When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, one of the most important warlords we aligned with was General Abdul Rashid Dostum.
Gary Schroen’s book First In describes how some of our earliest bribes had been to get Mohammed Fahim-affiliated commanders to work with Rashid Dostum-affiliated commanders.
I knew, however, that our choice of Dostum to be the first commander outside the Panjshir to receive a CIA team would not sit well with General Fahim and the NA leadership.
First In: How Seven CIA Officers Opened the War on Terror in Afghanistan, Gary Schroen, Random House
Tin-foil-wrapped bricks of cash were handed out, by the CIA, to get past this reluctance.
In 2004, the Bush administration sent a B-1 bomber to buzz Dostum’s house, to express irritation with Dostum’s warring with his warlord rival, Atta Mohammad Noor.
In 2008, Dostum had fled the country, after being charged in the kidnapping of Akbar Bai, a former ally of his. Hamid Karzai was trying to reduce the power of the warlords at that time.
In the elections of 2009, Hamid Karzai brought Dostum back, for his ability to deliver a block vote. In what Robert Gates called a clumsy failed putsch, the United States was seeking to oust Karzai. Karzai brought Dostum back to shore up his position. This was ugly all around, Gates says.
"It was all ugly: our partner, the president of Afghanistan was tainted, and our hands were dirty as well," Gates wrote. "Our future dealings with Karzai, always hugely problematic, and his criticisms of us, are at least more understandable in the context of our clumsy and failed putsch."
US 'tried to oust Hamid Karzai by manipulating Afghan elections', Emma Graham-Harrison, Guardian
In the elections of 2014, Ashraf Ghani selected Dostum as his candidate for first vice president. Ghani had once called Dostum a “known killer”. But again, in an election, Dostum can deliver a block vote.
In 2009, ambassador Karl Eikenberry had told Hamid Karzai that “a return of Dostum to Afghanistan would be unacceptable to the United States and most of the international community, and would endanger future international support for the new Afghan government”. In 2014, the presence of Abdul Rashid Dostum in Afghanistan was clearly not so unacceptable to the United States. Neither was his presence unacceptable to the United States in 2001.
Afghanistan can have Dostum now. But we do not want the guy here in the United States.
The New York Times reports that the United States has refused a visa to Dostum, who planned to address the United Nations in New York, on fighting drug trafficking.
As first vice president of Afghanistan, Abdul Rashid Dostum is the second-ranking official in a country that is almost wholly dependent on American military and financial might, and he is eager to visit Washington and discuss how best to overcome the Taliban.
The only problem is that Mr. Dostum, who has been accused of war crimes, is not welcome in the United States.
Mr. Dostum’s ascent to the vice presidency of Afghanistan, despite his past, exemplifies a central American failure in a war it is now fighting for the 15th year. In its effort to defeat the Taliban, the United States has built and paid for a government that is filled with the kinds of warlords and power brokers whose predatory ways helped give rise to the insurgent movement in the 1990s, and who American officials say pose as much of a threat to the stability of Afghanistan as the insurgents themselves.
And so, this month, American officials found themselves in the unusual position of threatening to deny a visa to the No. 2 official in a government whose survival depends on the presence of nearly 10,000 American troops and tens of billions of dollars a year in assistance.
Afghanistan’s Vice President Is Barred From Entering U.S., Matthew Rosenberg, New York Times
This is just ugly all around.
A warlord vice president of a US- and UN-backed narco-state, addressing the UN on fighting drugs, would have some very deep pretending to it.
In 2012, Asadullah Khalid, head of the National Directorate of Security, with an especially bad record for torture, was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt.
Asadullah Khalid, a US-backed torturer, had been attacked by the Taliban using a bomb hidden in the attacker’s rectum. The attacker pretended to be seeking peace. The story is ugly, all around.
Khalid was given a national security exemption to the human rights bar on him entering the United States, for hospital treatment here. Publicity photographs of Barack Obama and Leon Panetta visiting Khalid were released.
In the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by the United States, General Dostum’s forces had rounded up Taliban and other prisoners, and massacred them.
The killings took place over three days in late 2001, when Taliban prisoners were stuffed into shipping containers with no food or water. Many suffocated, according to survivors and witnesses, and others died when guards shot into the containers. All are believed to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan, the seat of Mr. Dostum’s domain in northern Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s Vice President Is Barred From Entering U.S., Matthew Rosenberg, New York Times
In 2009, when the United States had turned against Hamid Karzai, and was seeking to prevent Dostum’s return, James Risen re-raised the Dasht-i-Leili massacre.
While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.
A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstating General Dostum.
U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died, James Risen, New York Times
State Department officials recently have tried to derail Dostum's reappointment as military chief of staff to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the newspaper reported, citing several senior officials who suggested the administration "might not be hostile to an inquiry."
Obama orders review of alleged slayings of Taliban in Bush era, Anderson Cooper, CNN
By 2014, with Dostum affiliated with Ashraf Ghani not Hamid Karzai, US objection had disappeared.
This hypocrisy of ours, our having supported men in Afghanistan who are properly legally barred from entering our own nation, our objecting to or justifying US support of warlords depending on short term need, our objecting to the corruption of leaders we have been bribing from the moment we arrived, our barring one human rights violator while being photographed supporting another, is ugly all around.