Defense Minister's Trip Highlights Challenges to Afghan Unity

As his plane approached Kandahar's perimeter on April 2, Afghan Defense Minister General Mohammad Qasim Fahim paused briefly in his discussion with aides to take a better look at the Taliban's spiritual birthplace. As the plane prepared to make its descent, he turned to my colleague and me and said: "We are on a mission to invite the local army in Kandahar to join the National Army." But with the Taliban gone, Fahim and his fellow Northern Alliance veterans face a new Kandahari challenge to their legitimacy.

By absorbing fighters in Kandahar - the spiritual and political center of the Taliban's Afghanistan - Fahim would illustrate how the new Afghan government hopes to vanquish the militia. Fahim had rescheduled this trip - his first official visit as Defense Minister - three times because Gul Agha Shirzai, the legendary warlord who now runs Kandahar and neighboring provinces, had announced bad weather and otherwise conveyed his instructions to Fahim to wait. Another reporter and I joined the flight from Kabul to see Shirzai and Fahim meet as potential negotiators.

Fahim knew he had to tread carefully. Before and since Taliban rule, the ethnic Pashtuns who dominate Kandahar have mistrusted ethnic Tajiks like Fahim and Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. Though interim government chairman Hamid Karzai is a Pashtun, his cabinet includes many Tajiks. As such, the Kabul administration has very little leverage other than the backing of the international community. At the same time, that backing - specifically the support of the United States - means a great deal to a war-weary public.

The 48-year-old Shirzai, who uses the title of governor, has 3 wives and 16 children, a plane and a helicopter. More crucially for the army, he reportedly commands 30,000 troops. Fahim, in his pubic talks in the governor's office and elsewhere, politely asked Shirzai to contribute his troops to the force taking shape in Kabul. "The national army is now an all-Afghan army. It belongs to all of us," he said to his guests in the governor's mansion. Shirzai publicly praised the Karzai government and added that this was a time for reconstruction and cooperation among all the nationalities of Afghanistan. From there, the two leaders' views diverged. "The peace process needs to be established under the aegis of [exiled former king] His Majesty Zahir Shah," Shirzai said pointedly.

While this statement may have embarrassed Fahim, it is unlikely to have surprised him. Kandahar is unabashedly royalist. Shirzai mentioned the king's name five times, each time to applause. We saw a number of pictures of the king around the offices and the guesthouse but no pictures of Karzai anywhere. The governor's last words at the official ceremony were: "we believe the permanent peace comes with the king and we are ready to welcome him very warmly."

Two months before a scheduled Loya Jirga, or Grand Council, which will meet to choose a government and governance structure for Afghanistan, Kandahar's Pashtuns are making a major political investment in the ex-king. Already, Kandahar operates as a quasi-independent state with ministries modeled on the central government's. Khalid Pashtun, an American-Afghani who runs "foreign affairs," told me that Shirzai pays him and his colleagues $60 per month. "He pays these and all the other expenses with no help from the Kabul government," he added. Shirzai also pays his 30,000 soldiers from taxes on trade and smuggling. Shirzai and Pashtun stressed the theme of self-sufficiency during our visit. It's unclear how the central government would legitimately support Shirzai's army if he merged it with the forces in Kabul.

Shirzai's finances tend to cause problems for Fahim and his bosses. At one point, Fahim said that it was understandable why Kandaharis needed not worry about money from the central government because it was such a rich state with so many goods passing through it. He mentioned the transit from Kuwait through Pakistan and the transit from Iran through Herat. These mentions may have been a thinly veiled complaint: as does Herat to the north, Kandahar refuses to share its income from cross-border trade with the cash-strapped Kabul government, although Mr. Fahim only alluded to this impasse indirectly.

Money, rather than monarchy, dominated discussion at breakfast the next day. "You need to make a concerted effort at collecting taxes through customs and using your tax for rebuilding," Fahim told his host. But Shirzai replied that the state would need help from Kabul to supplement what it collects in legitimate taxes, because it couldn't afford to overcharge merchants. "If goods come as transit through our region from Iran and Herat and their final destination is Kabul, [the merchants] cannot be asked to pay very much," Shirzai said. "Either the place the goods entered Afghanistan or the final destination are places to tax people at." The reference to Herat, governed by warlord Ismail Khan, was no accident. Shirzai - an old rival of Khan's - seemed to be implying that if Khan pays no taxes to the central government, Shirzai would not pay them either.

Fahim's trip ended without much resolved. On the issue of the national army, Shirzai agreed to send about 100 soldiers to join the national Army in Kabul - largely a symbolic gesture - and he said he was ready to send many more. The Afghan Defense Minister left the ex-Taliban stronghold on a friendly and warm note. The two men embraced each other before the plane took off. But judging by what we saw here, significant splits between the warlord and the central government exist on a host of issues. Little between the country's north and south is likely to resolve itself very quickly.