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2 Intrigue takes Afghanistan to the
brink By M K Bhadrakumar
The people in the Amu Darya region in
northern Afghanistan would vouchsafe that General
Rashid Dostum's behavior can be depended on as an
unfailing barometer of their country's political
climate. The tough Uzbek leader from Shibirghan
keenly reacts when tensions begin to mount in his
country. The brief three-year spell between 1998
and 2001 was an exception when the Taliban regime
forced him into exile in Ankara, Turkey. But no
sooner had the September 11, 2001, attacks taken
place, Dostum found his way back to Afghanistan.
On Sunday night, Dostum appeared on the
roof of his villa in the upmarket Kabul district
of Wazir Akbar Khan and showered
invectives at a detachment of
100 Afghan police officers who surrounded his
compound with assault rifles and machine guns
mounted on pick-up trucks. (The police later
lifted the siege after receiving orders "to hand
the case over to the judiciary for
investigation".)
The "case" involved an
incident earlier in the evening when Dostum,
accompanied by 50 heavily armed men, entered the
house of his estranged former political aide Akbar
Bay and allegedly assaulted and kidnapped him. The
police later rescued Bay and had him hospitalized.
Two of Bay's bodyguards were shot. Dostum's
associates later alleged that the Afghan
government was plotting against their leader. They
warned, "If General Dostum is surrounded and
anyone touches even one hair on Dostum's head,
they must know that seven or eight northern
provinces will turn against the [Kabul]
government."
They feigned indignation,
"Certainly, we were not expecting that from the
security forces - particularly from the Interior
Ministry - to surround the house of General Dostum
in Kabul, [he] holds a higher position than the
Interior minister." Dostum, who leads the
political party Junbish-i-Milli and holds the
symbolic post of chief of staff to the commander
in chief, has an uncanny knack for appearing on
the center stage whenever Afghan politics is at a
crossroads. Of course, the most famous instance
was in 1990.
That was also in Kabul in
another extraordinary tension-filled time when the
blame game had already begun, the Soviet Union was
on the wane as a superpower, Mohammad Najibullah's
regime was on its last legs and the Afghan
mujahideen forces were stealthily advancing on
their capital city - like the Taliban today. In
the summer of that fateful year, Dostum, who was
the Praetorian Guard of Najibullah's regime, began
negotiating with Ahmad Shah Massoud, blurring
enemy lines, possibly with Soviet encouragement,
and paved the way for the mujahideen takeover in
Kabul. The rest, as they say, is history.
Vying to succeed Karzai
That is why
such incidents as Sunday night's can be pregnant
with possibilities. It happened in the prestigious
residential district of Kabul where the Afghan
elite and foreigners live, far away from the Uzbek
heartland on the Amy Darya, which is Dostum's
power base, and such incidents often tend to have
strong undercurrents that may simply refuse to go
away. At any rate, as Radio Liberty pointed out,
Dostum "consistently chafed at central authority
out of Kabul" and caused "embarrassment" to
President Hamid Karzai's government and
highlighted a "smoldering debate over the
influence of current and former warlords whose
actions undermine the rule of law and public
confidence in central authorities".
But
what remains unclear from the Radio Liberty report
is whether Dostum acted on his own, which is
improbable, or whether he felt encouraged to enact
a drama, which is not unlikely. Dostum can be
theatrical - in fact, he mostly is. No doubt, as
the Western media highlighted, Sunday's incident
underscored that even in the capital city of
Kabul, Karzai's authority has weakened.
The incident comes soon after another
Northern Alliance leader, Abdullah Abdullah (whom
Karzai unceremoniously removed from office as
foreign minister) , suddenly showed up in the US
out of nowhere after a gap of nearly three years,
meeting influential think-tankers and American
officials and leveling devastating criticism
against Karzai's leadership qualities as
president.
The protagonists of the
erstwhile Northern Alliance are coming out of the
woodwork. But are they being encouraged to do so?
