RASHID DOSTUM

[swamidada]

Rebel, Kingmaker, and Accused War Criminal: The Last Confessions of an Afghan Warlord

Jason Motlagh
Sun, July 30, 2023 at 7:58 AM CDT

IT’S PUSHING MIDNIGHT when my armored escort pulls up to a high-walled compound on the outskirts of Ankara, the Turkish capital. After more than a year and a half of waiting, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s most notorious and elusive warlord, has summoned me for an interview, his first since the Taliban takeover that forced him to flee his homeland. Special police patrol the periphery of his estate for assassins, and a pair of fighting mastiffs bark at me as I’m led past a fountain up to a villa fronted with candy-cane columns and giant golden lions bathed in floodlight. An adjacent reception room is stocked with Red Bull and assorted mementos: swords, a framed picture of Dostum and a U.S. Special Forces officer poring over a map, and a statuette of a rearing stallion.

Dostum enters wearing a striped Uzbek cape and extends a frail hand. He’s no longer the beefy warrior I remember. His movement is slow, his cheeks slack and pale. But he still sports his soldier’s buzz cut, underlined with thick black eyebrows that arch into daggers when his temper flares. I remind him that the last time we met was in August 2009, in his Sheberghan stronghold in northwestern Afghanistan, the day he returned from Turkish exile to deliver a million votes that helped get Hamid Karzai reelected as president. The Taliban was resurgent and Dostum swore that, if asked, his militia would mop up the militants without any help from government forces. “By having General Dostum in the northern provinces,” he told me back then, with his usual flair for speaking in the third person, “the people will again feel like they are in the belly of their mothers.”

Now 69, Dostum is an improbable survivor of more than four decades of war and treachery. An ethnic Uzbek born to a poor family in the gas fields of Jowzjan province, he was a street brawler who rose to power through a singular mix of bravado and opportunism, making and breaking alliances through the 1979-89 Soviet-Afghan War, the 1990s civil war, the first Taliban regime, and the campaign that overthrew them in 2001. Pro-women’s rights and against Islamic extremism, he became kingmaker under the U.S.-backed government, mobilizing legions of Uzbek supporters at the polls in exchange for cabinet posts. But allegations of war crimes — notably the massacre of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in his forces’ custody — cast a dark pall over his career, stoked by violent outbursts against political rivals. American officials actively tried to sideline him as their democracy project faltered, and a growing list of enemies tried to kill him.

Once a heavy drinker of Russian vodka, liver problems forced Dostum to give up booze and banquet feasts several years ago. He suffers from diabetes, and there were rumors he’d been poisoned before the Taliban swept to power.

At the height of the Taliban’s summer offensive, Dostum confirms to Rolling Stone, he was in fact poisoned by unknown “enemies.” Unresponsive, he was transferred to Mazar-i-Sharif, the largest city in northern Afghanistan, and then medevaced by plane to Ankara for treatment. “It was really bad — it nearly killed him,” his son, Babur, one of 10 children, tells me later. With the Taliban closing in on Sheberghan, his older brother, Yar Mohammad, tried to hold the line, but with Dostum away and hospitalized, and U.S. forces pulling out for good, “morale was low.”

Jowzjan, Dostum’s home province, was the second to fall, accelerating a domino effect that was all the more demoralizing given the north’s history as a bastion of anti-Taliban resistance. Absent U.S. air support, many Afghan security-force units — hamstrung by casualties and desertions, lack of supplies and food — surrendered without firing a shot. Dostum briefly returned to defend Mazar-i-Sharif, before escaping overland to Uzbekistan. In less than a week, the entire country was under Taliban control.

Dostum blames the collapse of the Afghan military on President Ashraf Ghani’s inept leadership. “We were in the hands of a person who could not rally people who were against the Taliban. I am a military man and know every part of Afghanistan,” he says, outlining a plan to take back districts and cities and force the militants to start peace talks in earnest. “I had the ability and could do the job easily. Instead, Ghani was backbiting me … and the Americans did not listen to me because of him.”

