The News International
October 8, 1992
By Imran Akbar
PARIS: The US House Republican Research Committee of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare has severely criticized the Central Intelligence Agencies and Inter-Services-Intelligence for their gross negligence and cover-up of the misconduct of the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan during the 13 year Afghan civil war.
The report also alleged that the ISI propped Hekmatyar as an ultimate Muslim choice, while knowing all along that he was actually working for the ex-Soviet KGB, the intelligence agency of the Soviet Union.
The 19-page report submitted in March 1990 and now doing rounds here, claims that the ISI had created Hekmatyar only to serve the military regime of General Ziaul Haq. The report states: "needless to say, the picture of Hekmatyar's success in the civil war created by the KGB-Khad (propaganda) closely fits the biases of Ziaul Haq and ISI. This Islamist leadership was subsequently adopted by Ziaul Haq because of the ISI's claims of tight control over the radical revivalist Islamist movements as well the ensuring ideological endorsement from Pakistan's Jamat-e-Islami and the Saudi Arabian leadership. (The new prime minister) Benazir Bhutto cannot afford to disavow and disassociate herself from the Afghan leadership built by her father, let alone confront the ISI on the conduct of its Afghan operations."
The report further states, "Given this, the reports of Hezb-e-Islami victories served the ISI's intrinsic interests so well that it had no desire to doubt them and indeed politically could not afford to. With the Zia regime wholeheartedly committed to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, any attempt to challenge or verify his (Hekmatyar's) claims was swiftly crushed by Islamabad's highest echelons. Moreover, it was in the personal interest of numerous ISI senior officers and operatives who were embezzling the ever-growing flow of US and Saudi military and financial assistance to ensure that the process should continue."
The false information from Islamabad to Washington through CIA resulted in the termination of aid in 1989 and the ISI plan to launch a massive attack on Jalalabad.
The debacle was so huge that even today the last body count has not yet been confirmed and neither the original planner brought to justice. The worse part of the story is that the Hekmatyar group was already working for the KGB and had in fact co-operated with the Soviet troops in persecution and subsequent defeat of other resistance factions.
Hekmatyar is also termed in the report as a commander who killed more Mujahideen than Soviet Afghan soldiers. The report recalls a curious incident where the ISI had to lose its two top agents in order to protest Hekmatyar and his KGB network from being exposed to the media. In the spring of 1985, a senior resistance commander's source in the Soviet intelligence network agreed to disclose the Hekmatyar dossier in Moscow in the return for the safe passage for his family. As the CIA prepared itself the task, the whole network was betrayed to the Soviets after a call for a top-level meeting by resistance commanders was intercepted by Hekmatyar.
Within twenty-four hours, a Soviet special flight IL-63M plane was arranged which flew the source to Tashkent never to be heard of again. The aftermath indicated the Hekmatyar was afraid that the credible source would expose his true identity. For the ISI, recognizing the gravity of the betrayal meant doubting the reliability of Hekmatyar and the self-serving empire built around his myth. Therefore, the ISI decided to suppress the incident eve though two of its won/operatives were amongst those arrested and transferred to Tashkent.
Hekmatyar's meteoric rise came after his expulsion from the Kabul Military Academy. Till then, he was a staunch communist and later infiltrated into Muslim fundamentalist groups on the behest of the KGB and Khad. He arranged his first professional assassination of a Maoist communist leader in Kabul in 1972 and then entered the Muslim Brotherhood as the older leadership began to be killed under mysterious circumstances.
The KGB-Hekmatyar co-operation could be judged from the fact that the resistance commanders in the Maidan area were afraid to ambush Soviet envy's for fear of reprisal from Hezb-e-Islami. Hekmatyar also managed to destroy two ammunition depots and five weapons trucks stripping Jamaiat-e-Islami leader Ahmed Shah Massoud of weapons near the Pakistani border of Garan Chashma.
The ISI, the Task Force reports states, monitored the ambush of Tekhar province where senior Jamiat commanders were killed. Some of them were brutally tortured. The communication system and messages exchanged were on the same frequency range as that of the ISI. The tussle between Ahmed Shah Massoud and ISI reached the peak in 1988, when Massoud refused to surrender to ISI pressure. In return, his aid was completely cut off forcing him to buy weapons from the black market.
The assassination of Afghan liberal intellectual, Majrooh, was orchestrated by the Hezb-e-Islami in Peshawar where the Hezb hit-team included a SPETNAZ commando from the Soviet Union. The ISI briefed Hekmatyar and with KGB KHAD assistance, the gulf between Pashtuns and other nationalities widened, Today an average of 200 people are killed daily in Afghanistan in continued battles between ethnic and sectarian minorities.
"The two extreme fundamentalist parties are of a different sort. Run by Mr Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Mr Rasul Sayyaf, they have done most of the sabotaging of other resistance groups and are suspected of collaborating with the Kabul regime. Their strong fundamentalism, however, has earned them most of the money."
The Economist, January 26, 1985The Hekmatyar phenomenon of violence occurred when General Hameed Gul was the ISI chief and later though officially retired, often found himself in Peshawar while General Asif Durrani sat as the Director General in ISI in Islamabad. Incidentally, it was during the same period that the Iran-Contra Affair reached its peak and Pakistan was cited as a willing participant in the scam. This at least indicated the huge heroin transportation by ships from the Pakistani coast of Makran to the islands of Mauritius and Africa between 1985 and 1988.
According to the much acclaimed Saudi aid to Hekmatyar also has a dark side. The great Afghan expert on Muslim strategy, General Kamal Adham, also the former head of the Saudi intelligence agency, is now under house arrest. He was responsible for arranging the meeting between Hekmatyar and a Soviet representative, Yu Voroustsov, in Taif Saudi Arabia. The meeting was requested by Dr.Najeebullah, the former President of Afghanistan in 1989. The reason for the arrest of Kamal Adham is said to be his role in heroin money laundering and recycling of drug money through BCCI. It was also the same period when two Israeli Defense force members were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan while invited by the ISI in 1986.
The report, it is believed in Paris, would cause further headaches to the propaganda officers of the Republican Party in the forthcoming US elections where President Bush finds himself trailing at the bottom in opinion polls.
The questions often asked buy security experts here is why the CIA and ISI failed to give the true picture of events and character of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Does Hekmatyar continue to serve a large purpose which some-how forms the New World Order now that war of nationalities funded by heroin engulf South West Asia?
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