The first vice president of Afghanistan, Abdul Rashid Dostum, has been away in Turkey, seeking medical treatment, since late May.
“Seeking medical treatment” basically means that he had fled to Turkey for fear of arrest, on charges for the kidnapping and rape of his political rival, Ahmad Ishchi.
The arrest of strongmen who have their own personal armies is a tricky matter. The arrest of populist ethno-nationalist leaders who have large influence on important voting blocks can be a tricky matter as well. Arresting vice presidents is no small matter at any rate.
Before going to a foreign country, for his health, the vice president had been in a long armed standoff with his government, holed up at his house in Kabul.
After Dostum had eventually fled, the government had liked the medical treatment story as well.
The government had initially talked of ending the culture of impunity, with charges of kidnapping and rape by a vice president certainly a good test case to try.
This is the second story of Rashid Dostum holed up in armed standoff at his home in Kabul, after his kidnapping of a political rival, ending in his flight to Turkey. The previous time had been in 2008.
Hamid Karzai allowed him back in the country, just in time to help deliver votes for Hamid Karzai as president.
The U.S. Department of State had disapproved of his return.
A statement released by the US embassy in Kabul said America had "serious concerns about the prospective role of Mr Dostum in today's Afghanistan".
It added: "The issues surrounding him become all the more acute with his return to Afghanistan during this period.
"Among other concerns, his reputed past actions raise questions of his culpability for massive human rights violations."
While the Central Intelligence Agency had been helping Dostum to build the dream house in which he would twice hole up after kidnappings, by giving him bags of cash.
Much of it also still goes to keeping old warlords in line. One is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose militia served as a C.I.A. proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a month from the palace, two Afghan officials said. Other officials said the amount was significantly lower.
Mr. Dostum, who declined requests for comment, had previously said he was given $80,000 a month to serve as Mr. Karzai’s emissary in northern Afghanistan. “I asked for a year up front in cash so that I could build my dream house,” he was quoted as saying in a 2009 interview with Time magazine.
With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan, Matthew Rosenberg, New York Times (April 28, 2013)
The 2009 election is one that the United States had attempted to throw, for Abdullah Abdullah, against Hamid Karzai.
Top US diplomats connived in delaying an Afghan presidential election in 2009 and then tried to manipulate the outcome in a "clumsy and failed putsch" that aimed to oust Hamid Karzai, the US defence secretary at the time, Robert Gates, has said.
In a memoir to be published next week, less than three months before Afghanistan's next critical presidential poll, Gates says the 2009 election was "ugly" and that, though the president was "tainted", "our hands were dirty as well".
…
Senior diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, paid public lip-service to the idea of a level playing field, but was working behind the scenes to ensure the opposite, Gates said. He first supported an unconstitutional three-month delay to the election and then, with the help of the US ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, backed Karzai's rivals, he alleged. Holbrooke aimed to push the poll to a second round that the incumbent would lose, but the candidate who got through cancelled the vote and conceded to Karzai.
"Holbrooke was doing his best to bring about the defeat of Karzai," Gates writes. "What he really wanted was to have enough credible candidates running to deny Karzai a majority in the election, thus forcing a runoff in which he could be defeated."
Tactics included advising candidates, attending rallies and organising high-profile photo opportunities, according to Gates, who is highly critical of Karzai elsewhere in the book.
US 'tried to oust Hamid Karzai by manipulating Afghan elections, Emma Graham-Harrison, Guardian (January 10, 2014)
In 2014, the United States had basically tossed the results of the presidential election, and an internationally-backed process to try to figure out what those results might have been, for the current Unity Government deal between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, which resulted in the current state of a years-long continual deadlock.
No one in the United States has ever cared about these acts of interference in Afghan elections, of course. Other nations interfering in our elections, and our interfering in other nations elections, are just totally different things.
In the month before the 2009 election, James Risen, at the New York Times, had published an article re-raising the issue of the 2001 massacre of some 1000 prisoners of war, by Rashid Dostum’s forces, during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.
American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.
“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”
U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died, James Risen, New York Times (July 10, 2009)
There was then talk of an investigation of the massacre.
President Obama has ordered national security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001.
"The indications that this had not been properly investigated just recently was brought to my attention," Obama told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview during the president's visit to Ghana. The full interview will air 10 p.m. Monday.
"So what I've asked my national security team to do is to collect the facts for me that are known, and we'll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all of the facts gathered up," Obama said.
The inquiry stems from the deaths of at least 1,000 Taliban prisoners who had surrendered to the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in late 2001.
Obama orders review of alleged slayings of Taliban in Bush era, CNN (July 13, 2009)
This investigation of Dostum and his forces never went anywhere. It was pure empty talk. The empty talk was done in the context of a U.S. effort to thwart Dostum’s return and his support of Hamid Karzai, who the U.S. State Department was interfering against in the election.
But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.
U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died, James Risen, New York Times (July 10, 2009)
The strongman Atta Mohammad Noor has long been a rival of the strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum, for power in northern Afghanistan. Violence between their armed factions will sometimes break out. Truces of convenience will sometimes break out as well. Here is an example from 2004.
