not mean that those parties which Pakistan was prepared to toler-
ate were representative of Afghan anti-communist forces in gen-
eral. The seven Sunni parties which I mentioned earlier were
especially privileged by Pakistan, and in principle (although not
altogether in practice), refugees were ‘required to be affiliated to
one of the parties in order to obtain assistance from the Pakistan
refugee program’ (Human Rights Watch, 1991: 106). Zahir Shah
and his immediate Rome-based family were refused permission to
visit Pakistan, and the nationalist party Afghan Millatwas frozen
out as well. While personality clashes and ethnic divisions would
have made cooperation between the Afghan parties difficult to
elicit even in the best of circumstances, Pakistan’s role as dis-
penser of largesse significantly accentuated the tensions between
the different groups. Hekmatyar’s Hezb, in particular, knew that its
continued receipt of arms was not dependent upon its military per-
formance, and it therefore showed a marked tendency to invest in
public relations in Pakistan, stockpile arms for future use against
other resistance groups, and freeload on the courage and commit-
ment of ordinary Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
With hindsight, the United States gave the ISI far too free a
hand in distributing US-funded weaponry. ‘The ISI’, Weinbaum
presciently observed, ‘was assumed in Washington to have a good
understanding of the Afghans and invaluable contacts among the
resistance parties. As a result, the United States was misinformed
about the popularity of former king Zahir Shah among the refugees
as well as about rank-and-file support for some of the hard-line
Islamic resistance groups’ (Weinbaum, 1994: 32). Pakistan’s
approach was not remotely concerned with Afghanistan’s post-
communist future. As Rubin notes, a ‘commander’s success in
mobilizing a large coalition, in setting up a civil administration to
replace the state in a region of the country, or in attracting support
and defectors from Kabul city or the regime army were all con-
sidered irrelevant’. Rather, Pakistan’s criteria for effectiveness
were ‘a high level of outside funding, weak links to the local soci-
ety, educated commanders, and ideological proximity to the ISI’
(Rubin, 1995a: 201). It is perhaps understandable that Pakistan
The Development of Afghan Resistance 75