Violence Thwarts Northern Afghan City's Rehabilitation

"Bring me to the sight of beautiful Balkh one more time." As our car wound toward the Northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the country's new Minister of Water and Electricity kept reciting this line from a popular old Afghan song. Mohammad Shaker Kargar was singing about a place roughly 22 kilometers to the west, where a sprawling, prosperous city stood for centuries as the envy of the ancient world, until Mongols sacked it in 1220. After serving as a base for American-led troops in the autumn 2001 rout of the Taliban, Mazar shows some traces of beauty. But like local leaders throughout Afghanistan, Mazar's officials plead for help from international agencies.

Those agencies are worried about Mazar, which worries General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek warlord who effectively controls the city. He had left the capital for Mazar in a big hurry on June 25, a few days after gunfights between two rival groups near Sar-e Poul had injured dozens of people, destroyed homes and spurred international aid agencies to talk about leaving the city. We were behind Dostum's convoy by about two hours. We arrived at Mazar's periphery right before dusk. A sentry briefly stopped our convoy to check our papers. They quickly opened the road once they saw Shaker. That was a mixed blessing, as roads in the region can be quite dangerous. According to a June 27 report by Human Rights Watch, seven armed men looted a car belonging to an international aid group on June 8, gang-raping a female employee and beating another woman. Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a UN spokesperson, told reporters on June 25 that many organizations had pulled female staff from the field.

So how can Shaker be singing of beautiful cities? Most Mazaris, while condemning the incidents, also fault aid groups for what they see as a hasty exit. "These are isolated events by people that want to give a bad image of our area to the world," complained a Dostum loyalist in Mazar's security brigade. "An i[international] pullout would encourage more banditry. Thousands of people who are destitute would have to go without food and shelter." Officials invoke a glorious past while they rally behind Dostum, claiming that thugs who resent his legitimacy with Kabul's central government perpetrated the recent crimes. "These people really hate Dostum's guts for clearing up the area of terrorism and thievery," said the official, referring to organized groups that he refused to name. Shaker, himself an ethnic Uzbek, agrees. "The problem is that General Dostum is a little too gentle and moderate for some of these people here," explained Shaker.

Dostum also courts civil-society agencies. He keeps his headquarters in a beautiful old building in Shebarghan, not far from the reported site of Taliban mass graves. I had to wait all afternoon to interview Dostum, as the German ambassador and a group of officers from the United States special forces took precedence. Looking haggard and exhausted, he nevertheless received me in grand fashion. "You know some people are upset with General Dostum," he said. "They are unhappy because I am not a fundamentalist like they. I am a democrat. I believe people have a right to their freedoms. I believe women, for example, ought to be able to show their face in the public as they like, that schools should be open to them," Dostum explained. "These people are against these changes. They have armed followers and they try to destabilize the area with these attacks."

At the same time, Dostum bristles at international complaints about how his own armed followers are treating prisoners near Shebarghan. "They are pressuring us to free these terrorists," he said. "They say the conditions these people are held in are not humane enough. Well, right now the ordinary folk around here hardly get to eat once a day and these foreign groups expect us to treat the prisoners in style." Dostum complained that international pressure had forced transitional president Hamid Karzai to call for amnesty for ordinary Taliban soldiers. "We say that the ordinary people who were in the ranks of the Taliban should be allowed to go to their homes without any concern," Karzai said in his June 21 inaugural address. "There should be no political prisoners in Afghanistan." But Dostum takes a different tack. "Who is going to guarantee that they won't just turn around and join the bandits and the armed groups and start terrorizing people or carry out another attack similar to the one in New York?"

Like Karzai and Shaker, Dostum talks more eagerly about the need for international aid than about internal politics. "Right now we don't have hot water in the Mazar University, we don't have warm food for the refugees, yet, they have both hot water and warm food in the prisons. What is this talk?" he said. I saw some of Dostum's 1,560 prisoners at a detention center not far from the general's house. The cells that Dostum's staff showed me seemed fairly clean and well-kept, and prisoners showed no overt signs of physical abuse or malnutrition. They have been cut off enough from recent developments that an unscarfed female visitor who could speak their language shocked them at first. But after some conversation, a pattern became clearer: some Afghan prisoners praised Dostum for his hospitality while many Pakistani and Arab fighters seemed unrepentant.

If Dostum is trying to evolve from a warlord into a politician, he has already shown a knack for powerful symbols. In Mazar, I saw for the first time, young women in the street with uncovered heads, some wearing heavy makeup. Unlike many Afghan commanders, Dostum has stressed women's freedom to move and express themselves, and displays the several peacocks in his private garden as evidence of his refinement. At the same time, Dostum still rules Mazar like a strongman, which may stall the aid he claims to want.

Dostum rejected an offer by Karzai to serve as Vice President, choosing to effectively patrol his familiar Mazar. He also claimed to have received and rejected a hero's proclamation from Karzai. "Everyone knows Dostum," he said. "I refused to take any official jobs in the capital, because I am needed here. Until safety and security is ensured for all Afghans, I am going to remain here in the North. The North is the gate to Afghanistan. I will stay here at least for the next 18 months."

Commerce and cheer are tentatively returning to this city. Women and vendors talk in the streets. Shaker, the water and power minister, compared the busy scene outside Dostum's compound to the early days of the Taliban's rule. "This is Balkh. The ancient city which is never subdued and is going to appear again in its old glory."