As Ghani dithered, Dostum says he pleaded with top U.S. officials and the CIA station chief in Kabul. “I told them Ghani can’t do anything, that Kabul will fall” unless I am provided with air support and munitions. “They did not give me a single bullet,” he grumbles. “They did not even ask for my suggestions.” Near the end of a rambling, 46-minute opening monologue, he insists his “American friends” should have backed him given his past success against the Taliban, and still should — before making unprompted references to some of the worst war-crime allegations against him.

“There has been lots of bad propaganda that Dostum killed prisoners, Dostum did this or that,” he says. “It’s good to use this opportunity to talk about these things, too.”

Afghan Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum arrives at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, July 22, 2018.REUTERS/Omar Sobhani - RC1228A61910
Afghan Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum arriving at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, July 22, 2018
The longer he goes on, the reasons for his expansiveness become clear: an old man with a sense of an ending, keen to set his record straight. For all his baritone bluster, Dostum’s traction inside Afghanistan is gone, Taliban control all but complete. Though much-respected by American military men who fought alongside him, the U.S. government turned its back long ago, wary of his mercurial antics and hungover from a 20-year, $2 trillion nation-building failure. And the Afghan resistance-in-exile is largely composed of has-beens whose greed and misrule are in no small part to blame for the Taliban’s second coming.

“The Dostum era is over — I am not sure under what plausible scenario the U.S. will ever consider supporting characters like Dostum, but it will be a fool’s errand and the result will be worse than what we saw after the collapse of the republic,” says Tamim Asey, executive chairman of the Institute of War and Peace Studies. “Dostum and other warlords are relics of the past and should be put in a museum.”

But Dostum is adamant, consumed by the fantasy of a triumphant return to the battlefield. “The Taliban deceived us — they should be dealt with by force. We don’t need American tanks or planes; we just need their political support,” he says. “If I get that and can’t teach them a lesson, then my name is not Dostum.”

IN A LANDSCAPE AS COMPLEX and unpredictable as Afghanistan, Dostum’s longevity can be chalked up to his ability to read shifting political winds, cut deals, and take bold action at just the right moment. During the Soviet-Afghan War, he commanded a freebooting communist militia of Uzbeks and Turkmen that routed U.S.-backed mujahideen and absorbed foes into its ranks. Then-President Mohammad Najibullah proclaimed Dostum a “hero of Afghanistan” — but when the Soviet Union dissolved, Dostum defected and brought his 50,000 fighters with him. The government quickly collapsed, and the country plunged into civil war. Dostum allied with various mujahideen groups, changing sides when it suited him.

AFGHANISTAN. Near Mazar Sharif. In his residence, General Rashid DOSTUM, a n Uzbeck warlord and the commander of Choura-E-Nizar military coalition.
The fall of Kabul happened on the 25th and 26th of April. Massoud's fighters, helped by airlifted reinforcements from an ethnic Uzbek militia, pushed fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar out of the Presidential palace and out into the southern suburbs1992.
Dostum in his residence near Mazar Sharif in the Nineties
“Dostum had the uncanny ability to preemptively jump ship and survive because he was a rare pragmatist in a land filled with true believers to whatever cause they fought and died for, whether it be communism, or ethnic dominance, or Islamic extremism,” says Bryan Glyn Williams, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the author of the Dostum biography, The Last Warlord. “He had mercenary instincts that gave him a rare flexibility and allowed him to survive among fanatics for various causes, who he outlived.”

Warring factions leveled neighborhoods and killed thousands of civilians in the fight for Kabul. In the southern city of Kandahar, backlash against predatory militia commanders spawned the Taliban, a Pashtun-led Sunni fundamentalist movement that enforced a strict interpretation of Islamic law. While the Taliban publicly hanged killers and flogged women for going out alone, Dostum ruled over a mini state in Mazar-i-Sharif during the mid-1990s that flaunted secular values. Girls went to school unveiled; he printed his own currency, ran an airline, and rode around town in an armored Cadillac. As Taliban strength grew, he was quoted telling his aides: “We will not submit to a government where there is no whisky and no music.”

Taliban advances on Mazar-i-Sharif, hastened by the betrayal of his second-in-command, forced Dostum into temporary exile in Turkey. In early 2001, he was called back by Ahmad Shah Masood, the legendary Tajik commander and tactician who kept a resistance foothold in the north. Two days before the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S., Al Qaeda hitmen posing as journalists detonated a camera bomb that killed Masood, striking a preemptive blow against the coming storm. Paid in cash and backed by B-52 bombers, Dostum and his horsemen spearheaded CIA and Special Forces operatives on a cavalry blitz across the north that won the war in three weeks, an extraordinary feat chronicled in the 2018 film 12 Strong.

