Afghanistan's new militant alliances

Afghan warlords have often formed unusual alliances in times of conflict, but even by their standards holding a war council in the presence of a clearly giddy beauty queen dressed in a pink jump suit and answering to the name of Snowflake was hardly standard fare.

Sitting with her was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who is now formally designated by Executive Order 13224 of the United States Government as a Global Terrorist.

But in January 1984 in the Pakistan frontier town of Peshawar Mr Hekmatyar, who became perhaps the only serving prime minister in history to have bombed his own capital, was busy charming Snowflake's boyfriend.

US Congressman Charlie Wilson was, according to his excellent and apparently authorised biography, a notorious drunken philanderer.

He was a man who represented everything that the hard-line Islamist Mr Hekmatyar despised.

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