Not just Taliban have blood on hands
Toronto Star
10/01/2007
By Rosie DiManno

The most ravaged district of Kabul is a ghostly testament to the folly of war, waged without pity.
There is nothing left intact, just the detritus of siege: Jagged bits of masonry, husks of buildings, crumbling walls pockmarked with artillery fire.
The Soviets didn't do this. The Taliban didn't do this.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar did this.
With his militia entrenched in the southern quadrant of the capital, unwilling to share power with other mujahideen leaders – offered the prime minister's job, he demanded the presidency – Hekmatyar rained rockets on Kabul. An alliance that had successfully and improbably driven Soviet might off Afghanistan soil shattered, as the squabbling warlords fell on each other.
But the continuous bombardment of Kabul in the early '90s was very nearly all Hekmatyar's doing. In one single rocket attack, 1,800 civilians were killed. In the first year of civil war, 30,000 Kabulis died under Hekmatyar's shelling, 100,000 wounded.
Hekmatyar is not a foreigner, not an infidel, not part of an invading imperialist army. He's an Afghan and he has more blood on his hands, arguably, than even the Taliban, with which he has variously fought against and yoked himself to, depending on strategic ambitions. And he's always been a most ambitious man.
These days, apart from embracing Al Qaeda – he took credit for spiriting Osama bin Laden out of Tora Bora in 2001 – Hekmatyar's shock troops comprise the largest band of hardened gunmen that fight alongside the neo-Taliban.
He belongs in front of a war-crimes tribunal, not in Afghanistan's parliament. Yet this is the man – an unyielding terrorist by any definition of the word, the embodiment of treachery – that Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he would welcome in peace talks. Hekmatyar says sure, let's parley – once foreign troops are removed and the new Afghan constitution is dissolved.
Nuts to that, Karzai counters, knowing full well that Hekmatyar covets the presidency and an ultrafundamentalist Afghanistan no different than what the ousted Taliban had imposed. Leery of what comes after NATO forces depart, however, Karzai is welcoming all fugitives into the negotiating tent as pre-emptive gambit.
This is deranged détente, testament to the few options Karzai has left to avert another calamitous civil war in the absence of foreign troops, as NATO countries – most critically, Canada – deliberate exit scenarios.
A worst-case scenario: Rumours that Hekmatyar might join forces with another unhappy warlord, Rashid Dostum. The ethnic Uzbek thug is a founding member of the United National Front, an anti-government alliance established this year that has pulled together senior veterans from the fight against the Soviets.
Though detesting each other, they've been fleeting allies before, Hekmatyar and Dostum, during the change-lobsters-and-dance chaos of the civil war era.
Last year, coalition forces found a cache of arms belonging to Dostum's forces. There is an escalating worry that Dostum, perhaps in co-ordination with Hekmatyar, would unleash heavy artillery on ill-prepared NATO troops in the northern part of Afghanistan, soldier contributions from countries that have kept them out of combat zones.
All these factional groups just won't let Afghanistan be, the fanatically anti-West Hekmatyar most especially. Yet there are elements within NATO, even in the U.S. State Department, urging accommodation with Hekmatyar, such is the yearning for a political resolution to end the insurgency.
In Afghanistan, though, internecine politics always devolves to war. And if new Afghanistan is destined to become once more old Afghanistan, Canadian troops have been wasting their time, their sweat, their blood.
_________________
Ba Naam e Khudahvand e Jan o Kherab, Kazeen Bartar Andisha Bar Nagzarad 007 Provokateur http://djini.de/better_arabic.html SCHAUT REIN