“The idea of the ‘horse soldiers’ is a myth that Hollywood ran with; the guys moved on nasty bony ponies and called in airstrikes at a standoff range,” recalls Robert Young Pelton, an author and filmmaker who was on the ground with Dostum’s forces. “It was the sheer fearlessness of attacking fixed Talib positions, and then the coordination with air strikes that eventually made the Talibs and Pakistanis flee.”

While Dostum was in Kunduz handling the surrender of thousands of Taliban fighters, most of whom were transported in trucks and shipping containers to a prison in Sheberghan, captured Al Qaeda militants staged a revolt at the Qala-e-Jangi (“War Fortress”) outside of Mazar-i-Sharif. CIA officer Johnny “Mike” Spann was killed, the first U.S. casualty of the conflict. Dostum and U.S. bombers crushed the uprising after a six-day siege, and the remaining survivors were brought to Sheberghan. In a barren desert outside the city, witnesses and human rights groups allege scores of prisoners were intentionally suffocated and buried in shipping crates, some after being shot inside.

Dostum has always rejected the allegations, claiming that any deaths of Taliban prisoners were unintentional, and that remains found at Dasht-e-Leili were killed by the forces of Abdul Malik — the commander who double-crossed him back in 1997 and handed Mazar-e-Sharif to the Taliban, only to break the deal. Vengeful Malik fighters “slaughtered Taliban prisoners in the streets” of Mazar-i-Sharif and dumped hundreds of bodies, Dostum says, adding that there are places along the highway from the city to the Uzbek border “where I still know there are multiple graves.”

According to a declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report, one source concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died in the Dasht-e-Leili massacre. Estimates from other rights groups and witnesses range from several hundred to more than 2,000. Forensic experts with Physicians for Human Rights who later examined remains found evidence consistent with suffocation and shooting. They further allege there was clear indication of evidence tampering, and that at least four witnesses in the case were tortured or disappeared.

Pelton disputes this version of events. He was at Dostum’s prison in Sheberghan when the prisoners arrived, and says he freely interviewed and photographed them as they were being processed. He asserts that between 250 and 300 men in crates had succumbed to injuries, disease, and suffocation. It was winter and snow was falling, so it was “very logical they were transferred in containers,” which also kept them from escaping, he explains. When stories were published in major U.S. media outlets attributing the war crimes to Dostum, Pelton says he approached their reporters to share what he’d seen, but none wanted to talk with him.

Afghan interim government leader Hamid Karzai (R) touches the arm of powerful warlord and Afghan deputy defence minister, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, during a ceremony held at Rosa Sharif Azrat Ali shrine, 21 March 2002, in Mazar-i-Sharif to mark the traditional Afghan new year. Thousands of people came out to attend ceremonies at the shrine under tight security, the first such celebrations since the former Taliban regime banned such ceremonies over five years ago. AFP PHOTO/HOANG DINH NAM (Photo credit should read HOANG DINH NAM/AFP via Getty Images)
Dostum (left), the Afghan deputy defense minister, and interim government leader Hamid Karzai at a ceremony in Mazar-i-Sharif marking the traditional Afghan new year, March 21, 2002
The “brutal warlord” label stuck. And it has since been perpetuated by journalists who have “fabricated a sense of menace around Dostum,” says Pelton, “probably to make them sound brave or make the story scary.” Indeed, another foundational, often repeated story about Dostum — that he lashed one of his own fighters to a tank tread and crushed him for looting — came from a Pakistani journalist who published it in a widely read book and later admitted it was a rumor for which he had no sources.

Dostum’s supporters contend the war-crimes narrative was nonetheless pushed by the State Department to discredit the Uzbek leader in favor of Karzai, an urbane member of the ethnic Pashtun majority seen as more pliable and trustworthy. “State wanted to put all their eggs in the Karzai-Kabul-Pashtun basket and marginalize any competition to their grand centralization plan,” says Williams, who met with State Department officials in Kabul while working for the CIA, and found their “loathing for Dostum disturbing” and “self-defeating.”

