Name: Commander Abdul Haq
Age: The count is off
Nationality: Afghan
Claim to fame: Played right into a deadly Taliban trap

COMMANDER Haq was one of the most prominent of the dozens of exiled Afghan tribal leaders and former military commanders who have returned to Pakistan in recent weeks in an effort to organize a new government inside Afghanistan in a broader effort to work out a post-Taliban scenario. Whether there will be a post-Taliban scenario at all, is beside the point, however.

Abdul Haq was captured inside Afghanistan and executed by Taliban authorities recently. In his mid-40s, Abdul Haq had been involved in such efforts for several years under the auspices of Afghanistan’s former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who lives in exile in Rome. But he himself became a victim of the violence that has become a deep-rooted reality in Afghanistan. For his homeland to turn to democracy or even return to a relatively benign monarchy may well take a long time. Abdul Haq had hoped he would be around to see it, but that was not to be.

Win or lose, he knew war ethics well. BBC’s Matthew Grant had met Abdul Haq in Peshawar just a few days before his death. Talking to him, the commander had remarked: “War is easy ... If you don’t like someone, you kill them.” And his words turned into reality, when Taliban proved beyond argument that they didn’t like him.

Abdul Haq was a true war veteran, having sustained more than a dozen wounds while leading the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. His war wounds were hidden. Only if one looked closely did one notice the evidence of his right foot blown off by a landmine. His greatest loss came two years ago, after he joined the campaign to rid his homeland of the Taliban, when gunmen shot dead his wife, their 11-year-old son and a bodyguard outside his home in northern Pakistan.

In person, Abdul Haq was a large, friendly man. At 43, he was going bald and grey. His remaining hair was cut into a short back and sides, leading into a neat beard. He spoke fluent English slowly. In his BBC interview, he made a very pertinent point when he said he was against the US campaign in Afghanistan. “I told the Americans the thing to do is to keep the pressure, but not to use it.” Before the bombing, he said, the Taliban had “exhausted almost all sympathy” they had in Afghanistan. The locals were hungry, angry and fed up. But the US onslaught had revived the stubborn streak in Afghans who have rallied around “their despotic rulers”. While Abdul Haq knew the Afghan history well, it appears he was not very aware of the US history, which bears ample testimony to the fact that the US pays little heed to sane advice.