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R E G I O N: Karzai picks Dostam to command army

* Former Taliban minister negotiating with Afghan government

KABUL: President Hamid Karzai has appointed General Abdul Rashid Dostam, a feared Afghan warlord who ran against him for the presidency, to head the country’s fledgling army, a source close to Karzai said Tuesday.

“General Dostam has been appointed as the Chief of Staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces. The appointment will officially be announced via national TV tonight,” the source told AFP.

The appointment is likely to alarm rights groups who have been calling for those who committed war crimes during the country’s bloody civil war to be brought to justice. Dostam, one of the most powerful men in northern Afghanistan, won 10 percent of last October’s presidential vote, mostly in northern provinces where he garnered much support from the ethnic Uzbek and Turkmen communities.

However he was named by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission for the violence of his troops during the civil war which raged in the Afghan capital between 1992 and 1995, and for his bombing of Kabul during that period. Karzai’s spokesman Jawed Ludin did not say if Dostam had been made the country’s military chief, but hinted that he would be given a key post.

“I think General Dostam will be offered a very good, respectable and appropriate job within the government,” Ludin told AFP.

Ludin insisted that Dostam’s appointment to a government post was “a good thing, a positive one.”

Dostam played a major role in overthrowing the Soviet-backed communist regime of which he himself was part for many years. During the subsequent civil war era, he switched sides between rival mujahedin commanders.

As the Taliban conquered large swathes of the country in the mid-1990s he fled to Turkey. After US-led forces ousted the regime in late 2001 he reappeared in possession of tanks and heavy weapons.

He has now ceded most of them as part of a UN-backed disarmament drive.

An ethnic Uzbek, he was appointed as Karzai’s envoy to the north soon after the fall of the Taliban and an advisor to the defence ministry.

Talks with Taliban: The former Taliban foreign minister is playing a key role in efforts to persuade members of the ousted regime to join amnesty talks with the Afghan government, officials said Tuesday.

Wakeel Ahmed Mutawakel, who was detained after the ultra-Islamic militia was toppled by US-led forces in late 2001, is said to be a leading moderate and would therefore be an ideal go-between for Kabul. “Recently members of the former Taliban regime who have come (for talks with the government) are of course in consultation with him,” President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman Jawed Ludin told a weekly press conference.

The Afghan government has launched a major reconciliation drive to get moderate Taliban to rejoin the nation’s political and social life. Continuing attacks by remnants of the regime on US-led and Afghan troops are hindering international efforts to get the war-wracked country back on its feet.

Karzai has previously extended an olive branch to all but some 100 or 150 Taliban who are alleged to have links with Al-Qaeda or to have committed war crimes. afp

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