Afghan overview
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Afghan Militias Cling To Power in North
Officials Fear Reforms' Effects Are Limited
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 28, 2003; Page A18
MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan -- The Balkh Gate looks like any other traffic post along a busy rural highway. Bored police run an eye over crammed minibuses, poke their rifles among wheat sacks piled atop farm trucks, and then wave the vehicles on into this provincial capital.
But the gate is a valuable, hotly contested piece of political and military turf that has just been liberated, under considerable national and foreign pressure, from the clutches of local militia forces who squeezed hefty fees from drivers and protected the movement of their allies' men and weapons through the area.
"It's much better now," said Nasrullah, 25, a driver whose wheezing truck full of wheat, beans and farmhands was being inspected at the gate Sunday. "The old police forced me to pay about 50 Afghanis [$1] every time I came into the city. The new ones treat us much better, and they say I don't have to pay anything at all."
As part of an Oct. 9 cease-fire agreement between northern Afghanistan's two long-feuding militia bosses, Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum and Gen. Attah Mohammad, a force of 300 newly trained national police officers were brought from Kabul two weeks ago to take over security in Mazar-e Sharif -- especially the checkpoints that served as militia chokeholds.
On Sunday, the government of President Hamid Karzai followed with a second, more dramatic move to curb the power of the two regional bosses. Officials announced they would replace the governors and police chiefs of four northern provinces and remove Dostum and Mohammad, giving both men jobs in Kabul, the capital, and joining their armed forces under a new, neutral commander.
"It is time for the north to be governed by the pen, not the gun," Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali told BBC Afghan-language radio Sunday night from this historic city of 1.5 million. Early this month, escalating tensions and scattered clashes between thousands of rival militia troops left at least 50 fighters dead or wounded and sent panic through the city, the capital of Balkh province.
Although both militia chiefs have reportedly agreed to the deal, many Afghans and foreign observers expressed doubt that even a high-level shuffle would bring enduring change to a region that has long been hostage to the brutal whims of ethnic commanders and the turf battles that frequently erupt among them.
For one thing, Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek who heads the left-leaning Jumbish-i-Milli party, and Mohammad, an ethnic Tajik from the Islamic Jamiat-i-Islami party, have been adversaries for well over a decade. Mohammad essentially controls Mazar-e Sharif, while Dostum has more forces in the countryside. Truces have been negotiated a dozen times, and the two men once signed a pact in Mecca, to no avail.
People agree it is not Dostum or Mohammad, but dozens of lower-level commanders from both sides, who truly wreak mayhem in the north -- fighting for control of villages, looting and extorting with impunity, and carrying out tit-for-tat kidnappings and assassinations.
"This kind of thing goes on all the time. These commanders control a lot of resources, and they only answer to Dostum and Attah when it is convenient," said Michele Lipner, a U.N. adviser in Mazar-e Sharif.
Lipner suggested removing Dostum and Mohammad might actually make things worse. "There is a very fragile balance of power here," she said. "If you move them out, things may become unbalanced. The tumor is gone but the cancer spreads."
Independent civilian authority here has been weak to nonexistent, which has also led people here to doubt that change is imminent. Until Sunday, most senior administrative posts in the region, including prosecutors and police chiefs, were held by loyalists from one of the armed factions. And although the forces under Dostum and Mohammad are officially part of the Afghan Defense Ministry, they continue to function almost entirely as personal militias.
A contingent of British troops and civilians has been based here since early this year to reinforce Afghan government efforts to rein in the militias, yet their presence has done little to prevent the raw exercise of militia power.
The struggle for the Mazar-e Sharif checkpoints illustrates this problem. The police who arrived two weeks ago, under orders to begin patrolling the city, encountered such stiff resistance from Mohammad's commanders that they have been able to take control of only a few checkpoints.
"We're supposed to be a force for peace. We're not here to fight anyone," said Col. Ahmaduddin, a police official. "The government and the United Nations are behind us, but the [local commanders] are not ready to give up their posts, and they are still moving their militias around the city. Until the problem is solved, there is nothing we can do."
Dostum and Mohammad have each said they are eager for peace and willing to disarm -- as long as the other takes the first step. They express deep mistrust and contempt for each other. After the recent clashes, in which Dostum's forces made considerable territorial gains, his aides accused Mohammad's forces of behaving like criminal gangs, while Mohammad's lieutenants dismissed Dostum as an arrogant, bloodthirsty tyrant.
The armed showdown outside Mazar-e Sharif and smaller clashes in scattered rural areas were precipitated in part by the alleged kidnapping of one of Dostum's commanders, known as Gen. Habib, by two of Mohammad's commanders. The suspects were arrested, and the truce negotiated by Afghan and foreign officials called for an investigation into such crimes. But Mohammad's men have since been released, leaving Habib's allies eager for vengeance.
"Hundreds of people in the bazaar saw what these men did, yet they are free and my brother is still missing," said Faisullah, 52, a burly older brother of Habib, standing outside the family compound in a village west of Mazar-e Sharif. "The government asked us to wait, but we can't wait forever. If there is no response, we will all be ready to fight. As they kidnap, we will kidnap. As they kill, we will kill."
Many local residents said the only way to wrest the region from the warlords is to disarm their forces. That is precisely what the Karzai government hopes to do in the coming months, by extending a program that was launched last week in Kunduz, another northern province, to disarm and retrain thousands of militia fighters.
But the cycles of violence and turf warfare have made many people cynical about the prospects for change and worried that their region, cut off from the rest of Afghanistan by a mountain range, will stagnate while other major cities such as Kabul and Herat begin to recover after 23 years of conflict.
In Mazar-e Sharif, home to a respected university and a majestic blue-tiled Muslim shrine, several people said that no matter what the Karzai government does, only the arrival of foreign troops can neutralize the warlords' power. "These men have been fighting each other for so long, it has become a habit. They need to be replaced and disarmed from outside," said Yama Sharaf, a law professor at Balkh University.
In the countryside, people familiar with both militias cast equal blame on Dostum and Mohammad. In Cod-e-Barq, a village long controlled by Dostum, some residents said both armies should be disbanded, but others said the militiamen would never put down their guns unless forced to do so.
"We have a shaky stability here right now, but only because the foreigners got involved," said Jan Mohammad, 41, an engineer. "Every time there is a truce, the fighting starts again. We can have 10 truces and 10 oaths, but neither of these forces is ready to give up its weapons. The whole structure has to be destroyed from top to bottom. Otherwise, sooner or later they will start killing people again."
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