Afghan power brokers

Playing the tribal loyalty card

KHOST, AFGHANISTAN - When jeeps and pickup trucks come barreling through town, they bear the sullen portrait of Badsha Khan Zadran on the windshield, as though it were a registration document.

When Badsha Khan – the most powerful warlord in southeastern Afghanistan – enters a room, a hush descends. People make way or stand up as though a judge were entering a court. Badsha Khan was the first of the country's many military bosses to challenge Hamid Karzai outright, despite enjoying a key cooperative relationship with US-led forces in the war against Al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives – or perhaps emboldened by it.

One of Badsha Khan's sons, Abdul Wali Khan, was content working in the automobile import-export business in Dubai when his father paid him a visit last December. But, Abdul Wali, a mild-mannered 20-something, says his dad made him an offer he couldn't refuse: Take up the post as commander in the city of Gardez in his father's army of approximately 3,000 men, or don't call yourself a son of Badsha Khan. "I told him I didn't want to go back to that bullet land," says Abdul Wali, who is slighter than his father – a man in his mid-50s with the physique of a long out-of-shape linebacker. "I didn't know what to do but to accept the orders of my father."

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Afghan power brokers
DOSTUM Deputy Defense Minister		KHAN Governor of Herat		GAILANI Religious Leader		ZADRAN Leader of Zadran tribe		KARZAI Interm leader
• Map of ethnic regions   • Slideshow   • About the loya jirga

Inside Badsha Khan's inner circles, no one so much as engages him in debate. Even in the family-run military business, it's just not the way the chain of command works. "Whenever Haji [an honorific used for a Muslim who's made the pilgrimage to Mecca] is sitting in at a family meeting, no one else will speak," says younger brother Kamal Khan Zadran, leader of the local troops in Khost that work with US-led forces. "When he sits, no one speaks without being asked first. The only one he's not strict with is his wife," he says.

Filial loyalty is a card Khan plays well. He promotes himself as the guardian of the "real Pashtuns" – a dig at the educated and more cosmopolitan Pashtuns like Karzai. But inside the Pashtun ethnic group, which makes up about 40 percent of the country, tribes have rarely been united.

The Zadrans are the largest tribe in southeastern Afghanistan – important enough that last December Karzai appointed one of Khan's younger brothers, Amanullah Zadran, as his minister of borders and tribal affairs.

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But Karzai also tried to sap Badsha Khan's overambitious power grabs by appointing Abdel Hakim Taniwal – of the rival Tani tribe – as governor in Khost. The two men surround their compounds with their closest relatives – and do not recognize each other's authority.

In a part of the country where Pashtun tribal ties override everything from political ideology to Islam, Badsha Khan says he has thousands of supporters – in three provinces and beyond – firmly on his side. That is far more, he says, than the loyalty that Karzai will ever claim. "He is not a Pashtun. OK, he is, but he does not take care of the real Pashtuns," says Badsha Khan, who gives straightforward, confident answers in a gravely voice that emanates from a huge chest, bejeweled by an ammunition belt. "I am higher than him, because I have fought Al Qaeda. I am the one who helped the US forces."

Indeed, Badsha Khan was the first of the original mujahideen leaders to storm back into southeastern Afghanistan when the Taliban showed signs of buckling under US airstrikes last fall; he had waited out the last years of the war in Pakistan. Though the Taliban were also Pashtuns, they are far more fundamentalist, come from another area, and most important, are not of his tribe. He lent both men and information to the US-led forces to help sweep up Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in return for funds and training. He then blamed the US for letting them get away because the US didn't act on his information quickly enough.

American officials have been subtly backing away from that partnership. But pulling out the plug completely may only confirm the feeling among many here that the US abandons its allies when they are no longer needed, just as Washington lost interest in the mujahideen after the Soviet withdrawal.

Badsha Khan feels entitled to run the troublesome swath of the country where his branch of the Zadran tribe, the Dary Khel, predominate. The many tribal chiefs who pay homage to his power agree, and together warn they may stage a boycott of the loya jirga to protest Tajik predominance at the expense of the Pashtuns.

One of the trickiest things about power derived from primacy in a large tribe, though, is that there is often competition from other tribes or subtribes. The most important rival for Badsha Khan is Ibrahim Haqqani, who is now a military commander for Paktia Province. He is also a Zadran and enjoys great support from the central government in Kabul. And the name Haqqani – his brother is Jalal Ud Din Haqqani, the Taliban's commander for southeastern Afghanistan – still commands support from some of the area's more radical fundamentalists.

Though tribal fealty is paramount, some here gripe privately about wanting a better future and the need to rebuild – goals that may be tough to achieve with an aging, unschooled warlord who wants to rule three provinces both as if by divine right and because he has the most guns.

Savvier members of his family pay lip-service to the idea of melding all of the country's tribal militias into one national army. But in reality, anything that smacks of taking away Badsha Khan's power for the good of the nation is attacked as the wicked work of the Northern Alliance. Unlikely to share power, he has decided to buck the system – and could be a fly in the ointment this week. If he shows up in Kabul, some analysts say, he could be arrested. If he stays away, other Zadran may sit out too, in effect staging a boycott.

The Badsha Khan clan are royalists and have long campaigned for King Zahir Shah's return, which the former monarch cannot ignore. And although the electoral show will probably go on without him, Badsha Khan's strength and bluster could contribute to instability in a part of Afghanistan that straddles the tribal areas of Pakistan – potentially the most important new front in the US war on terror.