After the fall

We also have to understand that this country has been at war for years. Everybody has been involved in the fighting, everybody has taken a side and played a role. To say that because they've defended their communities -- which is how they would see it -- that that somehow makes them bad and unable to play any role is crazy. There's nobody in Afghanistan right now who hasn't been involved in something or other that we might not like. The question is whether they have the capacity to administer a government. Has the situation evolved enough, with enough stability, that their communities feel secure enough that such things won't happen again? We have to understand that there's a basis for their actions in the past: a very insecure political system.

Rashid Dostum, for example, is being referred to as an "ethnic Uzbek warlord." I'm amazed that they don't put the ethnicity in front of Rabbani and say he's an "ethnic Tajik warlord president" or something like that. I don't quite understand it. Dostum was a major part of the resistance during the Soviet times and a major figure in the war. I don't quite understand how those determinations are made. I find that a lot of the reporting seems to be coming out of Pakistan with Pakistani ISI sources, and I just wonder if people are really understanding that they may be being played a bit in all of this. This has always been one of the problems. The Pakistani and Pashtun perspective has always been the one that gets reported because Pakistan seems to be the gateway for reporting about Afghanistan. It's a disservice because then you only get a piece of the story -- it's not the only perspective. You should want to get a more comprehensive perspective of what Afghanistan is.

Dostum, Ismael Khan and Karim Khalili are all serious leaders who are connected and rooted in their communities. Dostum, who was in charge of Mazar-e-Sharif at the time, was in my mind, was very helpful when a U.N. human rights team came in to investigate atrocities in 1997. One of the amazing things that's never been reported is that not only did he want to help -- he also personally went with them. He was incredibly supportive and said he wanted them to see the mass graves. He went with them and brought his men in order to guarantee their security. He directed the investigators to bodies of civilians murdered by General Pahlawan Malik. Then he's attacked as being a warlord with no interest in human rights. I'm always amazed that the press always misses those pieces.

These three men have all run decent administrations in the area. Dostum and Khan opened schools, Dostum had a university, girls were allowed to attend school, there was no dress code the way there has been under the Taliban. If you wanted to wear a burqa you could. Women were working -- they were working in hospitals, they were working in various aid organizations. There were restrictions, but it was a much more open place in an Afghan context. Of course, you can't apply Afghanistan to New York City, but in the Afghan context it was one of the most open places you could work and live, and it was quite peaceful during most of his reign. The fighting came after the Taliban's arrival, and you can't blame him for that. The same is true with Khan -- they both ran multiethnic administrations, they didn't just dominate with their own ethnic group. It's extraordinary to me that these guys are being tagged as some kind of wild maniacs -- it's nonsense and it's not the way it was. Most of the fighting was going on in Kabul.

In his book "Taliban," Ahmed Rashid writes that U.N. mediators didn't trust you because you were too aligned with the U.S. and had a "personal agenda."

Rashid has had a long personal disagreement with me and I'm sad that he needs to carry this out in his book. He's attacked me a number of times, but what I've found is that he's taken sides himself in all of this. His criticism about my being close to the U.S.? I was close to many different governments because I was trying to encourage them to get interested in Afghanistan because none of them were paying attention to it. The personal agenda he's talking about is that I was committed to trying to solve this problem. You can see that from my long history of involvement in Afghanistan. But that doesn't always go over well in a U.N. bureaucracy or any kind of bureaucracy that tends to like to see a more bureaucratic approach to addressing these kinds of problems.

I'm very open -- I stepped on a lot of toes in places where I could have probably been more careful, but I thought it was worth it because it meant trying to get issues in front of people. He makes these comments about U.N. officials complaining about me, but there were also high-level U.N. officials who were very supportive of my career who he doesn't quote who have written quite highly of me in their books. He decided to listen to those two and not others. That's reflective of his style of journalism -- he has an agenda himself and he decides what he thinks is true and what he thinks is not. Unfortunately, people have accepted his position as the gospel truth. But the reality is that he's a guy with a perspective that's sometimes a little off the wall. But he's entitled to his own opinions.

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