Taliban assault brings Afghan warlords back to the front line

On the front lines of Herat, a white-bearded septuagenarian leads the city’s defence against the Taliban. In Kabul, a notorious Uzbek warlord holds emergency meetings with the defence minister after rushing back from medical treatment abroad.

As Afghanistan reels from a lightning Taliban offensive since the American withdrawal, an array of infamous characters from the country’s violent past are stepping forward to pitch themselves as its last defence against a militant takeover. Afghanistan’s warlords, forged in the mujahidin battles of the 1990s, never really left the scene, thanks to the back-and-forward of American forces co-opting them against the Taliban, then seeking to neutralise their militias as they built a national army.

Hamid Karzai, 63, the country’s first post-Taliban president, was bitterly criticised for handing the warlords government positions and power, despite myriad credible accusations against them of war crimes. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, 72, tried to keep them at arm’s length, even at the cost of exercising effective power.

The warlords’ highly visible return to the forefront of power in the battle against the Taliban, raises fears that Afghanistan will once again implode in a war pitting fiefdoms against one another as local power brokers vie for dominance.

Ismail Khan, 75, former governor of Herat and now chief defender of the cosmopolitan city, may rank as the most acceptable face of warlordism. A renowned mujahidin commander, he defended Herat against the Taliban in 1995 until he was betrayed by his former ally, Abdul Rashid Dostum.

Dostum, 67, is the infamous Uzbek warlord whose shifting loyalties have resulted in him fighting on behalf of everyone from the Soviets to the Taliban to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and the Americans when they invaded to push the Taliban from power.

Both men’s militias ought to have been disarmed under a programme begun by the Americans in 2002 to create an Afghan national army, but the effort faltered as the strongmen resisted and the price of confrontation appeared too high.

The Afghan national army that the Americans sought to build was based on their own model, bringing together people from all ethnicities and communities to fight under a centralised command. It has proved a poor match for the highly localised Taliban forces who, despite their ethnic Pashtun origins, have made inroads into other communities by exploiting distrust of the western-backed government. Now the warlords are making the case, often convincingly, that their localised militias are the only bulwark against a Taliban takeover.

In Herat, Khan is leading 3,000 men alongside the Afghan security forces to defend the city. He has received the blessing of Bismillah Mohammadi, 60, Afghanistan’s defence minister, as part of his “popular uprising” strategy co-opting local militias in the fight against the Taliban.

Dostum returned to Afghanistan last week after having medical treatment in Turkey but was too late to stop his power base, Sheberghan, falling to the Taliban. The insurgents overran his palace, posting photos of their seized booty on social media, with one fighter dressing up in Dostum’s military uniform for the cameras.

He has now turned his sights to defending Faryab, the neighbouring province.

Dostum stands accused of many atrocities during his long career on the battlefield, but perhaps none is more infamous than the massacre of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in November 2001 when he was fighting on behalf of the Americans. They were suffocated after being packed into shipping containers to be transported from the front line at Kunduz to Sheberghan. The survivors described licking the sweat from others’ bodies to slake their thirst.

Dostum’s proposals to defend northern Afghanistan went unheard until his return, and the fall of key cities including Kunduz. Ghani then granted him an audience and apparently accepted his plan; further evidence, say detractors, that a desperate government in Kabul is allowing warlords to dictate their own terms. Many others are making a comeback, betting on Kabul’s desperation to overcome past differences.

Atta Mohammad Noor, 57, the legendary strongman of Balkh province, has vowed to “die in dignity rather than despair” defending the storied city of Mazar-i-Sharif and its fabled Blue Mosque. An ethnic Tajik, he has accused his clansman Abdullah Abdullah, 60, who shares power in the Ghani government, of failing to invest in Tajik interests. He was among the first to call for a “people’s uprising” as the Taliban advanced this year, slamming the American departure as irresponsible and calling for government funding to arm militias.

Noor’s history with Dostum, however, highlights fears about the longer-term consequences of empowering militias against the Taliban: the two have repeatedly fought one another for territorial control, even after Nato troops came to Afghanistan in 2001.

In Kabul, the terror of a Taliban takeover drives all reaction. Afghanistan’s capital is by far its biggest and most cosmopolitan city, and the only one in the country that hosts a multi-ethnic population. With 4.6 million people, it is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world.

Views as to whether the Taliban could take such a city again are mixed. US military leaders have warned that it could fall within six months but Ryan Crocker, the former US ambassador to Afghanistan, cast doubt on that this week, predicting that Afghanistan was more likely to degenerate into a long and grinding war.

Romain Malejacq, author of Warlord Survival: The Delusion of State Building in Afghanistan, foresees a similar outcome. “Whether the central government manages to hold its own and resist the Taliban or not, post-Nato Afghanistan is likely to feature a patchwork of overlapping, competing, political orders between the state, the Taliban, the warlords and other non-state armed actors — something resembling Afghanistan of the 1990s,” he wrote.

That was the scenario that spawned the Taliban in the first place, with many war-weary Afghans welcoming them as a source of stability. The people have not forgotten the instability of the warlord years, nor the atrocities that have gone unpunished.

The Taliban is not the only force Afghans have cause to fear.