“Dostum was the only leader fighting and unifying groups, and they didn’t want him running the country,” adds Pelton. “He has done more by creating political alliances among the minorities than by fighting.”

SOME FEUDS PROVED HARDER to end. With the Taliban ousted in 2002, Dostum and a rival Tajik commander, Atta Mohammad Noor, turned their militias on each other, engaging in deadly gun battles for supremacy over the north — until the U.S. suspended its $1 million-a-month cash payments to convince them that making peace and demobilizing under the new government was more profitable. Billions in reconstruction aid was pouring into the country from the U.S. and NATO allies, and the leaders siphoned away money to consolidate ethnic patronage networks in their fiefdoms.

“Working with warlords was seen as necessary to keep the politics of Kabul from spiraling out of control” and avoid the mayhem of the civil war when they were “at each other’s throats and everyone in the country suffered,” says Richard Boucher, the top U.S. diplomat for South and Central Asia from 2006 to 2009. “Keeping a more or less stable coalition of leaders and warlords, with the hope of eventual transition to democratic stability, was a practical compromise to avoid a return to chaos.”

KABUL,AFGHANISTAN - OCTOBER 6: Presidential candidate General Abdul Rashid Dostum sits on a horse during his final campaign rally October 6,2004 at Kabul stadium in Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghans will participate for the first time in direct presidential elections on October 9. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
Presidential candidate Dostum at his final campaign rally, in Kabul on Oct. 6, 2004
In Sheberghan and Kabul, Dostum seized land and built lavish homes, with secondary residences in Turkey and Uzbekistan. He indulged his love of buzkashi, the polo-with-a-headless-goat sport of his nomadic ancestors, paying up to $100,000 a piece for Central Asian stallions and awarding top riders fistfulls of cash and car keys. But accusations of violence against those who dared test his authority never went away.

In February 2008, when Dostum was serving a ceremonial post in the Afghan army, loyalists from his Jumbesh Party reportedly abducted a political rival and convicted drug dealer named Akbar Bai and his son in Kabul. Bai was taken to Dostum’s house and beaten and sexually assaulted, according to Afghan officials. (The U.S. Embassy described the incident in a cable as the “latest of Dostum’s drunken fits.”) When police surrounded his house, his militiamen fired upon them. Dostum was suspended and placed under house arrest while denying the allegations, saying they were “designed to create instability in Afghanistan.”

Desperate to boost the legitimacy of the Afghan government, top U.S. officials tried to thwart Karzai from reinstating Dostum. But in an ethnically diverse country where power centers on individual reputations more than institutions, Dostum’s support was indispensable. Nine days before the 2009 ballot, Karzai sent a charter flight to bring him back from Ankara and deliver the swing vote he needed. In 2014, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a Pashtun former World Bank economist, enlisted Dostum as his running mate despite calling him a “known killer” during the last election. They won.

Still, the office of the vice president did little to stem Dostum’s volatility. At a November 2016 buzkashi match in Sheberghan, Dostum publicly assaulted a longtime political rival named Ahmad Ischi, stepping on his chest and threatening to use him as the buzkashi game ball. Bodyguards dragged Ischi away to a basement where, he told me, he was beaten and raped with a rifle barrel during a five-day detention — a story reminiscent of the 2008 allegations. (Dostum dismisses the rape claims as another politically motivated smear campaign.)

Ahmad Ishchi, who is reported to have been beaten and detained by Afghanistan’s vice president Abdul Rashid Dostum last month, displays an injury on his leg during an interview at his home in Kabul, Afghanistan December 13, 2016. Dostum denied abducting Ishchi, saying he was in police custody. Dostum's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani - RC1C974B3290
Ahmad Ischi, a longtime political rival of Dostum, accused him of detaining and beating him in November 2016. Dostum, who was the vice president of Afghanistan, denied the allegations.
On returning from yet another stint in Turkey, Dostum narrowly survived a pair of assassination attempts. The Trump administration was by now in direct peace talks with the Taliban, and its decision to exclude Afghan officials made the government “appear weak and abandoned by its primary ally, while bolstering the legitimacy” of the insurgency, according to a damning November report from a U.S. government watchdog. The February 2020 Doha peace agreement set a timeline for American withdrawal and likely drove the Taliban to pursue total victory against the Afghan government “on the battlefield rather than through peace talks.”

