Victory Point - Ed Darack [40]
Hekmatyar, too, would influence eastern Afghanistan’s refugees, encouraging them to join HIG and his associated Lashkar-e Isar (Army of Sacrifice), not just by co-opting those in any of the hundreds of established refugee camps, but by creating his own. Just over one hundred road miles from Asadabad, the earthen-walled Shamshatoo Refugee Camp, about twelve miles southeast of Peshawar, would turn out thousands of fundamentalist fighters since the Pakistani government gave “Engineer Hekmatyar” the dusty swath of earth in 1979. With mosques, madrassas, medical facilities—even its own newspaper—the Shamshatoo camp, according to U.S. intel officers, was an important insurgent and terrorist base of operation for fighters moving into and out of eastern Afghanistan well into 2005.
In the early 1980s, the Arab influence pushed even farther into Afghanistan, spreading north of Kunar into Nuristan, through a man named Mawlawi Afzal, the Panjpiri-educated leader of Dawlat-I Inqilabi-yi Islamiyi Nuristan (Islamic Revolutionary State of Nuristan), a party that may have also influenced the people of the Korangal, Pech, and Kunar valleys. Another disciple of the Panjpiri madrassas, Jamil al-Rahman, broke away from Hekmatayar’s HIG in 1985 and formed yet another ultrafundamentalist Salafist group, the Jama’at-e Da’wa, in the heart of the Kunar. Attracting both money and fighters directly from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, this party achieved, by some accounts, greater power in the Kunar than even HIK during some stretches of the Soviet-Afghan War.
Vicious factional warring and withering disunity defined Afghanistan after the departure of the Soviet military; party leaders’ and individual commanders’ lustful quest for glory and regional dominance trumped any proclivity they may have held for peaceful Islamic unity. While no true victors emerged from the innumerable clashes during this period, the Afghan people, now virtually overlooked by the rest of the world, maintained their status of mass victimization at the hands of brutal war. Those who returned to Afghanistan from the refugee camps found razed villages, tainted water sources, and faced the dismal prospects of an ineffective central government in Kabul (often under siege), incapable of reining in the venal warlords who ravaged much of the country. But in the mid-nineties, a virtually invisible and stunningly unlikely factor would effect the reshaping of the country once again; Afghanistan would experience yet another tumultuous change.
Accounting for roughly 65 percent of its gross domestic product, cotton—and the textiles produced from the crop—is the most important of Pakistan’s domestically produced commodities. In 1993 and 1994, however, swarms of tiny white flies descended upon the prime cotton-growing areas in the Sindh and Punjab provinces, carrying with them the microscopic baggage of the leaf curl virus. Production plunged by over a third from its 1992 peak during the ensuing plague. With an economic crisis exploding before her eyes, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto dispatched her husband, Asif Zardari, to the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan to broker a deal to buy raw cotton to bridge Pakistan’s supply gap. The deal was finalized in short order, but the commodity had to be transported—through the warlord-plagued, anfractuous Afghan province of Herat, where bandits associated with Hekmatyar’s HIG hijacked the first of the convoys. Pakistan, once again viewing Afghanistan through the conceptual lens of “strategic depth,” realized that they needed a convoy protection force, and they needed that force immediately.
Pakistani officials sought to enlist the help of a former mujahideen fighter and student of the writings of Abdullah Azzam, an