ISLAMABAD, Nov 18: Notorious Afghan warlords are carving out territory for themselves following the collapse of the Taliban, raising the spectre of more internal chaos and civil war.
Far from paving the way for peace after more than 20 years of conflict, the US-led ouster of the Taliban militia has created a vacuum which is rapidly being filled by armed factions and ethnic rivals whose commitment to national reconciliation is ambiguous at best.
Provinces all over the country have been taken over by men with scores to settle and axes to grind. Their names are scattered through the pages of Afghanistan’s bloody modern history.
In the north there’s Abdul Rashid Dostam, an ethnic Uzbek commander known for strapping criminals to the tracks of his tanks.
In the east there are troops loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a hardline Pakhtoon like the Taliban, who helped reduce a third of Kabul to smoking ruins during the 1992-96 civil war.
And in Kabul itself there’s the Northern Alliance, a loose grouping of former enemies and turncoats who share nothing in common but a hatred for the Taliban regime and a hunger for power.
Elsewhere in the war-ravaged country, little-known tribal chiefs are filling the void left by retreating Taliban forces, carving out territory and influence which will be difficult to ignore once the complicated process of national reconstruction begins.
Hameed Gul, a former chief of the ISI, said most of the maverick warlords who have emerged out of the dust of the US bombing campaign are vehemently independent.
“The Northern Alliance cannot enter their areas and if they do it will lead to bloodshed,” he said.
“There is a permanent hostility between them and the Northern Alliance. Afghanistan has returned to the days of fiefdom. It has been thrown back to the 1992 position and even worse.”
The war which began with the collapse of the Moscow-backed regime in 1992 saw former Mujahideen allies in the war against the Soviets pitted against each other in a brutal scramble for power.
Analysts now fear that the same Mujahideen groups, lacking the common enemy of the Taliban or sensing new opportunities, will revive old hostilities.
“In Afghanistan there has always been war. Since its inception there has always been war and you just have to get used to it,” said Mohammad Ashraf Nadeem, an aide to Tajik ethnic commander Atta Mohammad.
A spokesman for Hekmatyar said his troops would resist the Northern Alliance and any Afghan government which emerged with the backing of the United States.
“We have commanders all over the country,” he warned ominously, while claiming that Hekmatyar’s men had already taken over eastern Kunar and Logar provinces following the Taliban withdrawal last week.
In neighbouring Nangarhar province, Haji Abdul Qadir, one of the few Pakhtoon members of the Northern Alliance, has been reinstalled as governor despite strong competition from fellow Pakhtoon commander Younis Khalis, the so-called “Fighting Mullah”.
Khalis, a Sunni fundamentalist and veteran anti-Soviet guerrilla campaigner, is affiliated with Hekmatyar and shares his distaste for “foreign” interference in Pakhtoon tribal culture.
“Neither the Northern Alliance nor anybody else should try to enter into Nangarhar,” a spokesman for Khalis said last week.
Less than a week after its triumphant march into Kabul, the Northern Alliance is also showing signs of internal friction.
Several hundred Hazara militia from Afghanistan’s central highlands, representing the only Shiite Muslim group in the alliance, marched to the outskirts of Kabul on Friday to ensure “security”.
They are demanding equal rights with the majority Sunni Muslims under Afghanistan’s post-Taliban regime, as well as UN peacekeepers to take over security from the alliance in Kabul.
“We want to see UN troops in Afghanistan as the United Front (Northern Alliance) agreed. There should be no armed factions inside Kabul apart from the blue helmets,” Hazara commander Abdul Karim Khalili told AFP.
Senior spokesmen for the dominant Tajik ethnic faction of the alliance have said there was no need for foreign peacekeepers in the capital.—AFP