That same month, Ghani was declared the winner of a disputed election, earning Dostum the coveted title of marshal of Afghan forces. But as the Taliban gained ground, Ghani refused to prepare for the possibility of a U.S. departure. He insisted the Taliban must be folded into the government while consulting “a highly selective, narrow circle of loyalists, destabilizing the government at a critical juncture,” the report concludes. “The gulf between the president’s inner circle and reality outside the palace walls meant that Afghanistan’s most-senior power brokers were unable to effectively respond to security developments.”

Ever the horseman, Dostum likens Afghan politics to a buzkashi match. “Foreign countries must select an experienced rider who knows how to play the game and read the terrain,” he explains. By backing Ghani, “the U.S. made the mistake of picking someone not familiar with the fluid conditions in Afghanistan, and the Taliban seized control of the goat [read: power] on the ground and won.”

Leaning forward in his gilt armchair, Dostum contends the U.S. made two fundamental mistakes during its 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. First, it tried to impose centralized, democratic governance on a country with a different political and cultural pedigree, “and the Taliban used this in their favor.” Greater attention should have been devoted to improving the livelihoods of rural Afghans, he says. “We have lots of mines, we have oil and gas. Our people would not have emigrated to other countries if they had jobs and their stomachs were full. Once this was done, democracy would have eventually come by itself.”

“The other thing America could not stop,” he adds, without a trace of irony, “was the corruption that was eating the country from the inside like a woodchuck. I don’t even want to discuss what happened to all the big contracts.”

One analysis of Defense Department contracts at the height of the war, from 2010 to 2012, found that about 40 percent of the money made its way into the pockets of Afghan officials, insurgents, and criminal syndicates. What’s more, in a 2015 Lessons Learned interview, an anonymous U.N. official alleged the U.S. and other sources had been paying Dostum $100,000 a month “to not cause trouble”

AS SHOCKING AS THE TALIBAN’S advance across the north was to some, it was a long time coming. Official corruption and resource monopolies, ethnic favoritism, and justice for sale fueled widespread grievances against powerful ex-warlords that militants exploited to win over disaffected ethnic and tribal leaders. The staggering inequality that characterized Dostum’s reign over Jowzjan made it especially fertile ground. Though rich in oil and gas, and despite tens of millions of reconstruction dollars that flowed through Dostum and his cronies during the U.S. occupation, the region remained mired in poverty and broken infrastructure. “Except for his close circle of loyalists, the common people had little ideological and political loyalty to him, and this was proven in the fight for Jowzjan,” says Asey. “The common Jowzjanis didn’t stand up to fight for Dostum.”

On an October 2021 trip to Sheberghan, my first since the Taliban takeover, I met with a stout ethnic Uzbek Talib (nom de guerre: Najibullah), who served as a spy inside the city in the months before it fell. A longtime Dostum supporter, he says he took seriously Dostum’s vows to use reconstruction funds to improve the quality of life. Instead, the city of 170,000 stagnated. Police and militiamen freely stole to cover unpaid salaries. Customs revenues were plundered. Funds for construction projects with the potential to bring jobs were stolen or nonstarters because Dostum’s Jumbesh people would demand such massive bribes that government contracts went elsewhere — all while Dostum luxuriated in his palaces.

Taliban promises of a more equitable treatment based on Islamic principles gradually swayed Najibullah’s allegiance. “We came to see what kind of man he is and understood the truth,” he says, looking up at Dostum’s “500” palace, the newest of three he built in the city. “It is with the people’s blood that he built these buildings.”

The stone-gate memorial marking the massacre at Dasht-e-Leili
The stone-gate memorial marking the massacre at Dasht-e-Leili
Najibullah’s boss, Abdul Basir Osmani, a white-turbaned intelligence officer, leads us on a tour of the seven-story monument to excess. Passing a private zoo of bactrian deer and through a gate adorned with peacocks, Osmani swears the Taliban has left the place exactly as it found it — save for oil paintings that have human faces slashed out, in line with the Koranic prohibition against idolatry — to show how Dostum “betrayed his own people.”

