, founded Hizb el Islami, or the Islamic Party, in 1975.
A Pashtun mostly reviled by Pashtuns for his violence and unpredictability, he made his name as a Pakistan- and CIA-funded mujahid in the battle against Soviet occupation during the 1980s. He was an enemy of the Taliban during the early 1990s, then a purported ally of the Taliban after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In March 2010, he presented a 15-point peace plan to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The plan calls for all foreign troops to start leaving Afghanistan by July 2010, and to be entirely withdrawn by January 2011.
It wasn't the first time Hekmatyar's Hizb el Islami reached out to Karzai's government. A 10-member delegation from the Islamic Party did just that on May 2, 2004, denouncing violence at a news conference after months of negotiations with Karzai and portraying itself as representing a moderate wing of the insurgency willing to sue for peace. "Hezb-i-Islami wants to play an effective role in bringing about peace," Khaled Farooqi, the leader of the delegation, said at the time. The offer was more publicity ploy than substance.
Hekmatyar's ties to the American and Pakistani intelligence services (the CIA and the ISI) have a long history. In the 1980s, the CIA considered Hikmetyar, who speaks fluent English, one of the ablest mujahideen in the field against Soviet forces. CIA analysts believed this, writes Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, a history of Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion to the 9/11 attacks, "because as they reviewed battlefield damage reports, tracked the movement of weapons shipments, and toured the refugee camps to check on organizational strength among mujahedin parties, 'analytically, the best fighters--the best organized fighters--were the fundamentalists,' led by Hekmatyar, as one officer then at headquarters put it." Coll went on:
William Pinkney, the CIA station chief, would drive down from Islamabad with ISI officers or visiting congressmen to meet with Hekmatyar in the rock-strewn border training camps. He admired Hekmatyar’s fighting ability, but among the mujahedin leaders it was also Hekmatyar who gave him the deepest chills. “I would put my arms around Gulbuddin and we’d hug, you know, like brothers in combat and stuff and his coal black eyes would look back at you, and you just knew that there was only one thing holding this team together and that was the Soviet Union.”Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, Hekmatyar alternately fought and served in (as prime minister), successive governments in Kabul, frequently shifting alliances and aims. His reputation for brutality and disloyalty alienated him from most Afghans and, eventually, from Pakistanm's ISI, which shifted its principal support in Afghanistan to the Taliban in the mid-1990s. The Taliban took control of most of Afghanistan, including Kabul, in 1996. Hekmatyar went into exile in Iran--until 2002, when Iran expelled him for criticizing the interim government the United States had installed in Afghanistan. At the time, Iran, whose theocracy was ideologically opposed to the Taliban's and to al-Qaeda's, was covertly aiding the United States in Afghanistan.
The United States designated Hekmatyar a global terrorist in February 2003.