President Karzai can promise what he likes, but he is under no illusions whatsoever that the reinstatement of Akhundzada is not acceptable. As much as he would like to reinstate him, that is a massive red line which would be crossed and Karzai knows it. The current governor, Gulab Mangal, is urbane, technocratic, savvy and very popular with the British PRT. He has been received remarkably warmly in areas of the Province like Garmsir and Gereshk, places which to all intents and purposes had not seen central government for about 30 years. I'd go as far to say that he is southern Afghanistan's most notable success story since 2001. Akhundzada is a thug from a long line of thugs, quite plainly. Reinstatement would be profoundly retrograde.Originally Posted by davidbfpo
The article overstates the promises Karzai might have made Akhundzada in return for electoral support. They have been comrades for donkeys years and spent a lot of time together in Pakistan during the Taliban reign. Once it fell, Akhundzada* was easily able to control Helmand and effectively run it as a fiefdom, becoming extraordinarily rich in the process. I have heard one tale that he and Karzai have million dollar houses next door to one another in Dubai. Whether that is true or not I don't know, but the idea that this is a marriage of convenience developed for electoral reasons is patently untrue. There are myriad other stories, but the sum of them is that Sher Mohammed Akhundzada is a dreadful, dreadful man. He is also mentioned in this terrific New York Times piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/ma...9Karzai-t.html
* Nasim Akhundzada, Sher Mohammed's father, was victor in a series of brutal internecine conflicts which took place largely in the Gereshk and Kajaki areas of Helmand during the Mujahideen era. It is often cited anecdotally that Soviet troops were welcomed as peacekeepers in Gereshk in 1987, such was the violence of the quarrel. The Harakat/Hezb-i-Islami split was basically entirely manifested by this fight in Helmand, with the Akhundzadas belonging to the Harakat sect and the joint forces of Rais Baghrani (Helmand's highest profile reconciler) and Abdul Rahman Khan, who hotfooted it to France, then Norway, where he now resides, when Akhundzada was installed as Governor in 2001, to Islami. Just to complicate things further, all three factions represented different subtribes of the Alizai, northern Helmand's dominant tribal grouping.
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