Juan Cole: Old US Islamist ally against USSR allied now with bin Laden

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the radical Islamist guerrilla fighter, has pledged his allegiance to Usamah Bin Laden.

Back in the 1980s, Hekmatyar was a "freedom fighter" supported strongly by the Reagan administration. His radical Islamists received on the order of a billion dollars from the CIA to fight the Soviets, via Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. In his youth, Hekmatyar is said to have thrown acid in the faces of unveiled girls.

In the 1990s, he became "prime minister" but fell out with "President" Burhan al-Din Rabbani, and the two of them fought a war over Kabul that killed thousands and destroyed much of the city! When warlords rule . . .

When the Taliban took over, Hekmatyar went underground to fight them, and could easily have been part of the "Northern Alliance" of warlords. But he went his own way, and opposed the US invasion of 2001-2002. He's been an underground guerrilla fighter, leading his Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party) ever since. He pledged to kill US troops, just as Reagan once helped him kill Soviet troops.

But now, he's joined forces with al-Qaeda, as it and the Taliban are regrouping in southern Afghanistan.