Boys in Kabul fixed a tire below a billboard for the presidential campaign of Ashraf Ghani.
KABUL,
Afghanistan — Ashraf Ghani, the apparent front-runner in the Afghan
presidential race this year, was once unstinting in his opinion of one
of the country’s most prominent warlords, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, calling him a “known killer.”
He
said that in 2009, when General Dostum was supporting President Hamid
Karzai for re-election. Now, Mr. Ghani simply calls General Dostum his
running mate.
In
fact, of the 11 campaigns in the April 5 presidential election, six
include at least one candidate on the ticket who is widely viewed as a
warlord, with pasts and policies directly at odds with Western attempts
to improve human rights here.
That
is the field that American military and diplomatic planners have to
consider as they take up President Obama’s call on Tuesday to look past Mr. Karzai and try to get the next Afghan administration to sign a long-term security deal.
For
officials working to finalize the bilateral security agreement, there
is still potential good news: All 11 of the Afghan presidential
candidates say they support the deal, which would allow Western troops
to stay here past 2014.
But
past that, American officials have taken pains to avoid expressing any
preference for a particular candidate, sensitive to accusations from Mr.
Karzai that they interfered in the 2009 vote, when American pressure
led him to agree to a runoff after widespread reports of election fraud.
The
preponderance of candidates with some sort of unsavory past has also
made American officials especially leery of weighing in, despite the
fact that many warlords have been recipients of American support and
cash in the past.
Recently,
for instance, allegations circulated that the American ambassador,
James B. Cunningham, had met secretly with one of the presidential
candidates, Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, who has been accused of war crimes
and who while in Parliament helped pass a law giving amnesty to war criminals and tried to repeal a law outlawing violence against women.
An
American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of
the political sensitivities of the issue, said that Mr. Cunningham and
other senior officials had met with all 11 presidential candidates “as
part of our normal diplomatic engagement.” Asked what would happen if an
accused war criminal were elected, the official said the American
government would not speculate on the outcome of the election.
General
Dostum’s candidacy poses some thorny questions. He still maintains a
private army, and human rights activists accuse him of ordering mass
killings. But he was also a stalwart of the American-allied Northern
Alliance that overthrew the Taliban in 2001, and he is a powerful
political leader among Afghanistan’s ethnic Uzbek minority.
General Dostum is now the first vice-presidential candidate on the ticket of Mr. Ghani, who is regarded as the front-runner based on an early poll
conducted for the American government. Mr. Ghani is a former World Bank
official who helped negotiate an initial version of the security
agreement, and as a Karzai adviser he presided over the handover of
responsibility for security to Afghan forces.
His
most significant challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, who ran second to Mr.
Karzai in 2009, also has ticket members branded as warlords: his
vice-presidential candidates — Mohammad Khan, a former leader of the
insurgent party Hezb-i-Islami, and Mohammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara leader of
the party Wahdat — have both been accused of abuses by human rights officials.
Spokesmen
for Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah said on Wednesday that upon election
they would quickly sign the bilateral security agreement with the
Americans. Both also expressed concern about Mr. Karzai’s refusal to
sign it before then.
“We
request the U.S. should wait, and in May there will be a new
president,” said Mr. Ghani’s spokesman, Fraidoon Barekzai. “Giving
ultimatums and bringing pressure only create sentiments that would harm
the process.”
Of
the leading five presidential tickets, the only two without members
accused of being warlords are those of Zalmay Rassoul, the low-profile
former foreign minister, and Qayum Karzai, the president’s brother and
the owner of restaurants in Baltimore.
Qazi
Mohammad Amin Waqad, a tribal leader appointed by President Karzai to
negotiate the withdrawal of either Mr. Rassoul or Qayum Karzai, said the
president had thrown his weight behind Mr. Rassoul. The president’s
brother was debating whether to withdraw, Mr. Waqad said, and if so, who
to endorse.
Human rights activists are alarmed by the number of warlords so obviously still in the political mainstream.
Ajmal Baluchzada, a member of the Transitional Justice Coordination Group,
a coalition of Western-financed groups that lobbies for past war crimes
to be acknowledged and punished, said that some of the men initially
tried to stay out of the spotlight after the Taliban’s overthrow,
worried about potential war-crimes proceedings. “But as time passed and
they saw nothing happen, and they saw the Taliban growing stronger, it
made them want to get involved.”
Most
analysts believe that none of the 11 tickets in the race will get the
necessary 50 percent of the vote in the initial balloting, which will
create a runoff between the top two vote-getters.
That
will give influential figures on the also-ran tickets an opportunity to
barter their support in the runoff for a position in the government of
the eventual winner. Warlords tend to be strongly identified with their
ethnic groups — Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek or Hazara — and can usually
deliver blocks of guaranteed votes as well as campaign money.
“For
me, it will be the continuation in power of the same group,” said Sima
Samar, head of the country’s human rights commission. “I’m sorry to say
this, but this is the truth.”
Some
of the candidates seen as warlords have disbanded their private armies
as they moved into politics. Others, like General Dostum, still have
personal militias and do not hesitate to use them. As recently as last
June, General Dostum forced the governor of Jowzjan Province out of
office by surrounding his home with gunmen.
Even
so, the general has tried to burnish his public image by offering a bit
of contrition over his rough tactics. “There were no white pigeons in
the civil war of the two decades,” he said in an early campaign speech.
“It is time that we all apologize to the people of Afghanistan for the
negative impacts of our policies.”
Mr.
Baluchzada, of the Transitional Justice Coordination Group, who lost
three relatives in the civil war years, said that was not good enough:
“If he wants to apologize, he first needs to admit all that he did.”
A
spokesman for the Ghani campaign, Hameedullah Farooqi, said that Mr.
Ghani’s condemnation of General Dostum in 2009 was just
heat-of-the-moment politicking. “Mr. Ghani told us that a politician
talks and criticizes lots of things when he runs for the presidency,”
Mr. Farooqi said. “We believe none of the people on our ticket are
accused of war crimes by any national or international court.”
That
is true. Still, the United Nations and other human rights groups accuse
General Dostum of being personally responsible for the mass killings of
thousands of Taliban prisoners and other opponents during the civil war years.
All
of the six tickets with identified warlords on them have rejected that
characterization. They prefer to call the men mujahedeen, for their
roles in fighting the Soviet invasion and the Taliban’s rule — with the
heavy support and funding of American officials. That relationship
positioned them to consolidate power after the Taliban fell, and many
have become wealthy from development and aid money.
“To
some extent America and the West is responsible — they’re the reason we
still have these warlords,” said Mohammad Aleem Sayee, the former
governor who was run out of Jowzjan by General Dostum and who is now
working in Qayum Karzai’s campaign. “They supported them and let them
stay in power.”
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