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2 Bad blood spreads to Afghanistan's
north By M K Bhadrakumar
The warriors of northern Afghanistan, whom
former US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad thought he
had astutely mothballed and consigned to the
dustbin of history, are reappearing in the Amu
Darya region that borders Uzbekistan.
Of
course, it was naive to have fancied that fighters
like Rashid Dostum would simply walk into the
sunset. Afghans are notorious for hunkering down.
They may have begun to sense that they can
soon
hope to reclaim their native dwellings.
Their unfailing instincts honed through
hardy life must have told them it would only be a
matter of time before the edifice that the US
created in post-Taliban Afghanistan would begin to
crack. They knew it was an edifice built on
quicksand, and that its facade apart, it was
inherently fragile. They cannot be missing the
point that in the meantime, competitive
great-power politics has reappeared in the Hindu
Kush.
Dostum was one of the founding
members of the United Front set up in February in
opposition to President Hamid Karzai's US-backed
government. Last month, he volunteered to go and
fight the Taliban, openly mocking the ineptitude
of the Kabul setup and its foreign backers.
On Monday, 13 followers of Dostum were
killed, with more than 30 reportedly injured, in
the northern ethnically Uzbek town of Shibirghan
at the hands of forces under the command of Juma
Khan Hamdard, the governor of Jowzjan province on
the Amu Darya River bordering Uzbekistan.
A Pandora's box of northern Afghanistan's
ancient ethnic and tribal rivalries may have
opened. Dostum is an ethnic Uzbek, while Hamdard
is a Pashtun, and Jowzjan is in the ethnic-Uzbek
heartland. Dostum's followers, numbering 1,000,
were protesting against Hamdard, seeking his
dismissal. They accused him of involvement in drug
trafficking and of his clandestine links with
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami (HIA) and the
Taliban. Hamdard says it is all a plot by Dostum.
Dostum versus Hamdard Not too
long ago Hamdard was a rising star in the HIA
under Hekmatyar's leadership - and a field
commander obeying instructions from Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence. But Hamdard says that
was a time when all patriotic Afghans joined up
with one mujahideen group or the other. The
parting of ways, if ever there indeed was one, is
shrouded in mystery.
Hamdard is immensely
popular among the Pashtuns of Balkh province in
northern Afghanistan, where he originally
belonged. In the late 1990s, most certainly,
Hamdard traded with the Taliban, who had taken
power in 1996. His betrayal, while notionally an
ally of Dostum, significantly helped the capture
of the Amu Darya region by the Taliban after a
chaotic, treacherous, extremely bloody campaign in
1997-98. It forced Dostum into a three-year exile
in Ankara, Turkey.
Then, with the US
intervention in 2001 leading to the ouster of the
Taliban regime, Hamdard resumed links with Dostum,
but only to desert him once again and pledge
support to Karzai in late 2004. That was part of
the celebrated deal worked out by Khalilzad
involving the defection of 150 mujahideen
commanders, mostly Pashtun, to Karzai's side on
the eve of the presidential election in October
2004.
Hamdard was handsomely rewarded. He
was made governor of the northern province of
Baghlan. From there he moved on as governor to
Jowzjan, Dostum's power base. Karzai was riding
high at that time, and Khalilzad, a Pashtun
himself, was determined to "pacify" the
Mazar-i-Sharif region (where he originally
belonged). Hamdard's induction into Jowzjan was
the ultimate insult to Dostum - an ethnic Pashtun
reigning as the provincial governor in Shibirghan,
where Dostum used to receive foreign dignitaries
posing as the emir of northern Afghanistan.
Branded as a warlord, ridiculed in the
Western media as a political dinosaur, and
constantly under the US threat of a war-crimes
tribunal, Dostum hunkered down. Given Karzai's US
support, he couldn't do much about his
humiliation.
Meanwhile, Hamdard seized the
opportunity and rubbed Dostum's nose in the dust.
In March last year, he "recovered" in Shibirghan
the largest cache of arms ever found in
Afghanistan. The cache belonging to Dostum's
forces included one bunker of detonators, two
bunkers containing a total of 80 tonnes of Russian
TNT, and one bunker with 15,000 anti-personnel and
10,000 anti-tank mines. Hamdard promptly claimed
credit for the seizure as the validation of his
commitment to bringing sustainable security to
northern Afghanistan and to creating the
conditions for good governance and the rule of
law.
Uzbek fear of Taliban resurgence
Uzbek-Pashtun tensions in the Amu Darya
region go back a century when King Amanullah Khan
created pockets of Pashtun settlements in the
northern region as a way of keeping a check on the
notoriously fierce fighters of the Uzbek-Turkmen
nationalities inhabiting the region and contiguous
Central Asian regions.
The Taliban
resurgence in the south and eastern provinces in
recent months has sent alarming signals to the
Uzbek tribes in the north. They see the Pashtun
communities in the northern region as once again
becoming a potential "fifth column" for the
Taliban in the Amu Darya region. The fear is
legitimate, as that was what happened in the
1996-98 period. The blood feud remains
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