Word: dostum
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...Dostum's mercenary troops achieved notoriety for ruthless courage on the battlefield and wild indiscipline off it. Bearing a legacy of 200 years near the bottom of a Pashtun-dominated social order, they seemed to take a special delight in evening the historical score, killing Pashtun mujahedin of the south, and looting and terrorizing the civilians...
...lofty language, the dapper attire, even expressions of regret for making "mistakes"--all are part of an effort by Dostum, a onetime soldier of fortune whose name is a byword for a decade of warlord power, to resell himself to his compatriots and the world as a democratic politician and servant of the people in a kinder, gentler Afghanistan. Whether he and other warlords succeed in this improbable transformation is even more important to Afghanistan's future stability than is the fate of al-Qaeda remnants hiding out in the Pakistani borderlands. While the Bush Administration continues to make chasing...
...warlordism is out, Dostum wants to be part of whatever is coming in. Since reclaiming his old stomping ground in northern Afghanistan last November with the help of U.S. special forces, Dostum, who at 48 is graying and developing a middle-aged spread, has picked up the politically correct patter of the country post-Taliban. "We must never repeat the mistakes of the past," he recently told a convention of robed Islamic clergy. "Now is the time to defend ourselves not with tanks and armed corps but by the rule of law and establishing political parties." His rhetoric has persuaded...
Born to a poor Uzbek farming family, Dostum had little formal education and worked in the natural-gas fields near Shibarghan before joining the military during communist rule in Afghanistan. By the mid-1980s he was in command first of a militia battalion, then of a division. His big break came with the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan in 1988-89. As the troop convoys headed home and the rebel mujahedin sharpened their knives, Dostum and his Soviet-funded army of tough Uzbek and Turkmen irregulars emerged as the only real mobile outfit the communist regime of President Najibullah could count...
...Dostum brought the Najibullah regime down when he mutinied in 1992 and joined forces with the northern mujahedin. He and his cohort seized Mazar and set up their Jombesh. The following years raised to national art forms both the alliance of convenience and the stab in the back, and Dostum outperformed the rest. He moved in and out of alliances with Ahmed Shah Massoud, then the Jamiat commander; with Massoud's arch-enemy, the Islamist radical Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; and finally with the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban, enemy of both. Meanwhile, differences of policy and personality at the top of the Jombesh...