Today's Stories

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

March 9 , 2009

The Worst-Best Hope in Afghanistan?

Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

By PETER LEE

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—a brutal, capricious, and violently anti-American warlord—may be the West’s best hope for its faltering adventure against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hekmatyar is fighting alongside the Taliban against the Karzai government and ISAF and U.S. forces.

Nevertheless, over the last five years, he has been the object of escalating blandishments by the Karzai government, Saudi Arabia, NATO, and perhaps even the United States, seeking to lure him away from the Taliban camp and into the Karzai government.

On February 20,  al Jazeera reported on the most recent status of talks between the Afghan government and Hekmatyar, Mullah Omar…well, probably everybody, as Karzai tries to shore up support for his rule in the run-up to snap parliamentary elections and in the face of growing U.S. hostility to his rule.

The Hekmatyar talks, encouraged by the UK, have apparently gotten to the point where Hekmatyar is being offered asylum in Saudi Arabia and the chance to return to public life in Afghanistan, at least Hamid Karzai’s part of it, with a pardon.

A key sticking point that al Jazeera didn’t go into a great deal is that Hekmatyar insists on a departure of foreign troops as a precondition for engaging with the Karzai government.

That’s a major, probably insurmountable obstacle for Karzai, and one wonders if Hekmatyar is negotiating or just playing for time as he preps for the latest iteration in Afghanistan’s twenty-year civil war.

Certainly, trusting Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is not a recipe for a long and happy life.

Paradoxically, in the eyes of the West, Hekmatyar’s bottomless appetite for betrayal and his ruthless willingness to inflict violence and suffering on the Afghan people may perhaps be considered his greatest asset.

Hekmatyar’s career as a revolutionary and warlord far pre-date the Taliban.

When Afghanistan was still a sleepy, pro-Soviet satellite in the 1970s, Hekmatyar, a student at Kabul University, fell under the influence of the Islamist politics of the Muslim Brotherhood, propagated inside the university by professors who had trained in Egypt.

Hekmatyar, who still uses the honorific “Engineer” in recognition of his studies at KU, became a paragon of Islamist militancy, reportedly carrying a vial of acid to fling into the faces of coeds not veiling themselves with suitable modesty.

The university, and Afghan political life in general, was split between secularist, socialist pro-Soviet and Islamist factions.  The strife was not just verbal, it was physical.  Hekmatyar murdered a Maoist student and was forced to flee Afghanistan for Pakistan.

There, Hekmatyar formed a lasting alliance with Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islaami (JI) political party and, through it, with Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate.

When the Soviet Union sent its 40th Army to prop up the pro-Soviet regime of Babrak Karmal, Hekmatyar became the preferred face of the Afghan resistance.  Hosted by the JI, patronized by the ISI, funded by the CIA and Saudi Arabia to the tune of US$ 600 pmillion, and armed by the Chinese, Hekmatyar was given carte blanche to run the massive Shamshatoo refugee camp near Peshawar that fed fighters into the jihad, and directly controlled the main Pashtun mujahideen force inside Afghanistan, Hezb-i-Islami.

After the Soviets left and, after three more years of struggle, the pro-Soviet regime of Muhammad Najibullah finally fell in 1992, Hekmatyar was finally ready to cap his political career with the formation of an Islamicist, pro-Pakistan government in Kabul.

However, a funny thing happened on the way to the Afghan presidential palace. 

A combination of Tajik and Uzbek forces from Afghanistan’s north ensconced themselves in Kabul first under the leadership of Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud, subjecting Hekmatyar to the frustration of on-again off-again negotiations to allow him to enter the government as Prime Minister.

In order to improve his bargaining position, Hekmatyar engaged in several campaigns of indiscriminate shelling of Kabul over the next two years that killed 20,000 civilians but did not seal his political ascendancy.

This dismal record, combined with Hekmatyar’s reputation for savage political infighting especially with royalist and socialist factions of the Afghan resistance, gave birth to the trope that “Hekmatyar has killed more Afghans than he did Russians”.

