Foreigners beware as Alliance hard men lord it over Kabul

Sydney Morning Herald

By Christopher Kremmer, Herald Correspondent in Kabul

Taxi driver Mohammed Younis knew something was wrong the moment we entered

the Afghan capital.

"You speak Pashto?" said the incredulous local from whom we sought

directions.

In Kabul, now in the hands of the Persian-speaking Northern Alliance,

speaking Afghanistan's other main language is asking for trouble.

Hours later in the hotel car park, Mr Younis was detained for questioning by

plain clothes intelligence officials of the Alliance regime.

"The black leather jackets" are back, said a local shopkeeper, referring to

the shadowy image and dress preference of Afghanistan's secret police since

communist times.

Under the Taliban, Pakistanis like Mr Younis could travel freely to and from

Afghanistan without passports or visas. Many had joined the student

militia's battle to defeat the Alliance in the civil war.

Now, to be a Pakistani in Kabul is life-threatening.

"Any Pakistani who shows his face here will be lynched by the mob," said

Hashmatullah Mosleh, an adviser at the Alliance's Foreign Ministry.

Officials of the ministry yesterday told journalists that they would need to

apply for visas if they wanted to remain in the country.

Foreign ministry? Visas? Suddenly, the Alliance is acting like a government,

tightening its grip on the levers of power.

In doing so, it is pre-empting a process by which the United Nations hopes

to establish a broad-based government representing Afghans from all groups,

and having friendly relations with its neighbours.

And it's not just Afghans the Alliance is pushing around.

Britain has announced that it will delay indefinitely the deployment of

thousands of its troops to Afghanistan because of Alliance objections.

The 100 commandos of the Special Boat Service deployed to secure the Bagram

air base, 15 kilometres north of Kabul, will be the last if the Alliance has

any say about foreign troops entering the country.

The UN secured a rare success in its tortured diplomacy on Monday when the

Alliance foreign minister, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, agreed to send a

representative to a meeting of all Afghan factions to be held outside the

country.

The Alliance had been insisting that the meeting take place in a city under

its control. But wherever it is held, the hard men of the Alliance will be

entrenched in Kabul.

The militia's interior minister, Younis Qanooni, is back in the office at

the ministry he vacated when the Taliban seized the city five years ago.

Asked if his presence made him the de facto minister, he replied: "No. I

just found this place suitable for myself because there is furniture and

carpets and everything here."

If the Alliance gets any more comfortable, it will take a jackhammer to

release its grip.

It seem to have forgotten how it got there, courtesy of relentless United

States-led bombing of Taliban forces.

The Alliance senses that the West - having crippled and demonised the

Taliban, and unwilling to send troops into this wildly unpredictable country

- has no-one else to turn to.

The presence in the capital of Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of the largest

constituent member of the Alliance, the Jamiat-e Islami, has alarmed leaders

of the Pashtun tribes, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group.

"This man Rabbani is going to be an obstacle," says Professor Rasoul Amin, a

prominent Pashtun intellectual in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.

Rabbani is a life-long Islamist who supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War

and had close ties with the Arab fighters grouped around Osama bin Laden.

In an interview yesterday, the US National Security Adviser, Condaleeza

Rice, described him as a "complicated figure", but Washington is determined

to look on the bright side, at least until it succeeds in its main objective

of catching bin Laden.

"We don't expect there to be a pre-emptive government set up in Kabul ...

this is for the UN," Dr Rice said. "We believe that the Northern Alliance

understands that."