Dostum convinced Atta that a power-sharing deal was necessary if they were both to avoid being weakened by Kabul. As a result, Atta abandoned any attempt to challenge Dostum's supremacy in the north-west, while Mazar-i Sharif and much of Balkh province was conceded to Atta by Dostum.
Empires of Mud, Antonio Giustozzi
When the United States, in 2014, had brokered the Unity Government deal between Ghani and Abdullah, leaving the Afghan government now paralyzed, it was basically on blackmail from Atta. He was threatening civil war if his side lost.
More recently, though, Atta has been shifting more to Ghani’s side, and Dostum had been more sidelined than ever from power in the Ghani administration.
But then, in another shift, Atta, Mohammad Mohaqiq, and Dostum in exile had formed an alliance. Washington Post reporter Pamela Constable calls this stunning and extraordinary. It follows the stirred up ethnic tensions after the very large truck bombing in Kabul in late May.
Leaders of Afghanistan's three major ethnic minority political parties, all of whom hold senior positions in the government, announced from Turkey on Saturday that they have formed a coalition to save Afghanistan from chaos, issued a list of demands for reforms by President Ashraf Ghani, and vowed to hold mass protests unless they are met.
The stunning development followed weeks of gathering political turmoil and public unrest after a devastating terrorist bombing in the capital on 31 May. It brought together a group of powerful ex-militia leaders, once rivals in a civil war, in an extraordinary alliance that could present Ghani and his shaky government with its most serious challenge since taking office in 2014.
Afghanistan's President under renewed pressure to enact reforms after ethnic leaders form new coalition, Pamela Constable, Independent (July 2)
The war criminal Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, recently invited back into Afghanistan with the support of the United Nations and the United States, in a peace deal, is suspicious of this alliance of other war criminals who were invited to rule Afghanistan with the support of the United Nations and the United States years ago.
Hours after the unofficial announcement of the Coalition for the Rescue of Afghanistan, a senior member of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami labeled the ‘Ankara triangle’ a suspicious move but stressed that the party would support any step which is taken for national unity and national interests.
The draft resolution of the alliance has laid out a number of personal demands – rather than other issues, Hizb-e-Islami member Mohammad Amin Karim told TOLOnews on Saturday.
According to Karim, raising the issue of the CEO Abdullah Abdullah, deputy CEO Mohammad Mohaqiq and the First Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum’s authorities was a personal matter.
Hizb-e-Islami ‘Suspicious’ About Dostum-Atta-Mohaqiq Alliance, Karim Amini, Tolo News (July 1)
After the formation of the alliance, National Directorate of Security head Masoom Stanikzai had then invited Dostum back into Afghanistan.
The Afghan Intelligence, National Directorate of Security (NDS) chief, Masoom Stanikzai has reportedly met the First Vice President General Abdul Rashid Dostum in Turkey.
It is believed the meeting has taken place in the residence of Gen. Dostum in Ankara, days after a new political front was formed involving the Vice President amid political and security instability.
The Office of the First Vice President has confirmed the meeting has taken place on Tuesday in Ankara city.
The Chief of Staff of the First Vice President Enayatullah Babur Farahman has told BBC’s Afghanistan service that Mr. Stanikzai met with Gen. Dostum on Tuesday and requested him to return to country.
Afghan intelligence chief has reportedly met vice president Dostum in Turkey, Khaama Press (July 6)
When Dostum’s plane tried to land in Mazar-i Sharif, though, the government had prevented him from landing.
During nearly two months of de facto exile in Turkey, Afghanistan’s embattled vice president, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, hastily formed a new coalition of the discontented. On Monday, he tried to return to Afghanistan to advance their cause.
But as hundreds of supporters waited late into the night at an airport in northern Afghanistan, the small private plane carrying Mr. Dostum, an ex-warlord, was denied permission to land on orders from the central government, according to several Afghan and Western officials.
The episode will probably deepen Afghanistan’s political crisis, testing the limits of Mr. Dostum, a politician who has been volatile in the past and who has threatened to turn his wrath against President Ashraf Ghani’s government, which he helped bring to power but now accuses of marginalizing him.
Afghan Vice President’s Return Thwarted as Plane Is Turned Back, Mujib Mashal and Najim Rahim, New York Times (July 18)
Never a dull moment in the governance of Afghanistan. Looks like the first vice president will be seeking his medical treatment in Turkmenistan now.
He has denied the accusations, and a spokesman said he left Afghanistan for medical treatment.
A senior official from Dostum's Junbish party, denied that he had tried to enter Afghanistan, saying that a guest of Atta Mohammad Noor, governor of Balkh province, had been due to land in Mazar but had gone to Turkmenistan because of technical issues.
"If General Dostum wants to come to Afghanistan, no power can stop him because he is Afghanistan's vice president," said Junbish deputy head Shujauddin Shuja.
Plane carrying Abdul Rashid Dostum 'denied landing', Al Jazeera (July 18)