Posted on 10/26/2001 5:29:56 PM PDT by dighton
ABDUL HAQ, who has been executed by the Taliban aged 44, was a prominent Afghan resistance commander who turned peace-maker even before the pro-Soviet regime was toppled in 1991.
He was born Humayoun Arsala in 1957 in Nangarhar Province, in eastern Afghanistan at the mouth of the Khyber Pass. His family traditionally headed the powerful Jabbarkhel clan, the historic leaders of the Ghilzai, who comprise the eastern half of the Pashtun peoples of Pakistan and Afghanistan (the clan heading the western Pashtuns was the Afghan royal family).
A great-grandfather had been the country's first foreign minister under Sher Ali Khan in the mid-19th century, and his father was a senior engineer in the huge American-funded Helmand river irrigation project in the 1950s and 1960s. Besides being a powerful local khan, his father installed their region's first, tiny hydro-electric generator rigged to a stream near their home.
Humayoun Arsala was educated in village schools, and in evenings more rigorously by private tutors. He cut short his education in the mid-1970s and after several scrapes with the police fled over the border to Peshawar. The Pakistan military, hoping to destabilise the Soviet satellite state next door, trained him in insurgency along with several hundred other future resistance figures including Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was recently murdered, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He acquired the nom de guerre Abdul Haq, or "Servant of Justice" - in those days a common precaution to discourage communist reprisals against family members still in Afghanistan.
Starting soon after the Soviet invasion in December 1979, Abdul Haq led assaults on Soviet convoys plying the deep ravines between the capital, Kabul, and Jalalabad, armed with little more than shotguns, deer rifles and dynamite. His resistance party (one of two named Hisbee Islami or the "Party of Islam"), led by a henna-bearded mullah named Younis Khalis, received few weapons and little funding from the Pakistani military or their American backers. But it attracted some of the foremost mujahideen (literally "Soldiers of the Faith"), including a number who subsequently became prominent Taliban commanders.
Abdul Haq opened the mujahideen's first front on the south and west sides of Kabul, where his attacks were characterised by detailed preparations, cleverness and bravado. In an attack on a Soviet ammunition dump near Paghman, Abdul Haq and his mujahideen hid along the roadsides flinging explosives into Russian lorries that drove deep into the seven-level underground complex. More than 1,000 enemy troops were thought to have perished in the subsequent five-hour firestorm, which was videotaped 10 miles away from the roof of the British embassy in Kabul.
In an assault on the Naghlu power station outside Kabul, Abdul Haq spent months interviewing retired construction workers until he found one who recalled a way into a tunnel that ran under the mountain, linking the dam with the hydro-electric turbines. The entire region was bristling with anti-personnel mines, so working by night over more than a week, Abdul Haq and his men used their knotted turbans to lower themselves repeatedly down the face of the mountain, clear a path through the minefield, and float explosives down the channel. The tunnel collapsed, shutting down the power station for a year.
Abdul Haq was wounded 17 times, most seriously when he stepped on a Soviet anti-personnel mine in 1987 during an assault on a Soviet position near Kabul, and had emergency field surgery nearby, provided by a Hungarian volunteer doctor who had fled Soviet troops in 1956. In 1988 Abdul Haq visited Britain as a guest of Margaret Thatcher.
Two years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, as the communist regime began to fall, Abdul Haq organised a multi-party "shura" or committee of mujahideen commanders to minimise the friction between resistance parties and to attempt to prevent civil war. All parties agreed to forestall their invasion of Kabul until they could create a plan to deter looters. Much to his irritation, the northern commander Ahmad Shah Massoud broke his agreement and secretly sent his troops into Kabul. Mujahideen leaders asked Abdul Haq to head Kabul's police department three times, but he refused when he was forbidden to disarm the bands of gunmen roaming the capital.
Insisting that no mujahideen had ever been elected to govern, he refused to participate in the internecine warfare that levelled most of Kabul, and instead joined a company of commodities traders and cyber cafe owners in Dubai. But he remained active in attempts to rebuild his country. Engineers from Siemens, hoping to restore Kabul's electricity supply, were impressed with his knowledge of the capital grid and asked him how he knew so much since he had no degree in electrical engineering: "Easy," he explained. "I blew it all up."
From 1988, Abdul Haq wrote to American, British and United Nations diplomats warning that CIA money and weapons were funding terrorist training camps run by radical Afghan mujahideen and Saudi extremists bent on overthrowing moderate Middle Eastern governments. He took a similarly strong line against the Taliban, claiming that they were backing terrorists.
In 1999 his wife, Karima, and his 11-year-old son Jamil were assassinated at Peshawar by a Taliban hit-squad. Family friends inside the Taliban supplied the names of the assassins who were killed according to local traditions of justice. He remarried nearly a year ago.
In recent years, Abdul Haq had been pivotal in attempts to convene a traditional national assembly, a Loya Jirga. He opposed the recent allied bombings of Afghanistan, fearing that ordinary Pashtuns would be driven to support the Taliban. He was on a mission to eastern Afghanistan, encouraging Taliban commanders to defect, when he was captured and killed.
He is survived by his wife Uma and five children.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001.
If the US was responsible for sending him in there, then I think we dropped the ball. He should have been better protected. I suppose in war mistakes happen, but this one is a real pity.
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