a house divided, 1933–73the cia were convinced that Hikmatyar’s men were the most effective when
it came to killing Russians. Hikmatyar did indeed inflict a great deal of
damage on the Soviet war machine but he was also a divisive force, for his
mujahidin spent nearly as much time fighting turf wars with rival factions,
particularly Rabbani’s Jami‘at-i Islami and Ahmad Shah Mas‘ud’s Panjshiris.
As well as hijacking arms and aid convoys destined for rival factions, Hizb-i
Islami was accused of being behind the disappearance or assassination of
rival commanders, Afghan journalists, intellectuals, religious dissidents and
foreign aid workers, including at least two American citizens. Later the u.s.
State Department would list Hikmatyar as a Global Terrorist, but during the
decade of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan he received in excess of $600
million in cash and arms, most of which was paid for by American taxpayers.
Among the many heads of state who shook hands with Hikmatyar during
the 1980s were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who publicly declared
that Hikmatyar and the other leaders of the Peshawar Islamist parties were
the ‘moral equivalent’ of America’s Founding Fathers.
Another major recipient of cia weapons was Yunus Khalis, a
Deobandi-trained Pushtun from Nangahar who had split from Hikmatyar
early in 1979 and set up his own branch of Hizb-i Islami. His deputies
included Maulawi Jalal al-Din Haqqani, a Zadrani Pushtun from Khost,
who would later head the Haqqani Network, and ‘Abd al-Haq, a wealthy
Jabbar Khel Ghilzai whose great-grandfather, Arsala Khan, had been Amir
Sher ‘Ali Khan’s minister for foreign affairs. As well as being a noted field
commander, ‘Abd al-Haq was one of the few mujahidin commanders who
attempted to unify the resistance across the ethnic and regional divide.
‘Abd al-Sayyaf ’s Itihad-i Islami also received substantial financial and
military assistance. Sayyaf, another graduate of Cairo’s al-Azhar, was ideo-
logically a Wahhabist, an ultra-radical version of Islam that was the official
mazhab of Saudi Arabia. Sayyaf was the main beneficiary of Saudi arms
and money and he spent much of his time touring Arab states raising
funds and recruiting Arabs to join the jihad. Aided by a wealthy Yemeni-
born civil engineer, ’Osama bin Laden, who was assisting the Saudi Secret
Service, Sayyaf constructed an underground bunker complex across the
Durand Line in Paktiya as a forward base for mujahidin operations. Later,
in 1986, bin Laden set up his own base in Jaji tribal territory, where he
surrounded himself with Arab mujahidin and increasingly focused on
internationalizing his jihad, particularly against America. The rest, as the
saying goes, is history.
Burhan al-Din Rabbani’s Jami‘at-i Islami received a smaller percentage
of the military aid, even though Jami‘at was the largest and most ethnically