In Need? Call the Warlord

HERAT, Afghanistan — The emir of the west, his excellency the lord and high ruler of five provinces, Gov. Ismail Khan, was seated on a plush love seat, his stubby fingers clicking a set of red prayer beads. He was about to answer a question he considered impertinent. His dark eyebrows shot up, and his wild silver beard began to twitch.

"We don't need any military trainers," he said, responding to a suggestion that U.S. Special Forces troops are training his soldiers. "We know quite well how to fight."

For the last quarter of a century, Khan has been leading men into battle--against the Soviets, against fellow commanders, against the Taliban. He is a man of many titles: emir, general, governor, commander. But more than anything else, Ismail Khan is a warlord.

In a nation where warlords write the rules, Khan is a king among kings. No rival threatens his primacy in a swath of western Afghanistan roughly the size of Utah. With thousands of men under arms and an armada of tanks and cannons, he is one of the country's most powerful men. Every civil servant and functionary in five provinces answers to him.

Khan was the first warlord to receive a personal visit from interim Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai. The British general who heads the international peacekeeping force in the capital, Kabul, traveled to Herat for an audience with him. So did a delegation of former Taliban leaders who begged for the release of 600 men imprisoned by the warlord, who himself was jailed by the Taliban for three years.

Afghanistan's struggling interim government cannot survive without accommodating Khan and a handful of other dominant warlords. Khan has promised to cooperate with Karzai's government, but he is an ethnic Tajik and Karzai is a Pushtun. Another Pushtun, former Afghan king Mohammad Zaher Shah, will have to contend with tribal leaders like Khan when he returns to Afghanistan after 29 years in exile.

Fighting among warlords allowed the Taliban to take power in 1996. But now, after battling to defeat the Islamic extremists, warlords and their followers feel entitled to retain their positions of power.

In the east, Hazrat Ali, Haji Abdul Qadir and Haji Mohammed Zaman are jockeying for power in the Jalalabad area and have national ambitions. Other potential threats to Karzai's government include Gul Agha Shirzai of Kandahar and former President Burhanuddin Rabbani.