Former warlord Ismail Khan: "The Taliban are in all the villages once again. They want all the power. Our army won't be able to stop them."

Former warlord Ismail Khan: "The Taliban are in all the villages once again. They want all the power. Our army won't be able to stop them."(Spiegel).

In truth, the 65-year-old minister is still what he was 30 years ago: a mujahed, or warlord, although he doesn't like the latter term. "The Americans and English tried to discredit us with that word, until they realized that they couldn't do without us in their fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban," Khan, now an older, more peaceful man, says with a smile.

But he is also a man who had entire armies march across the Hindu Kush Mountains in the 1980s to fight the Soviets. He was one of the commanders in the ensuing civil war, in which Afghanistan's ethnic groups -- the Tajiks, Hazara, Uzbeks and Pashtuns -- massacred one another and laid waste to the capital Kabul.

Khan, governor of the most important province in western Afghanistan until 2004, was known as the "Lion of Herat." He still prefers to be addressed by his former title of Emir. But then he became too powerful for the Americans and President Hamid Karzai, so they removed Khan from office and brought him to Kabul to keep a closer eye on him.

He was finally given the somewhat laughable position of water and energy minister, despite his feeling that he should have been offered the job of defense or interior minister instead. "I'm not in this position voluntarily," says Khan.
His office is now in a dilapidated building on the street leading to the Darul Aman Palace on the outskirts of Kabul, a stately building that once housed the parliament and was reduced to a ruin in the country's civil war. Khan, who has been water and energy minister for eight years, dedicates power plants, solicits bids for the construction of power lines and attends cabinet meetings. His ministry is not important in Kabul, and yet both the Americans and Karzai are afraid of him -- especially Karzai.

The year 2014 is approaching, and with it the withdrawal of NATO troops. When Khan appears in public today, it is with the demeanor of the mujahed. "We cannot allow Afghanistan to be destroyed once again," he said publicly late last year. He has also said that government forces are powerless in large parts of the country, that Afghans should arm themselves once again, new recruits should enlist and the command structures of the former militias ought to be reestablished.

The international coalition "has taken away our artillery and tanks and turned them into scrap metal. Instead, they have brought Dutch, German, American and French girls to our country, along with white soldiers from Europe and black soldiers from Africa, who were supposed to bring security to Afghanistan. They have failed," Khan said in a speech at a rally in Herat.

After the speech, President Karzai announced that the minister's words had "nothing to do with the government's policies." An Afghan senator said that people like Khan smell blood, and that they see the withdrawal of Western troops as "the opportunity to launch another civil war and eliminate local rivals."

American four-star General John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops in Afghanistan until February, expressed his concerns in a letter to Karzai.
Khan laughs. "One letter? There were two. Karzai showed them to me. And I said to him: It's a good thing that someone like Allen realizes what kinds of people we have here."

"So you believe that the Taliban will return as soon as NATO is gone?"

"The arrogant Americans drove the most important Taliban out of Kabul, bombed the rest from the air and then ended the war," says the minister. 

"So far, 2013 has been the bloodiest year yet in Afghanistan. The Taliban are in all the villages once again. They want all the power. Our army won't be able to stop them."

"And you could stop them?"

"We have 20 years of combat experience, and we defeated a superpower. We can deal with the Taliban too," says Khan, leaning back in his chair. "But not this army," he adds, waving his hand in the direction of the defense ministry. The Afghan army, trained by the West, has lost 63,000 men, or one in three soldiers, to desertion in the last three years.

Rarely have officials in Afghan government ministries spoken as frankly as they do today, now that the Western troop withdrawals have begun. And Ismail Khan is by no means an eccentric maverick.

Marshal Mohammed Fahim, a former warlord and Afghanistan's first vice president, speaks of a comeback by the mujahedeen. And Ahmad Zia Massoud, brother of legendary mujahedeen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, has even said publicly that his followers are arming themselves once again.
"Before the West leaves this place, it should give us back our planes and artillery, or the equivalent," Khan says before going to pray.Read the full story here.