Abdul hadi arghandiwal biography of george

The year was 1985.

In the heat of the CIA-backed Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union, a delegation of Afghan resistance leaders met with US President Ronald Reagan in the White House, where they were declared the “moral equivalent” to the founding fathers of the United States.

But one prominent visiting commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, refused to see the US president, despite reportedly receiving a hefty share of the roughly $200m that the CIA funnelled annually to Afghan guerrillas for defeating the invading Red Army.

Hekmatyar’s war never ended, as today, more than three decades later, he fights the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, probably with some of the same weapons that US tax dollars paid for.

To many, he epitomises the short-sighted alliances of the US, siding with unreliable figures who, even during their cooperation, openly expresse