Hekmatyar’s bloody and ineffectual intransigence convinced Pakistan that he couldn’t lead Afghanistan.  Fatally, the ISI prevailed upon Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to provide clandestine to support to another Pashtun force instead—the Taliban.

With the assistance and coordination of the ISI, the Taliban swept into Kabul in 1992. 

Hekmatyar, who had chosen exactly the wrong time to enter the Kabul government and fight the Taliban, fled to Iran (backers of the Rabbani/Massoud government), where he rusticated under the watchful eye of the Iranian intelligence services.

Hekmatyar was expelled from Tehran after 9/11.  Some reports attribute his expulsion to Iranian desire to placate the United States; others call it payback for President Bush’s provocative labeling of Iran as a member of the “Axis of Evil”.

As Hekmatyar journeyed into Afghanistan in May 2002, reportedly bereft of $70 million he had deposited in Iranian accounts but was confiscated by the Tehran government, he was targeted for assassination by a CIA drone as his convoy approached Kabul; the Hellfire missile somehow missed.

Once back in Afghanistan, instead of being a spent and discredited force, Hekmatyar raised the banner of jihad against the United States, NATO, and the Karzai regime.  He was able to rebuild his army and take credit for several high-profile outrages, including an assassination attempt against Karzai in 2002 and the bloodiest defeat suffered by NATO forces—the killing of ten French troops in an ambush north of Kabul in 2008.

It is difficult to escape the suspicion that, post 9/11, Hekmatyar still enjoyed the clandestine support of elements inside the ISI as a counter to the Taliban. 

It is also possible to look at the mysterious circumstances of his expulsion from Iran and the failed assassination attempt by the CIA (which was, as Gary Leupp pointed out, the Global War on Terror’s first announced targeted assassination attempt against a figure unrelated to the 9/11 attacks) as possible efforts to reintroduce him into Afghanistan without undermining his  anti-U.S. credibility (The idea of a deeper-than-deep black op initiative to reintroduce Hekmatyar into Afghanistan is not out of the question.  Sometime around the end of 2003, the United States released Abdullah Mehsud from Guantanamo; Mehsud returned to Pakistan and started up a Pakistan Taliban force, but was suspected by other factions of being a double-agent.)

Even as Hekmatyar re-established himself inside Afghanistan, the Karzai government made repeated attempts to lure him back into the government.

After all, there is virtually no convergence between Hekmatyar’s Islamicist militancy based on the Leninist and elitist doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the obscurantist fundamentalism of the Taliban, nurtured in the Deobandi madrassas of Pakistan’s west.

The suspicion, rivalry, and fundamental differences in theology and strategy that militate against a genuine alliance between the Taliban and Hekmatyar were described in a report by the “Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies”:

An Afghan political analyst and head of the affairs of the Middle East and African countries during the Taliban regime, Waheed Muzda while talking to journalists said, “The alliance between the Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami is impossible as they have differences over many issues. Gulbadeen Hikmatyar believes in democracy and elections but Taliban oppose it. They say such elections in which every person even corrupt people also take part are not justified according to the Shariah. Similarly, Hizb-e-Islami favors education and jobs of women whereas Taliban do not like it. Another different thing between the both groups is that Taliban are closely linked with al-Qaeda and their movement is separate from those of other Islamist organizations. For example, Taliban regime did not heed the chief of Tanzeem Ikhwanul Muslimoon and other religious leaders when they were demolishing historical statues in Bamian. Taliban had also rejected Hizb-e-Islami’s request for allied government. In 2001, when threats of attack on Afghanistan mounted, Taliban had formed a delegation to meet Hikmatyar but it was too late. During the talks between Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami in 2005, the former had said that they would change war strategy in 2006 and they proposed Hizb-e-Islami to accept responsibility of all the strikes. They also offered political leadership to Hizb-e-Islami. But Hizb-e-Islami rejected this offer as, in this way, Taliban wanted to eliminate chances of Hikmatyar’s possible alliance with the Afghan government."[emph. added]

Hamid Karzai has been wooing Hekmatyar for years to abandon the Taliban and join the Kabul government.  The Hizb-i-Islami “Decision Making Council”, a splinter group which has disavowed Hekmatyar but is still suspected of being directed by him, joined the Afghan political process in 2005 with the permission of the Karzai government and won 34 seats in the parliamentary elections.

