In Khinjan on Thursday, Ahmad Shah Massoud, left, and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum signed an agreement to join forces against the Taliban. (photo by Alan Chin)

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan -- If proof were needed that history takes curious turns, there is evidence in the heavyset warlord with the shoe-brush mustache whose portraits loom over this old Central Asian city. Once a Communist general, he is now spoken of by people in northern Afghanistan as Pasha, a title used by some of the region's ancient kings.

When the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in 1989, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum seemed washed up.

He was by turns a Communist union boss on an Afghan gas field built by Soviet engineers, leader of an ethnic Uzbek militia that sided with the Soviet occupiers in their war with Muslim guerrillas, and ultimately a major battlefield commander for Afghanistan's Communist dictatorship who won honors for his campaigns against the guerrillas.

But now, long after the guerrillas drove the Russians out and overthrew their proxy government, Dostum seems more powerful than ever.

When he raced southward in his armored Cadillac on Thursday for a clandestine meeting at Khinjan in the Hindu Kush mountains, the 43-year-old general emerged as leader of a kind of ministate in northern Afghanistan.

His alliance hopes to resist the Islamic purists of the Taliban movement who have ousted the guerrillas who defeated the Soviets and overrun most of Afghanistan south of the Hindu Kush.

Some who have watched Dostum (pronounced doe-STUM) believe that his ambitions may run further than stopping the Taliban, who have imposed what they say are Islamic strictures in areas under their control, including bans on women's working and on girls' going to school.

A diplomat here believes the general may see himself emerging from Afghanistan's chaos as the country's new ruler, winning glory for the Uzbeks that has eluded them for 500 years.

"He thinks of himself as the new Tamerlane," the diplomat said, referring to the leader of the Uzbek horsemen who conquered Afghanistan in the 14th century, starting an empire that for 150 years controlled all the territory between Baghdad and the western frontier of China.

Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum

Dostum is widely popular in Mazar-i-Sharif, the dusty city of 2 million people where he makes his headquarters, and not only among ethnic Uzbeks, many of whom take pride in the martial state he has created, with tank barrels and anti-aircraft guns bristling from every mud-walled fort and hilltop.

For many others, it is the freedoms here, fast disappearing in areas under Taliban control, that make him an icon.

"I think he is a good leader, because people here can live as they want," said Latifa Hamidi, 18, who is in her first year of medical studies at Balkh University, an institution financed by Dostum.

Like perhaps half of the population of the city, Ms. Hamidi is a refugee. She comes from Kabul, where her father was killed by a shell five years ago. She has nightmares about what would happen if the Taliban defeated the general and took control here.

"I want knowledge and I want a useful life," she said. "I don't want to be forced to stay at home."

The state proclaimed at the Khinjan meeting exists mainly on the piece of scrap paper that was scrawled on by one of Dostum's aides, and signed by the general and other anti-Taliban leaders. It has been dismissed by the Taliban, but the rival government the leaders agreed to establish at Mazar-i-Sharif could prove crucial to the future of Central Asia.

Its backers include India, Iran and Russia, which borders on former Soviet republics with large Muslim populations.

Brushing aside the Taliban leaders' promises to live peacefully with their neighbors, the Russian national security adviser, Alexander Lebed, has said the Taliban intend to "annex" the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, along with the sacred Muslim cities of Bukhara and Samarkand.

"Are you so surprised we are back?" Oleg Nevelyaev, Russia's vice consul in Mazar-i-Sharif, said to a reporter as Dostum emerged from the Khinjan meeting and embraced his principal partner in the anti-Taliban alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

The embrace took place in front of an old Soviet guesthouse in a region of barren hills littered with rusting Soviet tanks where Massoud, regarded by Soviet commanders as the most effective Afghan guerrilla commander, harassed Soviet troops throughout the occupation.

If Dostum feels a sense of irony at finding himself a key player in a new Russian gambit in Afghanistan, he shows no sign of it.

He is a bullish man, in stature and in style. He almost always appears in a Soviet-style uniform, as he did at Khinjan, and he presides, from his headquarters in a 150-year-old mud-walled fort outside Mazar-i-Sharif, over a territory where he is as much an overlord as were any of the Communist rulers of the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

One way in which he has achieved his new stature is by letting his military might, based on an army of at least 50,000 men that is undoubtedly the best trained and equipped in Afghanistan, speak for him.

A man of few words, he declined to be interviewed for this article. But he has spoken dismissively of the Taliban, telling aides that he does not intend to submit to a government under which "there will be no whisky and no music."

But Dostum is a pragmatist, and when the Taliban overran Kabul last month, he said nothing to make an accommodation impossible. His move to create a new state came only after the Taliban issued a spate of fundamentalist decrees and opened an offensive against Massoud's stronghold north of Kabul, with the implied threat of moving against Dostum.

A willingness to switch sides helped the general survive the collapse of Communist rule. In April 1992 his defection to the Muslim guerrillas besieging the Soviet-backed government in Kabul doomed that government.

Then, after joining the first government established by the anti-Soviet guerrillas, he switched sides again and shelled Kabul for months, killing tens of thousands of people. Then he retreated to the north, consolidating his grip on an area that now covers six provinces, with perhaps 5 million people.

While many are Uzbeks, the population of the region also includes many ethnic Tajiks, Hazaras and Pathans, the largest group in Afghanistan, and the one from which the Taliban have drawn almost all their support.

Since the Taliban seized Kabul, a new wave of refugees has streamed north across the mountains, and what they have found here has entranced them.

While much of the rest of Afghanistan is in ruins, Mazar-i-Sharif, trading with the newly independent states of what was Soviet Central Asia, is thriving. Its bazaars are packed with imported goods, including such luxuries as satellite telephones.

Dostum, who has grown rich from taxing the new trade, has started his own airline, Balkh Air, with two British-made jets that fly to destinations in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.

With its dusty streets and chromed pickup trucks and the macho mood of many Uzbeks, the city seems tailor-made for the general. When a visitor inquired about the price of a volume of plays at a bookshop in the bazaar, the merchant suggested that he buy a set of chest expanders instead.

And at Dostum's headquarters, fighters relaxing in the afternoon sun guffawed when a reporter suggested that future battles with the Taliban might be fierce.

"The Taliban?" said Mohammed Siddiq, one of the general's commanders. "Compared with us, they are a bunch of women."