July 25, 2002	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 14,1423

KABUL: It was the mid-1990s, and Kabul was a battleground for warring Islamic factions. Rocket fire blasted the city. The government was disintegrating. In the chaos, Hamid Karzai, a deputy foreign minister, was seized for interrogation by the country’s feared secret service. The agents who held him worked for Mohammed Fahim.

Karzai escaped when a rocket slammed into the building where he was being questioned, according to several sources familiar with the episode, which hasn’t before been made public. Bleeding from a head wound, he bolted in the ensuing bedlam for Pakistan.

Nearly a decade later, Karzai, now Afghanistan’s president, and Fahim, his defence minister, are locked in an escalating rivalry that threatens to further destabilize Afghanistan’s shaky government.

Karzai and his allies describe the secret service — once again controlled by Fahim — as a vast, corrupt and highly politicized apparatus that operates outside the president’s authority.

According to a source close to Karzai, the agency has 30,000 employees and its departments are run by ethnic Tajiks from the Northern Alliance who answer only to Fahim.

Now, Karzai has pledged to take on the agency. He named a high-level commission this month to recommend broad reforms and investigate allegations that the secret service tortured and killed Abdul Mutaleb, 22, a construction worker who had just returned to Afghanistan after living for years as a refugee in Pakistan.

Karzai’s challenge to the intelligence service is seen here as a contest over who will rule post-Taliban Afghanistan. To the ethnic Pakhtoon president and his supporters, the unchecked power of the Tajik-run secret service is a key obstacle to Afghan democracy that lies closer to home than regional warlords who refuse to disarm their men or lurking remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

“For a democratic country, a country that wants to move toward democracy, an institution like this is obviously in contradiction,” said Vice President Hedayat Amin Arsala, who’s leading the commission.

The secret service is a relic from Afghanistan’s past as a Soviet client state that managed to survive the country’s various political transformations in recent decades. After the Soviet invasion in 1979, the KGB created the Afghan intelligence agency in its own image. The agency, known by the acronym KHAD, had a network of neighbourhood informers and a reputation for torture and killing that made it as notorious as any of the spy agencies in the Eastern Bloc.

As control of Afghanistan passed from Soviet puppets to fractious Islamic guerrillas and then to the Taliban movement, the security service’s name changed — it’s now known officially as the National Security Directorate and referred to locally as the Amaniyat.

But many of its methods are the same, as are many of the operatives who carry them out, according to the agency’s critics. After the Taliban collapsed last year, the Northern Alliance installed its own leadership at the agency, and allies of Karzai say it remains a Soviet-style institution.

The former agent said most of the staff remained long after the Communist-backed government of President Najibullah was toppled in 1992, and that only the top leaders of the department have changed. The agency even maintains a political department, he said, responsible for monitoring “the ideology of the workers” — an archaic reminder of a Soviet Union that no longer exists.

Vice President Nematullah Shahrani, the other chairman of the commission set up to investigate the agency, said, “We will reform the intelligence service so that people are not afraid of them, so that people can think the intelligence service does not harass them.”

Interviews with the two vice presidents suggest how great a challenge that will be. In a country where men and guns still translate into power, they have no staff, no money, not even offices to work out of. They also have no plan for how to reform the secret service beyond the generic hope, as Arsala put it, that “intelligence agencies should be restricted to intelligence” while civil authorities enforce laws.

Even many inside Karzai’s government are skeptical that they’ll be able to effect much change. “It’s difficult for Karzai to do,” said Gen. Anwar Kohistani, a top official in the Interior Ministry’s separate, and much smaller, intelligence department.

But a spokesman for the president said Karzai had no choice but to take on the secret service, and the campaign is likely to have enormous popular appeal at a time when he’s seeking to strengthen his hold over the country.

Karzai first publicly vowed to reduce the power of the Amaniyat in June, after the loya jirga that elected him president was marred by accusations that the secret service harassed and intimidated delegates who dared to deviate from the approved line.

The US military has worked extensively with the Northern Alliance in prosecuting its war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But in an interview this week, Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, commander of the US-led military coalition in Afghanistan, said he wasn’t aware of any specific dealings the US forces have had with the security agency and said he doubted he’d ever met the agency’s head.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.