Afghan fighters' shifting loyalties

The Afghan terrain encourages local loyalties

By the BBC's Peter Greste in Tashkent

Over the past few days there have been reports of defections of Taleban commanders to the ranks of the Northern Alliance.

While the reports themselves are impossible to confirm, they point to a peculiar feature of the Afghan conflict that illustrates much about the war and Afghans themselves.

Defections are nothing new in the civil war between the former mujahedeen factions that has raged for most of the past decade.

The factions that make up the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance are the same groups that fought the Soviets through the 1980s.

The Afghan opposition is watching and waiting

But rather than working as a single army under a united command structure, they operated as a loose coalition of independent militias, all working to the same ultimate goal, but nonetheless as rivals.

That was partly due to the way the United States and other Western powers funded the mujahedeen.

Rival factions

The West was afraid of creating a powerful, unified Islamic force that would establish an anti-Western theocracy out of the ashes of Afghanistan, similar to neighbouring Iran.

With that in mind, the Western intelligence agencies deliberately divided their cash and supplies, often pitting the rival factions against one another.

But the Afghans also made it easy. The same hostile mountainous geography that has made it so tough for invading armies to get a toe-hold in Afghanistan has helped the tribes forge fiercely independent identities in their isolated valleys.

As long as there is a clearly defined uniting ideology, such as a Communist foe, or a common goal such as control of a particular region, they will work in the same broad direction. Without it, the guiding principle is to defend the interests of the local community.

The regime will find it extremely tough to hold its own coalition together if there is a general sense amongst the fighters that the Taleban's time has come.

Each faction depends on the support of local commanders, who will back any group that best serves their interests.

Even now, it is impossible for the notional chief of the Northern Alliance, General Fahim, to issue an order and expect that it will be obeyed down the line without first undertaking a complex series of negotiations.

On one occasion during 1995 when I worked as a correspondent in Kabul, I was visiting one Taleban command centre and spotted a familiar face strolling through the gardens.

The face belonged to a lower-ranking commander who I had been speaking to only weeks earlier on the government front lines.

He barely flinched when I asked him what he was doing in enemy territory.

"They [the government] is losing," he told me. "I don't want to be with the losing side."

Hard core

There is undoubtedly a hard core of fighters whose loyalties each side can count on, but the further away from the centre the militias become, the less reliable their support.

And the system can create some genuinely bizarre alliances.

One of the Northern Alliance's most important commanders is General Abdur Rashid Dostum and his group known as Jumbesh-I-Millie-I-Islami.

He is a career officer from the ranks of the original Afghan army that first welcomed the Soviet occupiers when they rolled into Afghanistan in 1979.

He and his troops remained loyal communists, until it became obvious that the government of the day would not survive.

Afghan commanders have often changed sides

At that point, General Dostum let his troops in a rebellion, and threw his support behind the mujahedeen, fighting instead for the "liberation of Afghanistan".

When Kabul finally fell, he joined the mujahedeen government of Burhanuddin Rabani, even taking a role in the new cabinet.

But after a falling out, he and his men turned their guns around, and once more became a major anti-government force.

Now General Dostum is back battling alongside his former foes to help put President Rabani back into Kabul.

Forces of evil

He has his own explanation, of course.

When I met him in 1995 he was still opposing Rabani's administration, and he described his actions as consistently opposing the anti-Afghan forces of evil.

He would undoubtedly say the same now.

Anywhere else, the flip-flopping would be enough to have the general and his men in front of a firing squad.

In Afghanistan, it is just business.

On one occasion, I visited the front lines in the savagely harsh Salang Pass through the Hindu Kush Mountains.

With every gully an almost impenetrable trench, and every boulder a bomb-proof bunker, it is very easy to defend and almost impossible to advance through.

The government troops were evidently preparing for a major offensive, and I spoke to the opposition fighters nervously loading rounds into the magazines of their Kalashnikovs.

"Aren't you confident of holding this ground?" I asked.

"Sure," they replied. "As long as some of the other mountain posts don't sell out."

I paused for a moment before asking what they meant by "sell out".

"Exactly that," one said. "It costs 200 US dollars to buy a post up here. Everyone knows it."

Defections

This is not to suggest that the Taleban's fighters will defect en-masse if the United States waves enough cash at them.

But many of the Afghan fighters currently with the Kabul administration are there because they have recognised the power of the Taleban, and understood that to oppose them is to invite retribution.

As the US-led strikes continue, the regime will find it extremely tough to hold its own coalition of groups together, if there is a general sense amongst the fighters that the Taleban's time has come.

Peter Greste was the BBC's Kabul correspondent in the mid-1990s