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He was once best known as the Prime Minister who rained barrages of rockets and artillery shells on the residents of his capital city, Kabul.
By the early 1990’s, with outrages such as this, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had established himself as the most feared and reviled warlord in all of Afghanistan.
When he failed to wrest power from his arch rival in the government of former anti-Soviet guerrillas, Ahmed Shah Massoud, Hekmatyar responded in a predictable way.
He withdrew to Kabul’s southern outskirts and blasted away at anyone and everyone in the city, and did so with the help of his long time supporter, Pakistan’s military intelligence branch, the ISI.
Now, 16 years later, he’s back in town, at least by way of a delegation of his Hizbe Islami underlings. This week they enjoyed safe passage to Kabul to hold direct talks with Hamid Karzai, the man given Afghanistan’s reins of power by Hekmatyar’s sworn enemies, the United States and its allies.
For the U.S.-led coalition, it is a disgraceful spectre.
Hekmatyar, after all, is an outspoken ally of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He's one of Washington's most-wanted Afghan terrorists. His gunmen have at times battled the Taliban for turf, but overall their goals and brutality have been in sync with the Taliban's.
Now, due mainly to the continuing support Hekmatyar enjoys from Pakistan (America’s supposed partner in George W. Bush’s “war on terror”) the Hizbe Islami leader is carving out a piece of the action, and doing so in negotiations with an Afghan president Washington no longer trusts or controls.
As if that's not bad enough, the Western parties to the war must ponder a far greater calamity: a full scale civil war, which could well be triggered by any Karzai-Hekmatyar pact.
Hekmatyar is thoroughly despised by most Afghans, and so any accommodation granted to him by the corruption-ridden Karzai clique could well mark the tipping point for the regime, accelerating its collapse - which many of Karzai’s critics now see as inevitable.
Over the entire 32-year-span of the Afghan war, no other alleged criminal holds a candle to Hekmatyar, either for the scale of mayhem attributed to his party, or the cold-blooded nature of its exploits.
Put simply, no other Afghan has amassed a greater tally of abuses over a longer period of time than Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Dostum, Haqqani, the Taliban’s Mullah Omar - all of them pale by comparison.
Ominously, considering the positive spin given this week's talks by Karzai’s spokesmen, Hekmatyar’s entry into Kabul for the next stage of proceedings could come within weeks or even days.
Kabulis will be treated to scenes on their television screens that will stir the worst memories of their lives.
Their embattled, under-achieving, ballot-rigged president will be pictured shaking hands with the great butcher of the civil war, the zealot whose artillerymen slaughtered at least 20,000 Kabul residents in 1994 alone, and made refugees of a hundred thousand more.
The Afghan people’s frustration is compounded by the actions of the United States and its allies. Once the Afghans’ great hope, these foreign sponsor nations are viewed as increasingly detached from the realities of the conflict.
While their armies busy themselves with operations in the desert southwest, the U.S.-led coalition has little influence on events in Pakistan, where advances like Hekmatyar’s are plotted and controlled.
American TV audiences may accept the storyline, currently coming out of Washington, that Pakistan is rounding up Afghan Taliban figures. But Afghans know better.
They see Hekmatyar rising yet again, and they know where the man is coming from: Pakistan.
Pakistan, refuge of al Qaeda, exporter of suicide bombers, and unquestionably the most ruthlessly determined player of Afghanistan’s Great Game.
