Afghan Fights Islamic Tide; As a Savior or a Conqueror
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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).
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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.
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Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum
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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."
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