HERAT: As Ismail Khan’s motorcade roars along dusty village roads, children cheer dutifully, holding up portraits of “uncles” slain in the armed struggle against Soviet forces during the 1980s. Before the dust has settled, the portraits are collected by soldiers and returned to their official storage places.
In the cavernous governor’s office, supplicants wait until past midnight hoping for Khan’s personal intervention in court cases, financial problems and family disputes. Ushered in one by one, they make their pleas while Khan listens sympathetically and clerks jot down details.
Throughout the domain of Khan — legendary anti-Soviet militia leader, two-time governor and self-proclaimed emir of Herat, a prosperous western province bordering Iran — the apparatus of power functions like a well-oiled machine.
But in recent weeks, cracks have begun to form in Khan’s political edifice. Herat’s professionals, stymied during years of control by militias — including Khan’s Jamiat-i-Islami party and the Taliban — are beginning to speak out against the nepotism and strong-arm tactics of one-man rule.
As this country emerges from more than two decades of bloodshed and chaos, Afghans from all sectors of society are struggling to prevent the future from repeating the past. Of the many factors threatening the stability of post- Taliban Afghanistan, few have proven as difficult to overcome as the factional and ethnic rivalries that have broken the country into regional fiefdoms.
The country’s new president, Hamid Karzai, has sought to dilute regional leaders’ power by including some of them in the central government. But Saturday’s assassination of Vice President Abdul Qadir in Kabul illustrated the volatility of dealing with the regional chiefs, whether inside or outside the government.
Unlike Qadir, Khan opted to keep his distance from Kabul. But last month’s Loya Jirga in the capital provided the impetus for the nascent political changes taking place in Herat.
After the Loya Jirga, Khan called the professional delegates to his office and asked for their advice. Shahir and others called for local gunmen to be disarmed and for uneducated Khan loyalists to be replaced by professionals in provincial government posts.
“In the past, such speeches would have been impossible. The leaders were like idols that no one could break. But after the Loya we dared to speak freely,” physician Hassan Farid said. In response, he said, Khan offered to resign if people were unhappy with his rule, and he hugged some of the delegates.
It was a shrewd move for Khan, 57, a survivor of two gruelling military campaigns and three years in a Taliban prison, from which he mysteriously escaped two years ago. The veteran politician has built a regional empire based on constituent service, subtle intimidation, tight control of public revenue, and personal devotion stemming from the anti-Soviet resistance.
In an interview, Khan professed to have shifted his leadership mission from armed struggle to social and economic reconstruction, in keeping with Afghanistan’s transformation from a nation at arms to a peaceful but impoverished postwar society.
“The other day we had a Jihad of blood. Now we have a Jihad of sweat,” Khan said. “Getting an education can be Jihad. Reconstruction can be Jihad. There may be fighting in other parts of Afghanistan, but in Herat there is security and order, there are schools and banks functioning, there are people solving problems. All this is our Jihad.”
Khan reportedly was offered several high-level positions by Karzai. But he turned them down, apparently preferring to remain in the western stronghold where he controls thousands of gunmen and lucrative customs fees from the burgeoning cross-border trade with Iran.
Karzai, who was confirmed by the Jirga after serving six months as interim leader, has said repeatedly that he intends to impose central authority over customs revenue now controlled by regional strongmen such as Khan, and he has insisted that several other regional governors who were given new cabinet posts remain in Kabul.
Some Afghan and foreign observers here said Khan may be on his best behaviour because of pressure from US military forces in the area. A hillside fortress overlooking Herat is occupied by Special Forces, and a contingent of Army reservists is repairing hospitals and irrigation canals.
Several other residents, however, said most people in the city are afraid to criticize the government and are intimidated by Khan’s armed supporters, who are far less conspicuous than the former Taliban police but can still be menacing.—Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service.