TIME: A Man with Many
Enemies
Monday, July 15, 2002
By MICHAEL WARE / KABUL
"I will be in the car soon," Haji Abdul Qadir told
his nephew over the phone. "I'm coming in maybe 15 or
20 minutes." But Qadir, one of Afghanistan's five
Deputy Presidents, as well as its Minister of Public
Works, never made it home for lunch. In fact, he
never made it to the street. Witnesses later said
that two gunmen had been waiting outside the ministry
compound's gates for half an hour. As Qadir's green
Toyota Land Cruiser nosed its way out, the men,
dressed in the clothing of Qadir's home province,
leaped out of the bushes and opened fire. Qadir's
driver floored the accelerator as bullets sliced
through the windshield and panels of the car, hitting
Qadir in the head. As the car collided with some
metal poles lining the driveway, the gunmen continued
firing into the rear window. When the vehicle finally
crashed into a concrete wall, the men jumped into a
taxi parked up the road and roared away.
Qadir, one of Afghanistan's most astute and powerful
Pashtun politicians, had been a linchpin in President
Hamid Karzai's effort to reconcile the country's
largest ethnic group with the rest of the nation. His
death increases the risk of ethnic division in a
nation already suffering from civil violence. His
passing also removes a moderate voice from Karzai's
government, still struggling to impose its authority
across Afghanistan.
Qadir's death marks the end of an epic of two
remarkable brothers. Qadir had been the elder of the
two; Abdul Haq, 12 years his junior, had been the
favored one. Abdul Haq was a legendary mujahedin hero
in the war against the Soviets. In America's battle
against the Taliban, he became one of the few
Washington selected to eventually lead the country.
But Abdul Haq, for all his talents, was unlucky. He
lost a foot in a land-mine explosion years ago; he
lost his wife and children to Taliban assassins; and
finally, last October, he lost his life when gunmen
ambushed him while he led a mission to rally Afghans
against the Taliban.
That left Abdul Qadir. As the Taliban collapsed, the
former warlord returned to the family power base
around the eastern city of Jalalabad. He took
possession of property the Taliban had used as an
ammunition dump: three buildings full of
rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, tank shells and
"enough AK-47 cartridges to last for 10 years," as
one of his fighters told a TIME correspondent late
last year. The ammo was enough to make Qadir, already
rich from the opium trade, a power to be reckoned
with not only in Jalalabad (where two other warlords
laid claims to power in his absence) but in all of
Afghanistan.
While it wasn't immediately clear who killed Abdul
Qadir, he had lived a controversial life and left a
long list of enemies. In 1996 he welcomed Osama bin
Laden to the region and gave him refuge in the
opium-rich area around Jalalabad. Some of Qadir's
rivals say he took $10 million to give up Jalalabad
to the Taliban. When the Taliban fell, he reclaimed
the governorship and, as part of the "new"
Afghanistan, helped lead a heavy-handed crackdown on
narcotics.
Local traders and drug barons, many of whom had been
supporters of Qadir, were furious. Moreover, although
Qadir was vocal about the rights of the Pashtun, some
viewed his cooperation with the Tajik-dominated
regime in Kabul--and his lack of support for the
reinstatement of Afghanistan's king, Zahir Shah--as a
betrayal."My efforts have been to urge people here to
have patience," Qadir told TIME in June.
His death illustrates the nature of public life in
this nation. As his political and military fortunes
mounted, so did the number of his enemies, some of
whom had once been allies. Sooner or later, Qadir's
luck was bound to run out.
--By
Michael Ware/Kabul. With reporting by Anthony Davis,
Matthew Forney and Simon Robinson