Word: fahim
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...erstwhile ally in the Northern Alliance, the mainly Tajik Jamiat-i-Islami faction. Jamiat's ascension has prompted an unlikely alignment between Dostum and Hamid Karzai, the patrician Pashtun tribal leader who heads Kabul's interim government. In December Karzai appointed Dostum deputy to Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, Jamiat's military strongman, and in March he named Dostum his "special representative" in the north. Dostum has also conspicuously aligned himself with former King Mohammed Zahir Shah. The moves suggest not powergrabbing as much as defensiveness. "Dostum is feeling threatened," says Ahmed Rashid, author of a best-selling book...
...sabotage." A Karzai adviser says that the alleged coup plotters were carrying documents from Hekmatyar's Hizb-I-Islami group, which it alleges is now working with remnants of al-Qaeda. The government also believes Hekmatyar was also behind last week's attempt to assassinate Defense Minister Mohamed Fahim in Jalalabad. "The demarcation line is no longer between ethnic groups, it's between moderates and fundamentalists," says Karzai's adviser. "And the hard-liners want...
...Hekmatyar threat is exaggerated, Karzai must still deal with internal splits. "The cabinet is deeply divided," says the interim leader's adviser. "But that's the government given to him by the U.N. in Bonn and he has to work with it." A power struggle between Defense Minister Fahim, an ethnic Tajik from Panshir who assumed command of the Northern Alliance last year, and non-Panshiri ministers has turned government into a slugfest. "The minute (Karzai) leaves the country (Fahim) tries to get his men into new positions," says the adviser. The foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, meantime, has stacked...
...have nothing against Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, Interior Minister Younis Qanooni or Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim. These three young disciples of deceased Afghan hero Ahmed Shah Massood impressed Western diplomats at the Bonn Conference and are probably among the most reliable warlords. The problem is that the Tajiks’ preponderance in the government makes other warlords very unhappy. And an unhappy warlord is often an unfriendly warlord...
...unified army combining Afghanistan's rival ethnic groups have proved farcical. Recruitment began in February. When the first 300 hopefuls turned up, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) took a quick look at the recruits' surnames and discovered they were almost all Tajik Panshiris sent by Afghan Defense Minister Fahim. But ISAF later accepted Fahim's second group, even though 154 of those 301 recruits were Tajik, 102 Pashtun and 37 Hazara. (The population of Afghanistan is 25% Tajik, 38% Pashtun and 19% Hazara.) Nor were the recruits interviewed to determine their allegiance to any of the armed factions. "Impractical...