It is not unreasonable to think that Hekmatyar, the  most significant Pashtun power not beholden to al Qaeda muscle, would embody the hopes of Pakistan for a strongman to cut the Taliban down to size—or at least neutralize the Taliban on the battlefield and create a bloody stalemate.

Clearly, the United States is also thinking in these terms—despite the multi-million dollar price it reputedly keeps on Hekmatyar’s head.

In June of 2008, Hekmatyar’s son-in-law (who served as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan in the brief, pre-Taliban period) was transferred from Bagram Air Base to an Afghan prison and released—a move that could have happened only with U.S. acquiescence. 

Asia Times’ Syed Saleem Shahzad fills in the story:

Ghairat Bahir is the son-in-law of veteran mujahid Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and a top leader of the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA). He was arrested by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in Islamabad in 2002 on American pressure when he was making desperate moves to activate the HIA's jihadi network in favor of the Taliban. He was handed over to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and kept in various secret locations before being moved to Bagram. He was recently sent to Pul-i-Charki jail in Kabul after apparently agreeing to cooperate with the administration of President Hamid Karzai.

Immediately after his release, Ghairat Bahir was received at the presidential palace in Kabul and offered powerful ministries for the HIA if he agreed to act as a power-broker between top insurgent commanders, including Jalaluddin Haqqani and Hekmatyar, on one side and the US-backed Karzai administration on the other.

When Saudi Arabia hosted exploratory talks between the Taliban and the Karzai government in July 2008, a representative of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was there, apparently as a free agent unaffiliated with either delegation:

The talks were also attended by a representative of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami party who was a former military commander during the Afghan-Soviet war. Hekmatyar is wanted by the United States on charges of terrorism.

In October, Hekmatyar appeared in the unlikely role of champion of democracy, differentiating himself from the remorselessly theocratic Taliban while restating his precondition of withdrawal of foreign troops in an assertion of his jihadi credibility.

From the Pakistan Daily Times:

“The only solution to the existing crisis is the withdrawal of foreign troops, the holding of fair elections, the transfer of power to elected representatives and the establishment of an Islamic government in Afghanistan,” Hekmatyar said in a statement released on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the United States attack on Afghanistan.

Then, in a November 2008 article entitled Afghan Rebel Positioned for Key Role, the Washington Post gave a hint that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might be the kind of guy we can do business with:

[W]ith casualties among foreign forces at record highs, and domestic and international confidence in Karzai's government at an all-time low, U.S. and Afghan officials may have little choice but to grant Hekmatyar a choice seat at the bargaining table.

Top U.S. military officials have indicated in recent weeks a willingness to cut deals with rebel commanders like Hekmatyar to take insurgents off the battlefield.

This was despite Hekmatyar claiming responsibility (despite Taliban’s efforts to take the credit) for the ambush that killed 10 French soldiers north of Kabul in a few weeks previously.

Then, in January of this year, Hekmatyar’s brother (who resides in the NWFP capital of Peshawar) was released from Pakistani custody after five months’ detention.

Clearly, there is a lot of action on the Hekmatyar reconciliation front.

The Chinese might be willing to give this channel a try as well, given the fact that the Taliban seems to have abandoned its traditional deference to Chinese interests and may decide to abet Uighur separatists undermining public order and Chinese rule in the PRC’s vast Muslim province of Xinjiang.

After all, although the Chinese role was never as highly publicized as the efforts of the United States and Saudi Arabia, China was a major participant in the mujahideen network sponsored by the ISI to battle the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. 

