TIME: The Price of a
President's Life
Sunday, September 22, 2002
By MICHAEL WARE
What is a president's life worth? In Afghanistan it
may prove to be as little as a pair of secondhand
Toyota Corolla hatchbacks. That's the payoff Afghan
intelligence officials believe was offered to Abdur
Rehman, the man who attempted to assassinate
president Hamid Karzai almost three weeks ago. The
cars are said to have been waiting for Rehman across
the border in Pakistan should he have succeeded and
survived his bid to kill Karzai. He did neither.
Instead, Rehman was gunned down after opening fire on
the president's car on September 5, missing his
target but wounding a provincial governor and a
bodyguard.
When the shooting stopped that afternoon in the
southern city of Kandahar the only clue to those
behind the failed assassination was the dead gunman.
Not much was known about him, except that he was a
soldier, recruited into the government's ranks only
weeks earlier and that he came from the vehemently
pro-Taliban district of Kajaki, in neighboring
Helmand province. Like thousands of others absorbed
into military units or government positions in
Kandahar since the fall of the Taliban regime in
December, Rehman was not screened for Taliban or
terrorist links. "That's what these people are doing,
coming into the government through village
connections or friends, that way there's no questions
being asked," says a senior intelligence official in
Kabul.
Intelligence operatives from Kandahar and the capital
Kabul spent two weeks dredging over Rehman's past,
scouring it for any hints as to who might have
ordered or arranged the hit. An Afghan intelligence
report, filed last week and examined by TIME
identifies Rehman as Abdul Razaq, a Taliban assassin
believed responsible for the murders of three
opponents to the fundamentalist movement in Quetta in
Pakistan in the mid-1990s. A veteran of the Kunduz
and Takhar fronts during the Taliban's civil war with
the United Front, Rehman was captured last year by
the forces of northern warlord General Rashid Dostum.
He was released earlier this year, most likely after
his family paid the almost $900 ransom that was
demanded to free each of the Taliban captives. Rahman
returned to his village but soon after moved south to
Kandahar. There he "used all his efforts to join the
security forces and become a soldier", says the
intelligence report.
Investigators say the dead hitman was connected to
hardline Taliban commanders, such as Mullah Bradar
and Abdul Wahid, still opposing government and U.S.
forces in Afghanistan and suspected of hiding Mullah
Omar. Their report may be met with some skepticism in
Afghanistan, where speculation is widespread that
Karzai's rivals within the government were
responsible for the assassination attempt.