Word: uzbek
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...echoing the Gettysburg Address as he spoke recently to a large political gathering in northern Afganistan. His speech was a booming appeal for a future that offered Afghans "government by the people, for the people." To accompany his new rhetoric, Dostum also has a new look. The powerfully built Uzbek general has shaved his beard--his thick trademark moustache remains--bought some new neckties and found a good tailor...
...echoing the Gettysburg Address as he spoke recently to a large political gathering in northern Afganistan. His speech was a booming appeal for a future that offered Afghans "government by the people, for the people." To accompany his new rhetoric, Dostum also has a new look. The powerfully built Uzbek general has shaved his beard - his thick trademark moustache remains - bought some new neckties and found a good tailor...
...Dostum truly has evolved, there's no doubt a strong element of realpolitik behind the transformation. Since the defeat of the Taliban, Dostum has reasserted control over his home turf, the ethnically Uzbek and Turkmen provinces of Jowzjan and Faryab. But the onetime master of the north now finds his position challenged by the growing power of his 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...
...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...
...warlords—minus a few notable exceptions—are back to their old tricks. Do not be fooled by those pictures of Hamid Karzai posing with George Bush and Tony Blair. Everyone in Afghanistan knows that real power resides with people like Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek warlord who controls Mazar-i-Sharif; Ishmael Khan, ruler of Herat and recipient of Iranian tanks and money; and the exiled Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a religious fanatic who currently resides in Iran but who is rumored to be staging a comeback...