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To understand the growing disillusionment among Afghan’s with Hamid Karzai’s government look to the case of Ghulam Yahya. Yahya used to be a member of the Karzai government. He used to work hand in hand with western officials to help rebuild Afghanistan. And he used to fight the Taliban. Now Ghulam Yahya has JOINED the Taliban. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov, who travelled to Herat to profile the man who switched his allegiances and took up arms against US and NATO forces.

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MARCO WERMAN: To understand the growing disillusionment among Afghans with President Karzai’s government consider the case of Ghulam Yahya. Yahya used to be a member of the Karzai government. He used to work hand-in-hand with western officials to help rebuild Afghanistan and he used to fight the Taliban. Now Ghulam Yahya has joined the Taliban. Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov traveled to Herat in western Afghanistan to profile the man who switched his allegiances and took up arms against US and NATO forces.

YAROSLAV TROFIMOV: Ghulam Yahya used to be the mayor of Herat which is the industrial hub of Afghanistan and then he was a senior provincial official working hand-in-hand with the western officials [INDISCERNIBLE] the downfall of the Taliban. But now he’s joined forces with the Taliban. He’s firing rockets at the allied headquarters near the city and setting off bombs.

WERMAN: And this man, Mr. Yahya, was actually part of the Hamid Karzai government and now you’re saying he’s with the Taliban? How did that transformation happen?

TROFIMOV: Well he was the head of public works in the Herat province until 2006. Then he was fired because he was accused of having a stockpile of weapons which he claimed he didn’t have. For a few other years he kept asking for another government position. He failed to get it. So he retreated to his village and took up arms again.

WERMAN: And he’s an angry man. I mean Hamid Karzai has offered him amnesty but apparently he’s rejected that.

TROFIMOV: Well the reason that he gave for rejecting the amnesty offer repeatedly was that he said that the Karzai government is unable to control the foreign forces in the country; he’s unable to expel them. So he said that he will not go back to the government as long as there are still American and western troops in Afghanistan.

WERMAN: Specifically what does Yahya blame the western forces for?

TROFIMOV: Well the way he put it is that the western forces came to Afghanistan to help in reconstruction but they are quote-on-quote pursuing their own interests and killing Afghan civilians. And there has been quite a lot of anger, especially in the Herat province, over the civilians who were killed in air strikes that were targeting the Taliban but missed the targets. Well even the one that missed him in February ended up killing more than a dozen civilians according to the Afghan officials.

WERMAN: It sounds like kind of a personal vendetta. Is he representative of a lot of people who’ve made the shift to join in the Taliban?

TROFIMOV: Well he’s [INDISCERNIBLE] because he is an ethnic Tajik and most of the Taliban are ethnic Pashtun – virtually all the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan are ethnic Pashtuns. But he does represent the people of that area. He was a mujahedeen commander there during sovereign occupation so he has a following in his clan, his tribe, in that whole region. So excluding him from the political system was also seen as an insult by many of the people in the area where he lives.

WERMAN: Right and now there’s been this election around which there are many, many irregularities – 2500 complaints have poured in. Has disillusion with the west and with Karzai’s government grown even more since those elections?

TROFIMOV: Oh yes. Yes absolutely. And what we are seeing now is that the violence that was pretty much limited to the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan plus Kabul for many years is now spreading to the west and the north of Afghanistan throughout Kunduz, Parwan, and that these provinces that were considered to be safe until not so long ago and where the security is not in the hands of the American troops but in the hands of the Italians, the Germans, and the Spanish whose governments don’t really allow them to engage in combat except in exceptional circumstances. So this is really a weak underbelly of Afghanistan and that’s where a lot of the Taliban are moving now with a degree of local support such as Ghulam Yahya who’s sitting at the crucial crossroads that allow them to move from south and into the north of Afghanistan.

WERMAN: Yaroslav Trofimov with the Wall Street Journal. Thanks very much for speaking with us.

TROFIMOV: Thank you.

WERMAN: To read Yaroslav Trofimov’s profile of Ghulam Yahya in the Wall Street Journal come to The World dot org.

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