The Soviet-backed government in Kabul accused the Chinese of providing $400 million in military aid, though it might be more accurate to say that the Chinese did $400 million in business, paid for by the CIA.

When the covert campaign to supply the Afghan fighters, in particular Hekmatyar, got so big that the CIA had exhausted the traditional sources of clandestine weaponry, China happily took on the profitable duty of providing guns and bullets from its factories.  China even provided mules to ease the famous transport shortage engendered by the flood of material. 

The Pakistan-ISI-JI-Hekmatyar channel is certainly familiar and comfortable for the Chinese government, and Beijing has been in contact with Hekmatyar for years.

When Hekmatyar reemerged in Afghanistan in 2002, Asia Times’  Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote:

Sources within the HIA say that the organization has recently reestablished contact with the Chinese government. In the past, Beijing has blamed the HIA for stirring a religious uprising in in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang, but Hekmatyar made concerted efforts to placate China, as well as to urge the Muslim leaders in Xinjiang to stop their separatist agitation. Beijing was said to be appreciative of these efforts, but it is yet to be seen how far China will go in supporting the new Afghan freedom struggle against foreign troops, if at all.

As conditions in western Pakistan have deteriorated, China has responded by reaching out to the JI, hosting a top level delegation from the Islamist political party in Beijing, Xian, and Shanghai this February.  A memorandum of understanding confirming the principle of non-interference in Chinese internal affairs i.e. Xinjiang was inked, and the head of the JI returned to Pakistan full of praise for the PRC.

As to the significance of this initiative, it should be pointed out that the JI’s influence on the Taliban is virtually non-existent.  JI’s political rival in west Pakistan, the JUI, run the Deobondi madrassas that nurtured the Taliban and has been the ISI’s designated interlocutor with the Taliban.

Now, even the JUI is forced to take dictation from the increasingly assertive and intimidating militants.

The JI would be of practical value to China if the Zardari government fell, and the JI entered the ruling coalition with its political ally, the Nawaz Sharif’s secularist PML-N.  A close JI link also be of use if China wanted to have the option of funneling aid to Hekmatyar in an anti-Taliban effort.

Hekmatyar’s consistent position has been that he wants foreign military forces to exit Afghanistan, and he will then mix it up with his chosen enemies. 

Indeed, it would appear politically impossible for Hekmatyar to fight the Taliban in alliance with U.S. and NATO forces and a Western-backed regime.

In 2002, Time Magazine quoted him as saying, “"We prefer involvement in internal war rather than occupation by foreigners and foreign troops".

Hekmatyar’s uncompromising militancy—especially his willingness to fight the Taliban and his consequences-be-damned approach to Afghan collateral damage--may turn out to be the music that the region’s interested powers want to hear.

However, a choice between conducting an unpopular counterinsurgency campaign reliant on foreign troops or unleashing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to take on the Taliban by himself is not much of a choice at all.

It remains to be seen if the aging Hekmatyar can stand up to the Taliban, which routed his forces in 1996, by himself.

In contrast to Hekmatyar’s bull-headed exploitation of the traditional channels of muscle and money—a Pashtun insurgency powered by foreign money and ISI expertise—the Taliban has shown itself to be frighteningly protean and potent.

The Taliban under Mullah Omar is not just a group of narrow-minded fanatics led by a charismatic leader who fancies himself an instrument of Allah on earth. 

The Taliban is a supremely adaptive military force, exploiting the friendship, assets, and expertise of Pashtun smugglers, southern Afghan drug dealers, the ISI, officers of the Khalq faction of the old Afghan government and, of course al Qaeda, to entrench itself as the dominant power in a broad swath of Pashtun central Asia, from the poppy fields of the Iranian border to the Pashtun high valleys less than 100 miles from Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad.

As the Taliban grows in strength, Hekmatyar fades, and the hopes for a native Afghan government able to dictate terms to Mullah Omar fades with him.

Peter Lee is a business man who has spent thirty years observing, analyzing, and writing on Asian affairs. Lee can be reached at peterrlee-2000@yahoo.
  

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