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Afghanistan fighting
the past
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - As an unexpected resurgence
of fighting by Taliban and allied forces against
the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai
raises new concerns over Afghanistan's stability,
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has repeated its call for
the prosecution of past atrocities by key
warlords, a number of whom continue to hold senior
posts under Karzai.
In a 133-page report
released in Kabul, HRW charged that many of those
implicated in serious abuses that occurred in one
of the worst phases of what has become a nearly
30-year-old civil war - the year after the defeat
of the communist-led regime in April 1992 - are
now well ensconced in the country's Defense and
Interior ministries, while others are running for
office in parliamentary and local elections set
for September.
Still others continue to
hold power as regional warlords whose authority
remains, for the most part, unchallenged by either
the central government or the some 30,000 US and
North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led soldiers
who have been operating in Afghanistan since the
ouster of the Taliban government in late 2001.
"This report isn't just a history lesson,"
said Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director, of the
intra-mujahideen fighting that virtually destroyed
Kabul from April 1992 to March 1993 and that is
the main focus of the new report. "These
atrocities were among some of the gravest in
Afghanistan's history, yet today many of the
perpetrators still wield power."
This
period, when various mujahideen factions began
fighting among themselves, set the stage for the
rise and eventual victory of the Taliban in 1996.
The report comes amid growing concern both
in the US and in the Afghan capital over the
resurgence of Taliban forces, particularly in the
predominantly Pashtun southern and eastern parts
of the country.
In the highest US toll of
the Afghan campaign, insurgents shot down a US
Chinook helicopter near the Pakistani border,
killing 16 US Special Operations Forces (SOF)
troops. The helicopter was on a mission to
reinforce a detachment of four other SOF troops.
Several days later, as many as 17
civilians in the same area were killed as a result
of a US airstrike on a suspected terrorist
compound, prompting a rare public criticism by the
Karzai government, which is increasingly on the
defensive from its political foes over many of the
tactics used by US forces, just three months
before scheduled parliamentary elections.
At the same time, more than 450 Afghan
government troops have reportedly been killed in
clashes with Taliban and allied forces since
March, amid indications that the insurgents are
adopting tactics, such as the use of improvised
explosive devices and even suicide bombings, which
have proven effective in Iraq.
Analysts
warn that Afghanistan could begin to look more
like Iraq, with an entrenched insurgency that
seriously disrupts reconstruction and becomes a
magnet for Islamic extremists.
The
Taliban's resurgence coincided with a sharp rise
in anti-American sentiment exacerbated by Karzai's
failure to persuade President George W Bush during
a visit to Washington in May to give his
government more control over US military
operations and detention practices, as well as
reports of US abuses against Muslim detainees and
the Koran itself.
The HRW report does not
suggest that the situation today compares to that
of the 1992-93 period, but does hint that the
continued impunity enjoyed by mujahideen
commanders and warlords of that time may be
working against US and Karzai's hopes of
stabilizing the country.
The abuses
committed during the year in question,
Afghanistan's calendar year of 1371, were among
the worst of the entire civil war. Among them were
indiscriminate shelling and rocketing of civilian
areas that reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble,
and the robbery, abduction, murder and rape of
civilians, including women and children.
Amid the most-responsible commanders and
leaders were Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, a radical
Islamist commander who currently acts as an
adviser to Karzai and who has placed a number of
key followers in the Afghan judiciary and
elsewhere in the government. He was and remains
the leader of the Ittihad-e Islami faction.
Abdul Rashid Dostum, the warlord and
ethnic Uzbek who continues to rule over several
northern areas around Mazar-i-Sharif, also holds a
senior post in the Defense ministry and has also
been implicated in atrocities committed against
suspected prisoners during the US-backed campaign
against the Taliban in 2001.
Mohammad
Qasim Fahim, a Tajik who served as defense
minister from 2001 to 2004, also continues to play
a leading role in the Jamiat-e Islami/Shura-e
Nazar faction of former president Burhanuddin
Rabbani and the late Ahmed Shah Masoud.
Karim Khalili, a commander of the Hezb-e
Wahdat faction, is now one of Karzai's two vice
presidents.
All of these men played major
roles in the 1992-93 violence, according to the
report, which details specific incidents. Former
commanders of Sayyaf's Ittihad-e Islami and
Fahim's Shura-e Nazar factions are running as
candidates in the upcoming elections.
Nor
are individuals in the Karzai government the only
ones who contributed to the mayhem. Another key
commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose
Hezb-e-Islami faction received the greatest covert
support provided by the US and Pakistan, committed
some of the worst crimes of the period, according
to the report. Self-exiled to Iran after the
Taliban victory, he has now joined its insurgency.
(Inter Press Service) |
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