KABUL, Afghanistan -- The removal of a longtime Afghan insurgent leader from the United Nations' sanctions list is designed to allow a peace deal with the beleaguered Afghan government to go forward.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami is the only insurgent group to have reached a deal with the government of Afghanistan. However, Hekmatyar himself must sign the deal to formalize it, and he has been a fugitive for years; the U.N. sanctions had frozen his assets and banned him from travel.
President Ashraf Ghani's government had requested the dropping of Hekmatyar's name from the sanctions list last year after signing the deal, regarded by some as historic because it was the first of its kind without foreign mediation. The deal required Afghan authorities to grant full political rights to Hezb-i-Islami, which is now considered a political party.
Hekmatyar is expected to return to Kabul within weeks, putting an end to his nearly four decades of military campaigning, which involved fighting the Soviets, Afghan opponents in the civil war and the current U.S.-led occupation.
The Afghan government is pushing to fulfill its two other main commitments with Hekmatyar: the release of nearly 500 fighters and commanders of his Hezb-i-Islami party, and the return of hundreds of families of the party's members who live as refugees in Pakistan.
Mohammad Akram Khpalwak, a senior adviser to Ghani, said a joint commission was assessing the number of Hekmatyar's fighters and the amount of weapons they own across the country, before reintegrating them. He said Hezb fighters had been "observing a truce" since the peace deal was signed in late September.
"We have seen a total drop in areas under their control," Khpalwak said in a brief interview.
These areas included Maidan-Wardak in the western outskirts of Kabul and Bagram to its north, close to where the U.S. military base is located, he said.
Khpalwak said routine and indirect contacts with the Taliban have been underway for some time, in an effort to bring them into a peace deal, too, but with no tangible result so far.
The Taliban militants who have gained some ground on the battlefield are pushing for total withdrawal of all foreign troops led by the U.S. military. The Taliban has termed Hekmatyar's peace deal with Ghani an act of treason.
The United States, Britain and some other Western nations hailed the signing of the deal with Hekmatyar, who is in his late 60s and was once the main recipient of U.S. aid during the war against the Soviets. But in 2003, the U.S. designated Hekmatyar as a "global terrorist."
Patricia Gossman, a senior researcher of Human Rights Watch in Afghanistan, termed the removal of Hekmatyar's name from the sanctions list as a failure by the government to insist on accountability rather than accommodating powerful factional leaders.
"His return will compound the culture of impunity that the Afghan government and its foreign donors have fostered by not pursuing accountability for the many war crimes committed by forces commanded by Hekmatyar and other warlords," she said in a message. "Afghans have paid a high price for appeasing the warlords."
In the past 15 years, most of Hekmatyar's key aides have parted ways with the once-reclusive man. They serve as senior government officials while hundreds of his former foot soldiers bolstered the Taliban ranks.
With affiliates of the Islamic State gaining ground in some areas of Afghanistan and the Taliban becoming stronger, Hekmatyar largely felt isolated and irrelevant, said Najib Mahmoud, a professor of political science at Kabul University.
"He is not an effective political and military force, and the expiry date has elapsed because his military might has been dissolved or melted away during the protracted war," Mahmoud said.
"By bringing him over, the government wants to show that it has an achievement of some sort to say it has brought peace in one part of the country and use this as media propaganda for some days."
A Section on 02/06/2017