THE BUTCHER COMES HOME

‘There is a limit to the patience of the people,” the wise and wizened Berhanuddin Rabanni told me back in the spring of 2010, during a conversation at his massively fortified compound in Kabul. The former Afghan president was talking about the absurd expectations involved in U.S. President Barac kO ba ma’ s plans to wash America’s hands of Afghanistan by forcing Afghans to reconcile with the Taliban. “Beyond that limit, no one can be patient anymore."

Owing to his stature among Afghanistan’s coterie of old warlords, it had fallen to Rabanni to take on the impossible task of leading efforts by the U. S.funded High Peace Council to devise inducements that would be generous enough to persuade Taliban leaders to end their reign of horrors once and for all, but not so generous as to incite a country-wide insurgency arrayed against the United States, the Taliban and the government of Hamid Karzai.

The High Peace Council had been established a few months earlier at a gathering President Karzai convened in Kabul. Although boycotted by many of Afghanistan’s more democratically inclined leaders, the affair drew 1,600 delegates. The pomp of the event was rather tarnished straight away. During Karzai’s opening speech, while he was flattering the Taliban by referring to them as his brothers, or “dear Talibs,” the Taliban interrupted the proceedings with an attempted suicide bombing, rocket attacks and gunfire.

On Sept. 20, 2011, a year after I spoke with Rabanni, a couple of Taliban emissaries arrived at his Kabul fortress with a gift for his 71st birthday. It turned out not to be the truce offering they had claimed they were bringing: one of the Talibs had a bomb hidden in his turban. The blast killed Rabanni and four members of his High Peace Council.

Even after that, the peace talks continued, supported perhaps most enthusiastically and faithfully in the NATO capitals by the gruesome former U. S defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and Canada’s happy- faced New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton. The most comical chapter in the story unfolded in Qatar in 2013, where U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was pleased to relocate a phalanx of Taliban knuckle-draggers, who were supposed to talk peace, but instead declared their new posh digs in Doha to be an embassy of Afghanistan’s government- i n exile, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It was all too much even for Karzai, whose own greasy entreaties to the Taliban began almost as soon as he set up shop in Kabul in 2002.

Now, a new chapter in the pantomime has opened with the High Peace Council’s rehabilitation of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Butcher of Kabul, a sociopath who almost single-handedly turned the Afghan capital to rubble during the early 1990s, when as many as 50,000 people were slaughtered and the city was reduced from a metropolis of two million to perhaps 500,000 shellshocked, ragged and halfmad survivors. A peace deal between Hekmatyar and the government of Ashraf Ghani is to be concluded this week.

Afghans l ong ago r esigned themselves to this sort of thing. Compromises must be made. Deals with the devil are better than ceaseless butchery. In the exigencies of post- conflict bygones, against the threat of collapse into more terrible bloodletting, the ugliness of realpolitik is the lesser evil. Besides, as a terrorist mass murder, Hekmatyar has been a spent force for years.

The details of the deal he struck have not been fully enumerated, but it appears to includes buckets of money in lifetime an- nuities for Hekmatyar and an unknown number of his consiglieri, the resettlement of their families from Pakistan’s hinterlands to swish digs in and around Kabul, and the removal of Hekmatyar’s name from the United Nations’ terrorist roster. For Afghanistan’s national unity government, the deal is a sop to its UN benefactors and an example the Taliban might emulate. Inconveniently, almost straight away the Taliban condemned the advantages Hekmatyar accrued by the pact as an unpardonable crime that will incur the wrath of Allah.

In Kabul, the dispirited survivors of the “Hekmatyar Time” and their younger, more idealistic compatriots have managed to mount some street protests against his rehabilitation in recent days, but unless something goes sideways, it’s a done deal. It should tell you some- thing that Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence ( ISI) agency invented the Taliban in the early 1990s only because Hekmatyar, its primary U. S.- bankrolled proxy in the war for control of Afghanistan, had proved too bloodthirsty after the Soviets withdrew, even by the low standards of the ISI’s ghastly generals in Rawalpindi.

Hekmatyar comes from the same Pashtun tribe as the Taliban’s recently deceased godfather, Mullah Omar, militant leader Jalaluddin Haqqani and three of the ostensibly Marxist presidents of the Afghan nightmare state the Russians backed during the 1970s. Hekmatyar first came to public attention in the 1980s after murdering a fellow student at Kabul University. He went on to a lucrative career in drug trafficking and became prominent in Afghanistan’s underworld, which allowed him to position his Hezb-e-Islami outfit to leverage more money and guns from the Americans and the Saudis than any of the 15 jihadist groups fighting the Soviets.

During the post- Soviet anarchy and the rush for the spoils of war, Hekmatyar spent most of his time in 1992- 96 raining rockets and artillery shells on the people of Kabul, leaving the city a smoking tomb. He was not alone among the warlords of the time in cultivating habits of mass atrocity, and some of those warlords found comfortable sinecures for themselves in Karzai’s government following the atrocities of 9/ 11. But none were anywhere near as vicious as Hekmatyar.

After 9/ 11, Hekmatyar helped Osama bin Laden escape from the mountains of Tora Bora into Pakistan, and then decamped to Iran, until his presence there became a bit too inconvenient. After making and breaking several truces with the Taliban, and carrying out a handful of assaults on NATO troops and Afghan civilians, Hekmatyar gradually diminished in significance. He distinguished himself mainly by issuing fatwas and preparing video speeches from his sundry hiding places in Pakistan. It is now hoped that after coming in from the wilderness, he will behave himself.

During his massacres of the early 1990s, the old warlord Berhanuddin Rabanni, while he was president of Afghanistan’s UN-recognized government, went so far as to give Hekmatyar the prime minister’s post, in the hope that it would be enough to slake his thirst for Afghan blood. The arrangement lasted mere weeks.

Afghan President Ghani and his peace- talks backers at the UN had been hoping that the Hekmatyar deal would convince the Taliban to entertain some similar arrangement. That hope, to no one’s surprise, appears to have already been dashed. The only hope that remains now is that Hekmatyar will abide by the Afghan constitution and wage his insane battles with ballots, rather than bullets.

In this disgraceful age of impunity, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar Assad treated as statesmen and legitimate leaders of UN member states, that is as good as it gets. But as Rabanni reminded me, there is a limit to the patience of the people. And beyond that limit, “no one can be patient anymore."

DEALS WITH THE DEVIL ARE BETTER THAN CEASELESS BUTCHERY, BUT THERE IS A LIMIT TO HOW MUCH PEOPLE WILL ACCEPT.