On the first-floor landing, a window glaze of Dostum’s face framed by crystal decanters looks into an under-the-sea-themed dining room ringed by fish tanks. A jade and brass elevator ascends from a basement pool to color-themed floors with silk carpets (one of which is now occupied by the Taliban’s provincial governor and his family). In the master suite, a pair of young Talibs wearing Dostum’s chapan capes flip through a photo album, mostly snapshots from the battlefront and his favorite buzkashi riders showing off their stallions. Images of Dostum swathed in white robes on hajj pilgrimage to Mecca arouse more intense curiosity.

The roof, capped with a bald eagle gargoyle, affords a sweeping view of the sunbaked city. Nearby, I see the crenelated towers of Tolai Sawar, Dostum’s fortress stables, where some 30 of his prized buzkashi horses are now under the Taliban’s care. A billboard of Dostum on horseback is in tatters. In the distance beyond, desert wasteland stretches to the horizon.

With billions in Afghan government assets frozen and its foreign-aid lifeblood cut off, the cash-strapped Taliban is struggling to carry out basic services and transition from guerrillas to governors. Jobs are scarce, the economy in shambles. But locals say that crime is way down, and the Taliban is making good on its promise of swift justice.

On a Monday morning, the hallway of the provincial courthouse, partly caved in by a U.S. airstrike, is full of burqa-clad women waiting to be heard. In small chambers, a man accused of selling alcohol is questioned ahead of sentencing; next door, Ahmad Javed, a Pashtun IT professional from Kabul, alleges his land was stolen by Dostum henchmen who beat him when he protested. He’s pleased when the judge orders a halt to construction until a verdict is reached. “Before the Taliban, I could do nothing,” he says. “We are happy this government came because they don’t accept force. If someone says ‘I am powerful,’ they reject them.”

Late in the afternoon, Osmani and Najibullah drive me out to Dasht-e-Leili, a tarana prayer chant echoing from the speakers. A stone-gate memorial marks the site, unremarkable save for a few dunes and piles of rocks. Taliban fighters come from around the country to pay their respects, and Osmani leads a group in prayer at dusk. “[This place] is proof that General Dostum was an oppressor, wretched and corrupt,” he says. “His only service was taking care of buzkashi horses and dogs. He was vulgar and a sex addict. His oppression had no limits.”

DOSTUM TURNS GLUM WHEN the subject of his animals comes up. “The deer you may have seen in Sheberghan were brought to me by hunters to eat, but I could not kill them; instead I gave them milk.” He complains the “poor Taliban” don’t know how to care for horses and rejected his emissary’s offer to take back the stallions. “I hear some good ones have already died,” he says. “If someone kills a bird in front of me, my heart can’t accept it.”

But when I bring up the Dasht-e-Leili allegations, he gets a second wind — and offers details on the killings he says he’s never shared before.

On returning to Sheberghan after the Battle of Qala-e-Janghi, Dostum says, he was alerted that 70 to 75 prisoners had been killed in shipping containers, mainly by gunshot. He asserts that a “crazy commander” of his named Kamal, who lost two brothers in the fighting, had stuffed the prisoners in the containers without proper ventilation and opened fire. Dostum says he asked his officers if the victims were shown to the International Rescue Committee, and was told they were already buried in the desert, which sent him into a rage.

“I got angry and told him bad things,” Dostum says, scowling. “I cried. I said, ‘I have won the north at great cost and you have destroyed it with this action. There will be rumors that Dostum has killed the captives. If it is a matter of guilt, Kamal is guilty of this!’”

In his own defense, Dostum notes that he managed thousands of captured fighters, and spared the lives of his Taliban arch-enemy Mullah Fazl, the commander of Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan pre-9/11. “Why would I kill 70 to 75 captured people?” he says. “Liberating a country is not easy, and I did it. Our fault is that we have weak publicity and people make rumors. These are all lies and propaganda. I fought with the Russians during [President Najibullah’s] time, I was with the Americans. I know the rules of battle and how to fight. I am the commander who does everything he can.”

