smh.com.au

Desperate call to CIA was too late to save Abdul Haq

By Michael Gordon and Tim Weiner

The mayday from Afghanistan arrived at CIA headquarters on Thursday. Robert McFarlane, Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, was on the line and he had bad news. Abdul Haq was in Afghanistan and surrounded by Taliban troops. He needed help.

The CIA and a liaison officer from the US Central Command took down Haq's co-ordinates and an air strike was ordered. But it was too late. Hours later the Taliban announced that Haq had been captured and executed.

His brother, Abdul Qadir, said that Haq's death deprived Afghanistan of a moderate voice who could have helped depose the Taliban and unify clashing ethnic communities.

"It's a loss to not only the Pashtuns, but to Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras as well. He was a man for all Afghanistan."

Patriotism, vengeance and dreams of glory had driven Haq out of exile and back into Afghanistan. His country, his wife and his son had died at the hands of his enemies. He wanted to fight back. He was a privately financed freelancer trying to overthrow the Taliban.

The US State Department lauded him. "Throughout his life, this gentleman has been a voice for the establishment of broad-based government for his country," a spokesman said.

But Haq entered Afghanistan with no direct support from any country, any army or any intelligence service.

Mr McFarlane said he had known Haq since the Reagan administration, when Haq was fighting to expel Russia from Afghanistan and was invited to the White House.

Mr McFarlane said the operation began last weekend when Haq led a 19-member band into Afghanistan, after shaking trailing Pakistani intelligence agents.

The group was armed with only a few rifles, a few automatic weapons and a pistol. The plan was to meet Pashtun leaders opposed to the Taliban and foment a rebellion.

Haq knew he was vulnerable. He could not even walk properly since he had lost a foot in the war against the Russians and was travelling on horseback.

But he calculated that arms could be shipped in later and that the Pashtun would embrace him as a natural leader.

On Thursday his nephew in Pakistan received an urgent call.

"I am cut off on a steep mountain road," Haq said from outside Jalalabad to his nephew across the Khyber Pass. "There are Taliban ahead and Taliban behind. Can you do something?"

The nephew called James Ritchie, a wealthy American in Pakistan, who with his brother, Joe, had helped finance Haq's quixotic trip to try to build an anti-Taliban coalition of local commanders and tribal chiefs in the south and the east. Mr Ritchie, in turn, called Mr McFarlane, who contacted the CIA's operations centre.

The CIA indicated it would do what it could to help, Mr McFarlane said. The agency was given Haq's co-ordinates.

As the night wore on, Haq's plight became bleaker. An unmanned Predator spy plane, equipped with Hellfire anti-tank missiles, was sent in to aid Haq early on Friday, US officials said.

The Predator, which was in the area but not ideally suited to the task, fired missiles at the Taliban, striking some of them.

Then Haq's brother in Peshawar received a call from his brother's satellite phone. The Taliban were on the line and they said Haq had been captured. News of his execution by hanging soon followed.

Haq's supporters say he needed weapons and helicopter support. But the sole support he was offered was several satellite telephones, which CIA and British agents offered to provide just before he entered Afghanistan.

Abdul Haq, 45, spent his youth trying to subvert the Soviet occupation of his country from 1979 to 1989.

One former senior US intelligence official referred to him as Hollywood Haq. When not in battle in Afghanistan he was in constant contact with US officials and foreign journalists from his base in Peshawar.

"An irascible scoundrel, but everyone loved him," said Richard Hoagland, a State Department envoy to Afghanistan in the early 1990s. "He embodied the Afghan national characteristic of openness, frankness, independence."

"For us, Afghanistan is destroyed," he said in 1994. "It is turning to poison, and not only for us but for all others in the world. If you are a terrorist you can have shelter here, no matter who you are.

"Maybe one day they will have to send hundreds of thousands of troops to deal with that," he predicted. "And if they step in they will be stuck. We have a British grave in Afghanistan. We have a Soviet grave. And then we will have an American grave."

The New York Times, Agence France-Presse

-- Anonymous, October 28, 2001