Taliban’s Grim Legacy: More Strife

Before Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar fled Kandahar on Dec. 7, he inserted a codicil into the last will and testament of the religious movement he led for seven years. It was, in effect, a guarantee that the city--and the country--he left behind would revert to the same strife and murder that plagued Afghanistan when the followers of the mullah emerged in 1994 to restore the law and impose peace.

On Dec. 6, Prime Minister-designate Hamid Karzai, the sophisticated, Pushtun aristocrat appointed at the Bonn talks on Afghanistan to head the U.N.-backed transitional government, offered Omar a personal guarantee of amnesty in exchange for the keys to Kandahar, the last Taliban stronghold to withstand the two-month U.S. bombing campaign.

Mullah Omar elected instead to surrender Kandahar to Mullah Naquibullah, one of three Pushtun warlords who had fought over the city until 1994, when, to popular acclaim, the first Taliban recruits arrived to deliver the population from moujahedeen violence. The choice was considered a parting shot at Karzai, whose pedigree, education and appreciation of America represented everything the mullah despised. It also highlighted just how difficult it may be to unite Afghanistan under a single, centralized authority.

Portrayed in the West as a disinterested moderate, Naquibullah is, in fact, an inveterate opportunist. In pre-Taliban days, he built a profitable livelihood smuggling electronics to Pakistan and cashing in on the opium trade in the U.S.-funded Helmand Valley agricultural project. In October 1994, when it had become apparent that the Taliban would be a major force in Afghanistan, Naquibullah responded to a typical Afghan ultimatum that combined threats of murder and offers of money by promoting himself to mullah, which put him in line for his next job, minister for martyrs and refugees for the Taliban. He seemed to have a natural calling for the job, having created plenty of both in his earlier work.

It has been a fundamental principle of Afghan governance in recent years that the preceding regime is always preferable to the one that comes after it. This yearning for times past has, by turns, caused the population to fondly recall ex-king Mohammad Zaher Shah, Communist President Najibullah and even the coalition of moderate Islamists led by President Burhanuddin Rabbani, which was swept from power when the Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, in 1996. Given the motley crew that has stepped forward to fill the void left by the Taliban, it seems not unlikely that the same wistful yearning may yet come to claim Mullah Omar.

Naquibullah is not the only questionable figure to grab for power in the Taliban’s wake. Pushtun warlord Gul Agha Shirzai, a ruthless former governor of the Kandahar province, spent the years following the Taliban’s 1997 victory in the Pakistani city of Quetta, where he cultivated friendships with Karzai, Zaher Shah and, later, with the U.S.

Shirzai was at the forefront of U.S. attempts in November to rally Pushtun resistance to the Taliban in Kandahar, where the main opposition group, the Northern Alliance, has more enemies than friends. After hard fighting, his forces seized control of the airport and, when the Taliban surrendered the city, they moved in to occupy the governor’s mansion.

Meanwhile, Naquibullah’s fighters occupied Kandahar’s military headquarters. The two rivals for power in Kandahar glared balefully at one another across the rubble, while the city was briefly engulfed by a frenzy of looting and skirmish.

The same cut and thrust for local ascendancy has played out across Afghanistan since Mazar-i-Sharif fell to alliance forces on Nov. 5, as former warlords, Taliban turncoats and a new generation of power-wielders slide onto sofas of power still warm from their predecessors.

Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord whose record of serial treachery is also a history of Afghanistan since the Red Army retreat in 1989, has resumed control in the northern capital, Mazar-i-Sharif. As in 1996, he is flanked to the west by Ismail Khan, the self-styled emir of Herat, who led the army mutiny that triggered the Soviet invasion 22 years ago this Christmas.

Haji Abdul Qadir once again commands the Eastern Council, an alliance of three local military commanders who grew fat in the mid-1990s on the heroin trade from Nangarhar, the largest producer after Helmand province, and the flow of humanitarian aid through the Khyber Pass.

