Afghanistan: Warlord, profiteer, idealogue, chief
Source:
The Far Eastern Economic Review Herat, just 120 kilometres from the Iranian border and the former centre of several glittering Central Asian civilizations, is now the site of a tense stand-off between Iran and the U.S.
Herat is now the front line of
America's fight against what U.S. President George W. Bush calls the "axis of
evil." Ismail Khan, 56, is a celebrated and charismatic anti-Soviet warlord who
has liberated the city twice - once in 1992 from the communists and again last
year from the Taliban. Khan is a master of the Afghan art of balancing the
interests of outsiders while extracting maximum benefit from them. In contrast
to his progressive past, Khan has taken on a hardline Islamic ideology. He has
decreed against women taking off the burqa and stopped a celebration of Women's
Day on March 8. "We expected our freedom but Ismail Khan has become more
fundamentalist than he was before. Why can't we have the same rights as the
women in Kabul?" says a female teacher.