This April 2002 photo shows a trench dug by Physicians for Human Rights forensic experts as part of a preliminary investigation for the U.N. at the Dasht-e-Leili mass grave site near Sherberghan, Afghanistan.
A trench dug by Physicians for Human Rights forensic experts as part of a preliminary investigation for the U.N. at the Dasht-e-Leili mass-grave site in 2002
Soon after taking office in 2009, President Obama pledged to open a fresh inquiry into Dasht-e-Leili, spurred by a report that Bush administration officials had discouraged investigations. Four years later, the White House completed its inquiry — and refused to release its findings, aside from confirming that no U.S. personnel were involved. Whatever the truth may be, the massacre allegations will forever taint Dostum’s legacy.

I pass through Sheberghan on a 2,000-mile drive around the country last year. At our mandatory check-in, the Taliban information officer, an ethnic Baluch named Hilal Balkhi, decides to cancel his meetings; foreign journalists are rare in this corner of Afghanistan, and there’s a newly discovered mass grave he needs to show us. We drive out to the western edge of town, near the turn for Dasht-e-Leili, and walk about 20 yards from the highway. Balkhi drops to his knees and starts digging hand over fist, revealing bones, shredded clothing, pieces of skull. In minutes, he’s compiled a half-dozen piles of remains. He estimates there are between 70 and 100 at the site.

Mass graves litter the Afghan warscape, and the provenance of this latest discovery has yet to be determined. According to Balkhi, the site was reported by a man who spotted bones unearthed by the winds. Another man came forward and claimed he had seen fighters for one of Dostum’s commanders, Jura Beg, bulldozing sand over bodies dumped from a container more than 20 years ago, but never spoke up, fearing reprisal. Balkhi says he’s reported the site to the U.N. and is awaiting an international forensic team — though, in his mind, Dostum’s guilt is a foregone conclusion. “Some people thought he was a hero,” says Balkhi. “He was a killer.”

DOSTUM RECKONS THAT IF HE were an evil man, God would have killed him long ago. “I am still alive by God’s blessing,” he says. “Now that I have lost many kilos, my scars are more visible; I have been injured six times. There have been many conspiracies, explosions, terrors. Bin Laden’s suicide bombers tried to kill me; now Osama is dead. Mullah Omar is also dead. But I am still here.”

“A warlord is a warmonger,” he continues. “War has been imposed on me. My battle has been legal. My enemies all say I am a murderer, but history will decide.”

At this point, Dostum has been talking for almost three hours. I ask how he would like to be remembered; he counters that he has one last mission. Since retaking power, the Taliban has turned back the clock on women and girls, barring them from secondary education and restricting their movement, while failing to protect ethnic minorities under widespread attacks from the Islamic State. Fear and hunger stalk the land. “When I take away these black clouds from Afghanistan,” he says, “then all of my dreams will be complete.”

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Dostum says he’s ready to beat back the Taliban again and restore equal rights for women and minorities: “Please go and tell the world, tell America, tell Joe Biden to ask the Pentagon, CIA, and generals who worked with me if Dostum can do what he says. Yes, I can. If they support me politically, the matter of the Taliban is finished. In 24 hours, I will be back in Afghanistan standing on top of a hill.”

Dostum thanks me for coming and promises to host me at a buzkashi match in Sheberghan once he’s home. He saunters back toward his villa, then abruptly spins around, jabbing a finger. “Remember: The things I have just told you [about the shipping container deaths], I’ve never told anyone else before — ever,” he booms. “This is the full truth.”


He turns to check on his rose bushes. Absent his buzkashi horses, Dostum has become more obsessive about flowers. “I take care of them myself — florists don’t have flowers as good as mine,” he smiles. “This bud here is not in bloom, but in a few weeks’ time it will grow back.” I can’t help but think of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone tending his garden in The Godfather, the feared Mafia boss finally done in, not by a bullet or betrayal, but by the tyranny of time. Although the record shows it’s never a good idea to count Dostum out of a fight, both fans and detractors agree his prospects for another glorious homecoming are bleak. In all likelihood, it’s here that the final act of a once-powerful man, forged in the bloody crucible of Afghanistan’s deserts and mountains, will play out. An aging warlord surrounded by walls, with no moves left to make.

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Note: Rashid Dostum is an Uzbek Ismaili commander.

All is allowed in love, war, politics, and business. (Swami).