In pre-Taliban days, Qadir’s aging fleet of Antonov aircraft, bearing the romantic name Khyber Airlines, flew in regularly from Dubai loaded with four-wheel vehicles, TVs, air conditioners and generators, mostly destined for sale in the bazaars of the Pakistani city of Peshawar. His adobe citadel at the head of the poppy-growing Surkhrud valley boasted a 10-mile tarmac driveway, the only newly paved road in Afghanistan.

Qadir, who made a triumphant reentry to Jalalabad on Nov. 14, is now allied with Hazrat Ali, the Nangarhar police chief and a former Taliban stalwart who led the recent Northern Alliance offensive against the Al Qaeda base in the Tora Bora mountains, south of Jalalabad. Before joining the Taliban in 1996, Hazrat Ali was in charge of security at the Jalalabad airport when it was openly used for the export of opium paste to Dubai, the shopping mall of choice for wealthy Afghans.

Newer faces, elevated by U.S. assistance or honors won on the battlefield since the war started on Oct. 7, have come to join them: Mohammed Daoud Khan in Taloqan and Kunduz; Mustafah in Baghlan; Ibrahim in Ghor; Ahmad Salangi in Parwan; and Fazel Ahmad Azimi in Kapisa.

Some are not even identifiable. The killing of four Western journalists on Nov. 19 near Sorobi, 35 miles from Kabul, was at first attributed to Taliban stragglers cut off after the fall of Kabul. But later evidence suggests that it may have been the work of former associates of Zardad Khan, a prominent commander loyal to the despised warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who, with Pakistani backing, shelled the capital relentlessly during a four-year siege from 1992 to 1996 that claimed more than 40,000 lives.

It is said that Zardad Khan, who won political asylum and now lives in England, once kept a “human dog,” a half-savage man who was kept chained and fed with uncooked beef and animal fats. If a traveler refused to give him money--or his sons or daughters--Zardad would unleash the man, who attacked like a dog, biting and pulling out lumps of flesh.

The U.N., which sponsored the Bonn peace talks, tried to weed some of Afghanistan’s worst human rights offenders out of the post-Taliban political dispensation by calling for a war-crimes tribunal to determine the worthiness of many of the military and political commanders now vying for power and office. It met strong resistance from Rabbani, who is averse to any retrospective reckoning, as is Dostum, America’s new friend in Mazar-i-Sharif. The whole issue of human rights accountability was shelved in a bid to rescue the U.N.’s other paramount interest--the dispatch of an international peacekeeping force to maintain security in Kabul.

Twenty or more separate jurisdictions form a defensive front line of vested local interests against the ambitions of Kabul, now represented by a 30-member coalition government that inherited the rags of central authority on Saturday.

The strongest members of Hamid Karzai’s jerry-built cabinet of reconciliation are Yunus Qanuni, the interior minister of the anti-Taliban United Front, as the Northern Alliance now prefers to be called, Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and Defense Minister Gen. Mohammed Fahim.

All belong to the minority Tajik tribe and all enjoy some of the legitimacy bequeathed by Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance founder assassinated on Sept. 9, allegedly by Al Qaeda agents posing as journalists. Unfortunately, none of them possesses his former master’s skill, either as a military strategist or as a maker of political deals across ethnic divides.

Mullah Omar’s greatest achievement, in retrospect, was to suppress the historic divisions that exist between rival centers of Afghan power by appealing to what he conceived of as a shared religious bond, shored up by terror and bribes to men of influence, like Naqubullah.

Now we have had yet another revolution, powered by the United States, in one of the world’s most turbulent societies. For the few Taliban converted to Omar’s cause by ideology rather than opportunity, the sight of an old guard, steeped in guns, drugs and blasphemy, returning to power with impunity amounts to a U.S.-backed counter-revolution.

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Michael Griffin is author of “Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban in Afghanistan.”