Standing Their Ground

There was nothing really wrong with the Taliban, says Haji Mangal, a small-time local commander in the city of Khost. They were "good people," he says, who got mixed up with the wrong company—international terrorists, that is. Such politically incorrect remarks would be hard to find in many parts of Afghanistan. But Khost has always been different.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]This is a land of independent, rebellious people and forbidding terrain, where foreigners are rarely welcome. The Soviets found this out in the 1980s when mujahedin—among them a volunteer named Osama bin Laden—made their life here hell. A group of U.S. special forces discovered Khost's dark side several weeks ago when it was ambushed in the city, suffering one dead and another injured. The attackers were either in the pay of the Governor's enemies—the official version—or were simply three angry, local brothers avenging relatives killed in U.S. bombing raids. The city reverberates at night to the sound of U.S. air bombardments, directed at a cave complex some 24 km away, and B-52s pass lazily overhead in the daytime.

Up to 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters are either hiding in the surrounding mountains or slip back and forth across the Pakistan border, Afghan officials maintain. The new rulers of Khost are hosting and helping U.S. special forces, but their main concern is to restore their own power after decades in exile. They have made a good start. Seven brothers from the Zadran clan, aged from 17 to their late fifties, control the key positions of power in Khost and the whole of the two surrounding provinces of Paktia and Paktika. One brother, Amanullah Khan Zadran, looks after the family's affairs in Kabul where he is Minister of Tribal Affairs and Border Questions in the new Cabinet—a position that traditionally has gone to someone from Khost as a way of trying to keep the area more or less under Kabul's control. Another, Pachakhan Zadran, governs Khost, Paktia and Paktika. His deputy for Khost province is his 28-year-old brother, Kamal Khan. The youngest of the family, an engaging 17-year-old named Wazir Khan who was born in exile in Pakistan and who set foot in Afghanistan for the first time a few months ago, liaises with U.S. special forces.

The government of Hamid Karzai in Kabul says it wants to put an end to rule by local magnates, yet in a series of quick-fix deals, it has put them in charge of places like Herat, Kandahar and Khost. In time, Karzai says, the local leaders will be replaced by professionals who are not part of local power structures. Anyone trying to do this in Khost could be in for a tough time. The brothers, fervent royalists, fly the royal banner from official buildings, not the current national flag, and pictures of deposed King Mohammed Zahir Shah adorn their cars. Their own way of ruling has a regal feel. The 55-year-old Pachakhan, Governor of three provinces, is an irascible potentate who holds court in the time-honored manner, seated on cushions at the far end of a long audience room. A bandolier hangs over one shoulder. In a far corner, his civil servants sit on the floor, leafing through papers. To his right, ferocious-looking warriors listen intently, while an obsequious secretary tries hard to finish his master's sentences and is rewarded by Pachakhan with a look of withering disdain. Faintly bored by questions about al-Qaeda strength—it's hard to tell, he shrugs—he livens up a little when asked how much he spends a day to keep his provinces working. "I don't keep count of such things," he says, then adds with a faint smile that it costs him about $30,000 a day to pay his 3,000-man army.

Now, he says, it is time for the U.S. to cough up some funds. "If they don't our soldiers will disappear and al-Qaeda will come back," he warns. But Pachakhan certainly will not give up that easily. In Khost, counter-terror operations are an extension of local politics. Pachakhan is hunting down al-Qaeda in his region to "protect our family and friends," says his brother-minister, Amanullah. A top al-Qaeda leader in the area, the brothers claim, is old rival Jamaludin Haqqani, a former mujahedin in Soviet times and later a Taliban minister, who squeezed the royalists out of Khost in the eighties. The brothers are in essence offering Kabul and the U.S. a deal: give us money and power, and we will keep Khost quiet. It is not clear whether the modernizing government in Kabul will want to accept this. It is even less sure if it will have any choice.