LUKE HARDING, Islamabad | Friday
TRIBAL warlords who have spent the past five years in hibernation were swiftly re-emerging on Wednesday to try to get control of large swaths of southern Afghanistan – moves that are plunging the country back into the chaotic and feuding pre-Taliban era of the early 1990s.
As Taliban forces retreated, tribal Pashtun leaders seized power in the southern province of Oruzgan and were poised to move into the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Forces loyal to one local warlord, Arif Khan, have already seized Kandahar airport to the north. Tribal elders also took over at Gardez, 100km south of Kabul. In the east several tribal leaders began staking claims to the strategic city of Jalalabad.
The rapid fragmentation of Afghanistan into a mosaic of rival fiefdoms dismayed supporters of attempts to introduce a coalition government in Kabul. They said the resurgent warlords represented a serious obstacle to creating a broad-based administration. Afghanistan, they feared, is now sliding back into the bad time it suffered after the fall of pro-Soviet regime in 1992, when rival mujahedin groups battled for power, destroying Kabul in the process.
You create a vacuum and somebody has to fill it. It is a rule of physics, said one source.
The Taliban showed on Wednesday that they are not entirely finished, even though their regimes dominion has shrunk to less than 20% of the country. In the northern provincial capital of Kunduz, up to 20 000 Taliban fighters refused to surrender, despite being surrounded by opposition troops.
In the south Taliban soldiers fired from hilltop positions on the 200 tribesmen occupying Kandahar airport. The latest message I have received is that the Taliban forces have established a defensive circle around greater Kandahar, an anti-Taliban Pashtun tribal leader, Hamid Karzai, was reported as saying on Thursday.
On Wednesday night a Northern Alliance representative claimed that Kandahar had fallen. The scene inside the city was one of total chaos, said Dr Abdullah, the foreign minister of the alliance, which has rushed to set up its own government in Kabul. Its absolute confusion. The Taliban have lost control of the situation and no Taliban officials are to be found.
The Talibans last remaining senior official in Islamabad, Sohail Shaheen, insisted that the regime was regrouping after what he described as a tactical withdrawal from the main cities.
Taliban commanders were forming a new plan, he said. In all these provinces there is no clash. It was a strategic and tactical withdrawal from all these provinces.
He added: About Kabul, we wanted to save the lives of the civilians of Kabul. For the protection of their lives we withdrew from Kabul. There is a new regrouping and, of course, there will be a new programme worked out.
Reports in several of Wednesdays Pakistani papers said the Taliban leadership have drawn up a secret plan to send the bulk of their fighters over the border into Pakistans sympathetic Pashtun-dominated tribal areas in the mountains. From there they will consolidate and prepare for a long guerrilla war. The News said some Taliban have already crossed into Pakistan from the border town of Torkham. But more reliable observers say the Taliban have been comprehensively wiped out. The Taliban movement is history. Mullah Omar was the head of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It doesnt exist any more, one aid worker said. The Taliban might emerge as one of many factions, or revert to their previous mujahedin incarnation.
Afghanistan was now entering an old era – rather than a new one – defined by silly politics in which rival factions competed for territory and influence, one source said. We are back to the civil war problem.
You drop hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bombs to bring about the re-emergence of warlordism.
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