[This month, Mr. Khan
rallied thousands of his supporters in the desert outside Herat, the cultured
western provincial capital and the center of his power base, urging them to
coordinate and reactivate their networks. And he has begun enlisting new
recruits and organizing district command structures.]
 |
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Mujahedeen commanders at a gathering in Herat, Afghanistan,
to address the threat to security posed by the Taliban.
|
HERAT, Afghanistan — One
of the most powerful mujahedeen commanders in Afghanistan, Ismail
Khan, is calling on his followers to reorganize and defend the
country against the Taliban as Western militaries withdraw, in a public
demonstration of faltering confidence in the national government and the
Western-built Afghan National Army.
Mr. Khan is one of the strongest
of a group of warlords who defined the country’s recent history in battling the
Soviets, the Taliban and one another, and who then were brought into President
Hamid Karzai’s cabinet as a symbol of unity. Now, in announcing that he is
remobilizing his forces, Mr. Khan has rankled Afghan officials and stoked fears
that other regional and factional leaders will follow suit and rearm, weakening
support for the government and increasing the likelihood of civil war.
This month, Mr. Khan
rallied thousands of his supporters in the desert outside Herat, the cultured
western provincial capital and the center of his power base, urging them to
coordinate and reactivate their networks. And he has begun enlisting new
recruits and organizing district command structures.
“We are responsible for
maintaining security in our country and not letting Afghanistan be destroyed
again,” Mr. Khan, the minister of energy and water, said at a news conference
over the weekend at his office in Kabul. But after facing criticism, he took
care not to frame his action as defying the government: “There are parts of the
country where the government forces cannot operate, and in such areas the
locals should step forward, take arms and defend the country.”
President Karzai and his
aides, however, were not greeting it as an altruistic gesture. The governor of
Herat Province called Mr. Khan’s reorganization an illegal challenge to the
national security forces. And Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, tersely
criticized Mr. Khan.
“The remarks by Ismail
Khan do not reflect the policies of the Afghan government,” Mr. Faizi said.
“The government of Afghanistan and the Afghan people do not want any
irresponsible armed grouping outside the legitimate security forces
structures.”
In Kabul, Mr. Khan’s
provocative actions have played out in the news media and brought a fierce
reaction from some members of Parliament, who said the warlords were preparing
to take advantage of the American troop withdrawal set for 2014.
“People like Ismail Khan
smell blood,” Belqis Roshan, a senator from Farah Province, said in an
interview. “They think that as soon as foreign forces leave Afghanistan, once
again they will get the chance to start a civil war, and achieve their ominous
goals of getting rich and terminating their local rivals.”
Indeed, Mr. Khan’s is
not the only voice calling for a renewed alliance of the mujahedeen against the
Taliban, and some of the others are just as familiar.
Marshal Muhammad Qasim
Fahim, an ethnic Tajik commander who is President Karzai’s first vice
president, said in a speech in September,
“If the Afghan security forces are not able to wage this war, then call upon
the mujahedeen.”
Another prominent
mujahedeen fighter, Ahmad Zia Massoud, said in an interview at his home in
Kabul that people were worried about what was going to happen after 2014, and
he was telling his own followers to make preliminary preparations.
“They don’t want to be
disgraced again,” Mr. Massoud said. “Everyone tries to have some sort of Plan
B. Some people are on the verge of rearming.”
He pointed out that it
was significant that the going market price of Kalashnikov assault rifles had
risen to about $1,000, driven up by demand from a price of $300 a decade ago.
“Every household wants to have an AK-47 at home,” he said.
“The mujahedeen come
here to meet me,” Mr. Massoud added. “They tell me they are preparing. They are
trying to find weapons. They come from villages, from the north of Afghanistan,
even some people from the suburbs of Kabul, and say they are taking
responsibility for providing private security in their neighborhood.”
Still, there have long
been fears about the re-emergence of the warlords, after more than a decade of
efforts by Afghan officials and their Western allies to build up an inclusive
national government and co-opt some of the factional leaders’ influence by
bringing them into it.
One senior Western
official in Kabul saw Mr. Khan’s actions as the start of a wave of political
positioning before the 2014 transition and said it bore close watching. The
allies want to avoid any replay of the civil war in the ’90s that led hundreds
of thousands of Afghans to flee. A renewed civil war would undo much of what
the West has tried to accomplish.
Mr. Khan is one of the
towering figures of the resistance against the Soviets and the Taliban, and his
power base in Herat Province, along the border with Iran, has remained relatively
thriving throughout the war, despite a recent rise in kidnappings and militant
attacks.
After years of
consolidating power in the ’80s and early ’90s, he was forced to flee Herat
after the Taliban took the city. After the northern coalition and American-led
invasion drove out the Taliban in 2001, he was restored as governor of Herat.
But he was removed by President Karzai in
2004, prompting violent demonstrations among his supporters.
He continues to exert
strong influence in the western regions today, and he clashes regularly with
the current governor, Daud Shah Saba, Western officials say.
Mr. Khan called a
gathering of thousands outside Herat city on Nov. 1, in a district called
Martyrs’ Town, which he established in the ’90s to give free housing and land
to the families of slain mujahedeen. A video clip of the meeting, attended by
many influential regional figures, featured Mr. Khan criticizing the
international coalition for disarming the fighters but then failing to make
Afghanistan secure.
“They collected our
cannons and tanks and they turned them into a pile of garbage,” he told the
crowd. “In return, they brought Dutch, German, American and French girls, they
brought white soldiers from Europe and black soldiers from Africa in the hope
of securing Afghanistan, but they failed.”
After the public
criticism that he was creating an armed opposition to the government, Mr. Khan
insisted at his news conference in Kabul on Saturday that he was not rearming
his followers or opposing the security forces, but rather wanted the mujahedeen
to work with the army and the police as a sort of reserve force, warning them,
for example, if they saw signs of Taliban infiltration.
“This does not mean we
are rebelling against the government,” he said. “We are struggling for 30 years
to build this government, and we are not allowing this government to be
toppled.”
Still, such an auxiliary
role is exactly what was envisioned for the Afghan Local Police, organized and
trained at great cost by American Special Operations forces in recent years.
In Herat, Mohammed
Farooq Hussaini, one of the region’s most prominent mullahs, said that people
were looking to their traditional leaders to protect them, and still possessed
weapons if they ever had to fight.
His own family told a
story of spreading Taliban influence, he said: his son-in-law, a pharmacist,
recently joined the insurgency. “There are two to three weapons in each house
in Herat and other provinces, and not only men but also women are ready to
fight against the Taliban and other terrorists,” he said.
A mujahedeen fighter,
Saeed Ahmad Hussaini, a member of the provincial council in Herat, said that if
the United States had not yet recognized its failure in Afghanistan, the Afghan
people certainly had.
“We have rescued this
nation twice from the hands of invaders and oppressors, and we will rescue it
once more if needed,” he said. “People cannot tolerate the whippings and
beatings of the Taliban.”
Habib Zahori and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed
reporting from Herat, Afghanistan, and an employee of The New York Times from
Kabul.
