WASHINGTON — In the U.S. view, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is a villain who deserves a violent death, although he is different from the al-Qaida and Taliban leaders previously targeted by the military and CIA in Afghanistan.
The CIA took a shot at Hekmatyar with a missile from one of its unmanned Predator drones on Monday near Kabul but missed, defense officials said. The missile killed some of his followers.
U.S. officials accuse Hekmatyar of plotting attacks on American troops, offering rewards for their deaths and trying to destabilize the U.S.-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai.
At the same time, officials acknowledge that Hekmatyar, who once served as Afghanistan's prime minister, has limited ties to the Taliban and is only suspected of working with al-Qaida. But they say his anti-U.S. activities make him a more immediate threat than the other feuding warlords.
"I can assure you when we go after individuals in the theater of war, it is because they intend to do some harm to America," President Bush said Thursday when asked about the strike.
CIA officials declined comment.
U.S. special forces are stationed in Khost and Gardez in eastern Afghanistan, where warlords such as Bacha Khan Zardran and Zakim Khan wage artillery duels, park their tanks on street corners and hide their men behind bunkers.
Some of these same warlords are the anti-Taliban soldiers on whom the U.S.-led coalition is relying to help it find Taliban and al-Qaida members.
Hekmatyar presents a special case, U.S. officials say. Not only is he targeting Americans, he is thought to maintain close ties with fellow ethnic Pashtuns in the Pakistani intelligence service, some of whom are operating without the consent of President Pervez Musharraf to oppose U.S. interests.
The strike against Hekmatyar was one of the U.S. government's first overt actions against a non-al-Qaida or Taliban group in Afghanistan.
Officials provided few specifics on what they had learned of Hekmatyar's intentions. He has been marked for months as a potential destabilizing force opposing the shaky new Afghan regime.
In April, hundreds of people linked to his Hezb-e-Islami group were arrested in Kabul for an alleged plot to set off bombs throughout the capital, officials said at the time. Pentagon officials said there was intelligence that Hekmatyar had been making plans to strike the Afghan government, perhaps Karzai himself, and American troops in Afghanistan.
Public statements from Hekmatyar and his followers have been somewhat contradictory.
From exile in Iran, Hekmatyar called for jihad against the United States in November. Iranian authorities closed his offices there in February and ordered him out in a move that appeared a gesture toward the United States and Karzai. Hekmatyar went to Afghanistan to rally his supporters, and the United States lost track of him.
Hekmatyar has claimed he still has U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and controls a loyal militia in his homeland that would be ready to follow him.
But several weeks ago, Hekmatyar's son told a news conference in Peshawar that Hekmatyar wants elections. The party announced in early March that it had sent a delegation to meet with Karzai in Kabul to work out disputes.
Hekmatyar's whereabouts were unclear Thursday.
"Hekmatyar is somewhere in Afghanistan but we don't know in which area he is living," said Qutbuddin Hilal, a senior member of his hardline party living in Peshawar, Pakistan. "Hekmatyar is a supporter of peace in Afghanistan."
Hilal denied that the group was plotting an attack on Afghanistan's government, saying Hekmatyar supports Karzai.
Also in April, Pashtun figures said they suspected Hekmatyar's group might be responsible for threatening leaflets found in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the traditional stronghold of former Taliban rulers. The leaflets said parents who send their children to school will be killed and their homes burned down.
Hekmatyar is a longtime player in the violence that passes for Afghan politics. U.S. officials describe him as an Islamic fundamentalist who desires secular power.
"What we're talking about here is someone at the absolute margin of violence in Afghan society — in his own way someone as extreme as Osama bin Laden," said Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"I think we have to distinguish between warlords just as we have to distinguish between all other potential targets. ... This is a violent, vicious man who deserves to be a target."
In the 1980s, Hekmatyar was an able rebel commander during the war against Soviet occupation, becoming a benefactor of CIA weapons and support funneled through Pakistan, according to former U.S. intelligence officials who served in the region.
After the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan, he served as a prime minister in the fractious government that took power in 1992.
But civil war continued, and ruthless power struggles between his forces and those of rival Ahmed Shah Massood — the late commander of the anti-Taliban northern alliance — led to fighting that left whole Kabul neighborhoods destroyed and tens of thousands of civilian noncombatants dead. Hekmatyar fled to Iran after the nascent Taliban took Kabul in 1996.
Hekmatyar, 52, is a Ghilzai Pashtun from Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. He speaks several languages, including English, and has two wives and several children.