US under fire for backing Afghan warlords

Financial Times
November 6, 2002
By Victoria Burnett in Islamabad

A report accusing a prominent regional governor in western Afghanistan of flagrant human rights abuses has underscored the frailty of democratic rule in the country and the complexities of a nation-building exercise that is being executed alongside the war on terror.

The report, released yesterday by Human Rights Watch, offers a bleak assessment of life in Herat province under the tyrannical reign of Ismail Khan and accuses the US and United Nations of not doing enough to prevent abuses that include torture and beatings.

The report also casts a harsh light on the US policy of giving weapons and money to Afghan factional leaders who are aiding the hunt for al-Qaeda operatives, a practice widely decried as bolstering and lending legitimacy to warlords like Mr Khan.

Coming as President George W. Bush continues to invoke moral grounds for a possible attack on Iraq, the report is a reminder of the thorny path that the US is treading as it attempts to establish democracy in a country riven with factional hatred, while pursuing its objective of hunting down al-Qaeda members.

In the report, Human Rights Watch describes the wealthy province of Herat, under the command of the power-hungry Mr Khan, as a "mini-state" over which the central government, based in Kabul, holds almost no sway.

Women continue to be repressed, although they have better access to education, and citizens are subject to strict Islamic law that prohibits music and television. Arrests by Mr Khan's militias -estimated to number 30,000 - were often arbitrary and detainees routinely beaten with "thorny branches, wooden sticks, cables [and] rifle butts" or tortured with electric shocks to the toes and thumbs, the report said.

Abuses are often ethnically motivated. Mr Khan, a Tajik, took power when the mainly Pashtun Taliban fell in November. One witness describes how a local commander, Bismullah the Mad, picks up Pashtuns at his checkpoint, accuses them of being Taliban and jails and beats them until they confess.

The report charged that the US supplied Mr Khan with "military and cash assistance" in late 2001 and early this year and noted that Mr Khan had played host to high-ranking US officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary.

A US military official in Afghanistan recently said that the US was now giving all confiscated weapons to the central government, but admitted that if a US-allied warlord laid claim to a cache, they would trust him. "The use of warlords to provide security in the short term, instead of international peacekeepers, is the weakest part of the current strategy of the United States and other coalition partners in Afghanistan," Human Rights Watch said.

The UN is aware of the abuses but has displayed "little sign that they consider human rights to be a priority", the report charged.

Manoel de Almeida e Silva, spokesman for the United Nations mission to Afghanistan, yesterday said the UN's role was to attack the root causes of abuse, not police Afghanistan.

"There is no state here. In the meantime we need an international force here and we've been screaming for this for a long time," he said.

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