Even though the presidential election is due only
in end-2009, an element of uncertainty has
gradually come to envelop the Afghan political
landscape - the sort of haze that one associates
with long sunsets. Former Afghan Interior minister
Ali Ahmad Jalali, who fell out with Karzai, is
also being lionized in Western capitals as a
potential candidate in the presidential race.
The friends of Zalmay Khalilzad, the US
ambassador to the United Nations and an ethnic
Pashtun, have launched an altogether independent
campaign sponsoring his candidacy to the post of
president. From all appearances, the search has
begun for a worthy successor to Karzai.
Britain's covert operations Therefore, the latest "leak" by the Karzai
government about Britain's controversial role in
the "war on terror" has hidden meanings. If the
calculation of Western intelligence is to threaten
Karzai by reviving the political profile of his
detractors, that doesn't seem to work. Karzai is
certainly not impressed. He is retaliating. Over
last weekend, the intelligence apparatus in Kabul
has almost dealt a fatal blow to Britain's
reputation in the "war on terror". Such a thing
couldn't have happened without political clearance
at the highest level in Kabul.
The
Independent newspaper of London reported on Monday
that according to Afghan intelligence sources,
Britain has been talking to the Taliban without
the knowledge of the Karzai government and working
on a top-secret plan to train renegade Taliban
fighters in a special camp and set them against
Mullah Omar's militia. The training camp is to be
set up outside Musa Qala in Helmand province. The
Independent claims unnamed British diplomats, the
UN and other Western officials have confirmed the
outline of Britain's clandestine project.
Apparently, British agents have been paying the
Taliban out of slush funds.
Indeed, we may
be seeing only the tip of the iceberg. But the
sensational leak leads us to reassess many recent
happenings - the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's much-touted operation to capture
Musa Qala on December 11; the Afghan government's
expulsion of the acting head of the European Union
mission in Kabul, Michael Semple, a Briton, and
the third-ranking United Nations diplomat in
Afghanistan, Mervyn Patterson, an Irishman, on
December 25; Mullah Omar's sacking of senior
Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah on December 29.
The big question is: was Britain acting
alone? Most certainly, not. US forces played a big
role in the Musa Qala operations in December. In
fact, B-52 bombers attacked Musa Qala before the
Americans and British entered what was left of the
town. After Musa Qala's "liberation", on January
13, American ambassador in Kabul William Wood
visited the town and met renegade Taliban
commander Mullah Abdul Salaam in charge of the
area.
Wood told the Taliban commander:
"You can count on the support of the United States
... The eyes of the world will be on Musa Qala ...
We want to see the voice of the people of Musa
Qala represented in the government of Lashkar Gah
and the government of Kabul through [Mullah
Salaam's] voice. And we want to see the government
of Kabul and the government of Lashkar Gah
represented in Musa Qala through [Mullah Salaam's]
voice."
Karzai strikes back
Exactly a week after Wood's meeting with
Mullah Salaam in Musa Qala, Karzai struck. While
on a visit to Davos, Switzerland, in a series of
high-profile press interviews with the Western
media, he displayed an uncharacteristic defiance.
He told the Times newspaper of London, "We
[Afghans] suffered after the arrival of the
British forces. Before that, we were fully in
charge in Helmand. When our governor was there, we
were fully in charge. They came and said, 'Your
governor is no good.' I said, 'All right, do we
have a replacement for this governor, do you have
enough forces?' Both the American and the British
forces guaranteed to me they knew what they were
doing and I made the mistake of listening to them.
And when they came in, the Taliban came."
He then told the BBC that Paddy Ashdown
couldn't become the UN's super envoy to
Afghanistan. Thereafter, Karzai went on to comment
in his interview with Die Welt, "I'm not sure
sending more [NATO] forces is the answer." In yet
another interview with CNN, Karzai pointed the
finger at the "misguided policy objectives" of
certain countries and organizations, which he
refused to name, as contributing to the violence
in Afghanistan. Talking to The Washington Post,
Karzai said, "It [war] will make a difference when
the Americans are clear and straightforward about
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