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A warlord returns to Afghanistan

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It’s the last day of campaigning for presidential elections in Afghanistan on Thursday. President Hamid Karzai got an endorsement from a notorious warlord. General Abdul Rashid Dostum returned from exile yesterday to urge his supporters to vote for the incumbent, Hamid Karzai. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. President Barack Obama today warned of difficult days ahead in Afghanistan.

BARACK OBAMA: Today our troops are helping to secure polling places for this week’s election so that Afghans can choose the future that they want. Now these new efforts have not bee without a price. The fighting has been fierce and more Americans have given their lives.

MULLINS: That’s President Obama speaking at the National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona. And there is more disquieting news from Afghanistan today. President Hamid Karzai has allowed an exiled warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, back into the country. In return Karzai won Dostum’s promise of support. Dostum is the leader of the Uzbek minority. Uzbeks make up about 9% of Afghanistan’s population. Their vote could be crucial to Karzai’s chances in Thursday’s election. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports of the warlord trying to be king maker.

JEB SHARP: General Dostum has a long and checkered history. He was once a communist general who supported the Soviets. Later he was a leader of the Northern Alliance that fought the Taliban. In 2001 he joined forces with the US-led coalition that invaded Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. But the US has distanced itself from him in recent years. Susannah Sirkin, of Physicians for Human Rights, says he’s associated with a large number of atrocities.

SUSANNAH SIRKIN: Most particularly we’re concerned about the massacre that occurred in Northern Afghanistan in November 2001 in which as many as 2000 captured or surrendered Taliban and assorted fighters were loaded onto container trucks that had no air and enormously high heat and were suffocated to death.

SHARP: Dostum’s also accused of a cover up. Physicians for Human Rights has been calling for a full investigation of the incident and so now is President Obama. One fear is that President Karzai has made a deal with Dostum that could put him in a key government post. Alex Thier, director of the Future of Afghanistan Project at the US Institute of Peace remembers first meeting Dostum when Thier was an aid official in Afghanistan back in 1993. Their wanted to speak to Dostum because his men were preying on refugees returning from Iran.

ALEX THEIR: We went to see him in his mud-walled fortress in Northern Afghanistan. There were dozens of supplicants waiting to see him to get something. There was Soviet television with topless women dancing in the background. And we stated our case to him and he essentially waved us off as being not important. He wasn’t really concerned about the plight of refugees and he was already known then as somebody whose troops had committed grave abuses.

SHARP: Thier is troubled that Karzai is now courting Dostum instead of condemning him. He says the problem with Karzai’s government consorting with warlords again is they’re the reason the Taliban was so successful in the 1990s.

THIER: These warlords had turned Afghanistan into such a chaotic and corrupt environment that when the Taliban swept through Afghanistan they were welcomed by many of the Afghan people because the looting and rape and despotism that they represented was so horrific that the Afghan people welcomed the Taliban in their place.

SHARP: President Karzai pushed Dostum into exile last year after Dostum took a Member of Parliament hostage and ended up in a standoff with police. Thier says it’s devastating to see the warlord back.

THIER: Finally after years of thousands of people and Afghans of the international community complaining about Dostum, he was pushed out. And the fact that Karzai went to such lengths to bring him back to the country just a few days before the election I think has really tarnished Karzai’s image.

SHARP: Not only that, it could lead to an unpopular and unstable government. Selig Harrison directs the Asia Program at the Center of International Policy in Washington. Harrison wrote in today’s New York Times about Karzai’s dependence on a security apparatus, made up mostly of ethnic Tajiks. That’s left his own Pashtun constituency feeling neglected and dominated. Harrison says Karzai’s need for Dostum’s Uzbek vote is part of the same thing. Because Karzai’s unpopular with Pashtuns he’s making deals all over the place with other powerful ethnic groups.

SELIG HARRISON: If Karzai is able to return to power it will be simply because he’s been able to buy local groups of various kind including ethnic groups in support of his candidacy. So it’s not going to be a tight ship, a well-balanced, democratic system and it’s going to be, I think, more unstable than it has been until now.

SHARP: But right now it’s not clear Karzai will return to power. If he doesn’t secure 50% of the vote on Thursday there will be a runoff election six weeks later. For The World I’m Jeb Sharp.

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