Word: qadir
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...know there could be a great political cost from doing this," says the Western diplomat, "but that price, no matter how much, will be less than losing the president." Two weeks ago Kabul lost a key figure to assassins' bullets, deputy president and public works minister Haji Abdul Qadir. The loss was of more than another politician; Qadir was Karzai's rallying point for the vast Pashtun south which feels excluded - and threatened - by the Northern Alliance. Though the Qadir killing is most likely related to the drug trade, local power plays or revenge against a mujahedin warrior who made...
That left Abdul Qadir. As the Taliban collapsed, the former warlord returned to the family power base around the eastern city of Jalalabad. He took possession of property the Taliban had used as an ammunition dump: three buildings full of rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, tank shells and "enough AK-47 cartridges to last for 10 years," as one of his fighters told a TIME correspondent late last year. The ammo was enough to make Qadir, already rich from the opium trade, a power to be reckoned with not only in Jalalabad (where two other warlords laid claims to power...
While it wasn't immediately clear who killed Abdul Qadir, he had lived a controversial life and left a long list of enemies. In 1996 he welcomed Osama bin Laden to the region and gave him refuge in the opium-rich area around Jalalabad. Some of Qadir's rivals say he took $10 million to give up Jalalabad to the Taliban. When the Taliban fell, he reclaimed the governorship and, as part of the "new" Afghanistan, helped lead a heavy-handed crackdown on narcotics...
Local traders and drug barons, many of whom had been supporters of Qadir, were furious. Moreover, although Qadir was vocal about the rights of the Pashtun, some viewed his cooperation with the Tajik-dominated regime in Kabul--and his lack of support for the reinstatement of Afghanistan's king, Zahir Shah--as a betrayal."My efforts have been to urge people here to have patience," Qadir told TIME in June...
...death illustrates the nature of public life in this nation. As his political and military fortunes mounted, so did the number of his enemies, some of whom had once been allies. Sooner or later, Qadir's luck was bound...