Word: militiaization
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...They drove out both Rabbani and his enemies, winning over most of the local warlords who dominate rural Afghanistan. Rabbani's ousted Tajik forces joined with the Shiite Hazari mujahedeen backed by Iran and with Dostum's Uzbek militia to create the Northern Alliance, which has now reclaimed Kabul thanks to the U.S. campaign against the Taliban. And while they're paying lip service to the notion of a "broad-based government," Rabbani is back in Kabul. Despite its internal divisions - Hazari fighters last week marched into Kabul to stake their own claim for a share of the Alliance...
...beards and burkas, and switching on long-dormant television sets. But as they contemplate the perilous unfolding of the post-Taliban political scenario, many may soon be reminded why the Taliban were actually welcomed by many residents when they first seized the city in 1996 - they hoped the fundamentalist militia would at least bring peace. Now rival warlords within the Northern Alliance and among former mujahedeen commanders in the Pashtun south are deploying fighters to stake their claim to post-Taliban Afghanistan, and next week's U.N.-sponsored talks in Berlin over the country's political future are part...
...leader Burhanuddin Rabbani as president for one year. But Rabbani held on for four years, during which time the forces of Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar waged a vicious artillery campaign that turned the capital into rubble and killed thousands. Hekmatyar was sometimes joined on the battlefield by the Uzbek militia of General Rashid Dostum, a former security chief of the Soviet-backed regime. Eventually, with direct military support from Pakistan and financial aid from Saudi Arabia, the Taliban swept to power in 1996, vowing to end the bloodletting...
...simply be the difference between a heroic death and a humiliating one - even though many of their Afghan Taliban comrades may simply surrender. For the movement's surviving leadership, a retreat for the mountains and a protracted guerrilla campaign appears to be the only survival option facing the battered militia, even as a number of its senior leaders were reportedly captured by opposition forces Friday. They've also shrewdly handed over the southern cities to rival Pashtun forces rather than fight them, hoping the bond of ethnic solidarity against the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras of the Northern Alliance...
When the Taliban lost this capital of northern Afghanistan, they set the pattern for the war. After days of relentless pounding by American bombers, the Islamic militia simply had no stomach for a fight...