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. He’d had clandestine meetings with renegade Taleban commanders, he said, and they’d pledged their support to him — but any hasty attack could unite the Taleban again against the West. Sadly for Afghanistan and for the West, Blair and Bush ignored Haq’s warnings. The bombing went ahead and Abdul Haq was, in October of that same year, captured and killed by the Taleban — who knew, even if we didn’t, how dangerous he was to them.

A decade later, our folly in not listening to Haq becomes more and more obvious. The situation is deteriorating daily, as evidenced by the recent bold attack on the British Council in Kabul and the steady picking off of Karzai’s allies by the Taleban: Ahmed Wali Karzai, Jan Mohammad, Mohammad Daoud and Mattiullah Khan — all those whom the western military and intelligence have paid off to protect routes, or provide compounds or irregular militia forces.