Afghan combatants, became an extremely substantial one.
However, it was anything but neutral, and Pakistan’s urge to play
favourites distorted the Afghans’ struggle, with disturbing longer-
term consequences.
Pakistani manipulation and the Afghan resistance
That Pakistan would seek to play favourites was in one sense not
the least bit surprising. Pakistan had been closely tied to various
Afghan groups since before the April 1978 communist coup. When
Daoud renewed his Pushtunist rhetoric following the July 1973
coup in Kabul, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had responded by building ties
with Afghan groups hostile to Daoud. He and his adviser on Afghan
affairs, Naseerullah Babar, toyed briefly with the idea of seeking to
restore Zahir Shah, but ultimately settled on the strategy of sup-
porting anti-Daoud Islamic groups. It was in this way that the
young radical Gulbuddin Hekmatyar first received Pakistani back-
ing, which he was to enjoy for over two decades. In 1975, the
Pakistan Army had backed Afghan Islamist groups who mounted an
uprising against Daoud in July. Daoud crushed his opponents with
relative ease, and Hekmatyar in Paktia failed altogether to win pop-
ular support (Roy, 1990: 75). However, in a sign of what was to
come, Hekmatyar’s failure did not lead Pakistan to abandon him as
worthless. And through the 1980s, Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e
Islamiwere well-provisioned by ISI despite a dearth of evidence
that they were militarily effective against the Soviets or the Kabul
regime. As Weinbaum put it: ‘ISI officials seemed to be more
impressed with the frequent ruthlessness of Hekmatyar’s leaders
than with the scope of their fighting or accomplishments against
Soviet and Kabul government troops’ (Weinbaum, 1994: 34).
Yet at the same time, General Zia, who had witnessed the
September 1970 crisis in Jordan in which King Hussein’s
Hashemite monarchy had turned on Palestinian groups, was deter-
mined that no Afghan group was to become sufficiently powerful
or organised as to pose any kind of threat to its host. This concern
militated against exclusive reliance on Hekmatyar. However, it did
74 The Afghanistan Wars