Questions, or, The Fall of the Northern Alliance

Referring back to the last part of the previous post, here’s the question mark that’s been raised above a number of Kabul traffic circles.

Rather apt, particularly regarding recent political news here. Yesterday, it was reported that Gul Agha Sherzai, a somewhat cleaned-up, rotund ex-warlord serving as governor of Nangahar province, along the border with Pakistan, was throwing his hat into the presidential ring, hoping to ride his Pashtun roots and reputation for getting things done–he’s nicknamed “the bulldozer”–into the Presidential Palace after elections in August. Of note was the added news that Ahmed Zia Masood, the brother of the late and famed Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Masood, and one of Karzai’s VPs, would leave Karzai’s fold and support Gul Agha (Check out Sarah Chayes book, The Punishment of Virtue, for more on the troglodytic Kandahar native). This is pretty arcane stuff, and I don’t really think most folks would be as interested as I am, but if you hang in, it gets kinda interesting…

Gul Agha Sherzai, April, 2009

See, the man who succeeded Masood as Northern Alliance overall commander–the Northern Alliance being the collective of ethnic militias that banded together to try to prevent the Taliban from taking over the entire country at the end of the last decade, and Masood being the man Al Qaeda employed two fake journalists to kill on September 9, 2001, because they’d never been able to defeat him on the battlefield and were expecting a fight after 9/11–Marshall Fahim had already announced that he was going to support Karzai. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the thoughtful ex-dentist who became a Northern Alliance mainstay, is also thought to be a likely presidential candidate. So what you had there was three top guys from the Northern Alliance all going different ways. To me it seems like a good time, perhaps overdue, to say the Northern Alliance, or United Front, as it was also calls, no longer exists in any significant form. They had a decent run, aided, after 9/11, by a lot of American cash and a quick grasp of the best ways to make a lot of money and gobble up a lot of property in the vacuum of order following the Taliban’s downfall. But now, they’re badly splintered. They could come back together, since alliances are fleeting and opportunistic in Afghan politics, but any cohesion the group once showed has been undermined by the politicking and the shift in focus from the group’s victories to personal accomplishment–particularly personal accumulation.

The majority of actors in the Afghan political system are looking out for themselves. That’s self-evident and not all that much different from most places. Like most things, however, it’s done here with an acutely Afghan flair. Whether it’s because they are innately venal, or because they feel like they deserve some spoils for their roll in ousting the Taliban (or, earlier, the Russians), or because they don’t trust that the Yanks will stay and that this whole experiment is really going to work so they’re taking what they can while they can, the result is the same: a people with little to no faith in their leaders and leaders who deserve little faith from the people, who are, in some cases, open to the lures of others, traffickers (the ones not in government), the various branches of the Taliban, criminal networks, or more generally, bad people.

Oh, and by the way, when we were driving through town last night, we passed the entrance to the presidential palace and saw Gul Agha’s vehicle drive and head through the gate. Wonder what that’s all about, we thought. A few hours later, it was announced that Gul Agha was not running, that he’d met with Karzai and they’d reached some kind of understanding, and that he might be resigning as Governor, too. There are many moves left in this game. Perhaps he’s running some kind of con. Perhaps he and Fahim could be Karzai’s two vice presidents? That’s a possibility, but a nightmare scenario, because these two are/were big-time warlords with a lot of money-making ventures to protect and a lot of priorities that don’t exactly match up with the average Afghan’s. The causes of reform, human rights, accountability, and anti-corruption (and maybe counter-narcotics and counter-, too) would all get a swift kick in the ass from the inclusion of either, much less both, of these guys on or near the presidential ticket.

And Ahmed Zia Masood, well, he looks like a fool, a man who bet on the wrong horse–the wise move may be betting on all of them, so you can’t lose everything, like Ahmed Zia did. He has few allies remaining now, like the Northern Alliance in general.