Soldiers of God by Robert D. Kaplan Page B

shot, and the village
mullah
and headmen were taken away to prison for summary execution by Afghan Communists. The soldiers even defecated on the ritually cleansed dishes, the most sacred items in a Moslem household. Unlike Abdul Haq, Din Mohammed seemed truly transformed and hardened by this experience. Whereas Haq, in his role as a field commander, had killed Soviets, he didn't seem to hate with the same fanatical intensity as his brother. “Din Mohammed is a bitter, inflexible man” was a remark I frequently heard from Afghans outside the fundamentalist fold.
    I was one of the only reporters ever to talk with Din Mohammed at length, and the experience was disconcerting. For several hours he suffered me. He certainly did not feel comfortable with non-Moslem foreigners, although he would spend long stretches with Shuster, chatting and drinking tea.
    Shuster, himself a product of totalitarianism, seemed to think in the same cynical, conspiratorial framework as Din Mohammed. He badgered Din Mohammed with a harsh reality designed to force the Haji's hand, in order to allow Haq to go to the United Nations.
    President Zia of Pakistan was conspiring, in early and mid-1988, to make the anti-Western Afghan extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the permanent chairman of the seven-party mujahidin alliance. Hekmatyar, whose three-month term of office as temporary chairman was set to expire, was loathed by all theother party leaders, fundamentalist and moderate alike. He was young, charismatic, highly educated, and power hungry, but his organization lacked fighting ability and squandered much of its resources attacking other guerrilla factions. Hekmatyar wanted personal power first, a mujahidin victory second. He was a Pathan from the northern Afghan province of Badakshan, but his eyes were not those of a Pathan. They resembled an Arab's or Persian's: pellets of hard black ice that never stopped moving unless they were looking down and away from you. A spellbinding demagogue before a crowd, in private he was eerily soft-spoken; his mouth flowed with honey that denied all bad intentions. Hekmatyar was forever calling press conferences, accusing the other parties of selling out to the Soviets while claiming credit for military operations that the other parties had carried out. It was a Peshawar truism that the split in the “hopelessly divided mujahidin” — as the media phrased it — was basically six against one. At times it seemed that the only issue all the factions of Westerners at the American Club could agree on was a hatred of Hekmatyar for “giving the mujahidin a bad name” in the outside world.
    Yet Zia favored the thirty-nine-year-old leader. In addition to being a militant fundamentalist like Zia himself, Hekmatyar was a talented politician backed up by almost no grassroots support and no military base inside. He was therefore wholly dependent on Zia's protection and financial largess (courtesy of American taxpayers) for his party's existence. Hekmatyar, a former student leader at Kabul University, was the classic artificial creation of an outside power. But the mujahidin could not openly oppose Zia's choice, because it was Zia's personal support that allowed the guerrillas to operate from Pakistani territory over the opposition of most of his countrymen, who would have gladly cut a deal with the Kabul Communists in return for getting the 3.5 million refugees off their soil. And the price for Zia's protection was a mujahidin leader who was completely subservient to him.
    Shuster pleaded his case to Din Mohammed: Abdul Haq and the other alliance leaders were the way around Zia's machinations. By accepting the invitation from Perez de Cuéllar's office, which Shuster was asked to help relay, Haq could become, overnight, a unifying figure in the mujahidin alliance, overshadowing Hekmatyar and thus blunting the force of Zia's gambit without openly crossing him. Also, at that very moment in mid-1988, Ahmad Shah Massoud was forming