of
Afghanistan, was planning a new coalition cabinet, an alternative administration to the new regime in Kandahar and Kabul. He had met the Alliance’s leaders in an abandoned hotel just west of the town centre on the day of my arrival, but I had been unable to get any nearer to the actual meeting than the street outside. This was dangerously filled with fighters belonging to one faction or another, eye-balling their rivals from the tops of trucks that bristled with guns and RPGs. The atmosphere was tense and aggressive and I didn’t linger.

A few days later I went for a walk around the city centre, principally in order to warm myself up, since it was sleeting in Mazar and the hotel I was staying in, the Bharat, had sporadic electricity and no hot water. Passing the famous Blue Mosque, I noticed a crowd of people outside the main entrance, and stopped to study the amazing range of headgear on display: a classic indicator of the ethnic hodge-podge the Mazaris comprised. There were tribal turbans, kufi caps, Uzbeki lamb’s-wool
karakuls
, rolled-up Chitrali
pakuls
, fur hats with ear flaps, Red Army crap-hats, even a Russian officer’s cap with a glittering badge and red and white braid. Others wore grubby anoraks with the hoods up, or swathed their heads and shoulders in woollen
patous
so tightly that only their eyes showed, dark and narrowed against the cold. Soon the guards began to clear a path through the crowd, levering them back with the stocks of their Kalashnikovs: a VIP had come to pray at the shrine, and he and his entourage were making their exit.

From the photographs I surreptitiously took that day there is no mistaking Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the slightly hooded eyes, the convex beak of a nose, the long face accentuated by a sculpted black beard that was greying at the cheeks. He was tall and stately, and wore a black turban with a long tail and a heavy overcoat to match.
A television camera appeared as he salaamed briefly to the crowd, his right hand over his heart, the cameraman swivelling as Hekmatyar was bundled into a waiting Toyota and rapidly driven away.

Whatever the reason behind Hekmatyar’s public appearance here, the TV camera proved that he wanted it publicized, because the press did not materialize without permission in Afghanistan. I hurried back to the hotel to try to arrange an interview. Late that afternoon, three Hi-Lux trucks roared to a halt outside, each of them carrying three or four swaggering gunmen. The receptionist looked frightened as I climbed into the middle vehicle, but I was glad of the heavy escort, which would speed our way through any checkpoint. Hekmatyar, I learned, was installed in a compound in the desert scrubland a few miles east of the city. He had only been there a few days: his first time on Afghan soil for over a year.

From the compound’s fortifications it was clear that he didn’t feel very secure here. Guards patrolled a parapet by the reinforced main gate; a fleet of machine-gun-topped Toyotas was parked inside with their fronts pointed towards the exit. I was led across freezing slush to a building in the corner where I was patted down for weapons – or suicide bombs – before being shown into a guest room. Hekmatyar was waiting at the end amongst an entourage of surprising size, perhaps twenty or so men. I didn’t know then that Hizb-i-Islami modelled themselves on the Ikhwan (‘brothers’ in Arabic), an Islamic tribal militia noted for the merciless throat-cutting of their enemies, and who helped their leader Ibn Saud to unite the Arabian peninsula and then found modern Saudi Arabia in 1926.

The overstuffed faux-leather armchairs lining the sides of the room were all taken, apart from one in the centre. I sat down in
awkward silence. It was going to be a more formal interview than I had anticipated, even though I knew Afghan dignitaries often arranged such encounters this way. Diplomats and journalists were treated much the same: we were all spokesmen and emissaries of a foreign power. Hekmatyar, and indeed his attendants, were more smartly turned out than was customary in this part of Afghanistan, in pressed white shirts and black turbans with the tails smoothed carefully across their chests. I suspected the Ikhwan had been subtly citified by a year of exile in Meshed or Tehran. There was something positively Ayatollah-ish about Hekmatyar himself.

The substance of his message, delivered in faltering English learned long before in Pakistan, was remarkably similar to what his son-in-law was now telling Karzai, twelve years on. Only the enemy had changed.

‘A military solution is not the answer. I propose dialogue, a ceasefire, an interim government leading to proper elections. We need to find an
Afghan
solution.’

He was in Mazar, he said, at the repeated invitations of the Northern Alliance, although he had made it clear to President Rabbani that he wanted no part in the proposed coalition cabinet.

‘A coalition is not the answer. Hizb-i-Islami is the only party that can unite Afghanistan. It is the only national party: we have support in both north and south. If Hizb-i-Islami were to show partiality, there could never be peace.’

He claimed to want nothing more than to serve his country: ‘I want the people to know that. I want the West to know that.’ But he had also calculated – entirely accurately, as it turned out – that the Northern Alliance ranged against the Taliban was too shaky to last for long. Rabbani’s meeting had not been a success. The Tajik leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had scented a trap and refused to
attend at all. Without either him or Hekmatyar, the coalition idea was already dead. Were the alliance to collapse completely, Hekmatyar must have reasoned, Mazar and the north would fall, the country would belong to the Taliban, and his Iranian exile could become indefinite. He was a supreme opportunist who saw a chance instead to broker a deal with the Taliban, which he no doubt hoped would return him to what he really craved: the prime ministership in Kabul.

‘And the Taliban – what do you really think of them?’

‘Their methods are . . . incorrect. But we all want the same thing, finally: to live in an Islamic state, and to live in peace.’

I thought this was a bit much coming from him.

‘But do you think the people would welcome your return to power? I mean, after so many died in the bombardment of Kabul. Don’t you regret that?’

For the first time I caught a flash of anger in his eyes. I had put the question too directly; he was offended by my impertinence, and there was an ominous pause before he answered.

‘The martyrdom of innocents is always unfortunate,’ he said eventually. ‘The fighting in Kabul was not of our choosing.’

A braver journalist might have pressed him further. He had taken a leading part in the four-year battle for the capital, which had ‘unfortunately’ killed tens of thousands of civilians. On the other hand I knew it was not a good idea to push him too far. In 1994, notoriously, the BBC Pashto Service’s Mirwais Jalil was murdered immediately after an interview with Hekmatyar that had displeased him. In 1987, Hekmatyar was also said to have rewarded the killers of a BBC cameraman, Andy Skrzypkowiak, whose only crime was to have taken some footage of a battle against the Soviets won by a rival mujahideen leader.

I suddenly remembered how alone and exposed I was – and scuttled for the safer ground of softer questions.

Later, as the interview began to wind down, he remarked that it was ‘good to be conversing again with the Great Satan’.