Word: pachakhan
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...looks after the family's affairs in Kabul where he is Minister of Tribal Affairs and Border Questions in the new Cabinet?a position that traditionally has gone to someone from Khost as a way of trying to keep the area more or less under Kabul's control. Another, Pachakhan Zadran, governs Khost, Paktia and Paktika. His deputy for Khost province is his 28-year-old brother, Kamal Khan. The youngest of the family, an engaging 17-year-old named Wazir Khan who was born in exile in Pakistan and who set foot in Afghanistan for the first time...
...Khost could be in for a tough time. The brothers, fervent royalists, fly the royal banner from official buildings, not the current national flag, and pictures of deposed King Mohammed Zahir Shah adorn their cars. Their own way of ruling has a regal feel. The 55-year-old Pachakhan, Governor of three provinces, is an irascible potentate who holds court in the time-honored manner, seated on cushions at the far end of a long audience room. A bandolier hangs over one shoulder. In a far corner, his civil servants sit on the floor, leafing through papers. To his right...
...says, it is time for the U.S. to cough up some funds. "If they don't our soldiers will disappear and al-Qaeda will come back," he warns. But Pachakhan certainly will not give up that easily. In Khost, counter-terror operations are an extension of local politics. Pachakhan is hunting down al-Qaeda in his region to "protect our family and friends," says his brother-minister, Amanullah. A top al-Qaeda leader in the area, the brothers claim, is old rival Jamaludin Haqqani, a former mujahedin in Soviet times and later a Taliban minister, who squeezed the royalists...
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