The road not taken

Abdul Haq and the ‘Afghan solution’

Just after September 11 2001, a piece appeared in the London Evening Standard under the headline: ‘Rebel chief begs: Don’t bomb now, Taleban will be gone in a month’. The accompanying photo showed a bearded man shaking hands with a beaming Margaret Thatcher. The man was Abdul Haq, perhaps the most famed Pashtun commander of the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad. Haq’s fabled exploits included blowing up the Soviet army’s seven-storey-underground munitions dump with two single rockets; an event that turned the war.

This time, Abdul Haq had a plan for how to win another war — the one that America had vowed to wage on al-Qa’eda and their friends the Taleban in Afghanistan. The first step towards victory, said Haq, was for Blair to ‘put the hand of restraint’ on America to delay or halt air strikes on Afghanistan. Haq’s urgent message for western leaders was that the Taleban regime in Afghanistan was toppling from within.