Tribal ties bind Afghan Army

While Kabul has been relatively calm since the Taliban fled US bombing last November, ongoing conflict rages in several Afghan provinces, including Khost. And while Afghan officials say it would be extremely helpful if the 4,500-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were expanded and dispatched around the country, Western participants in the peacekeeping team seem skittish about becoming entrenched in provinces beyond the Afghan capital.

"The question of extending ISAF geographically is not on the table in the immediate future," Khalilzad says. "But there are other ways to deal with the challenges of security we have."

The hope is that with US training, Afghan military officials in Kabul can create a national army of soldiers with allegiance to the central government, not a panoply of warlords whose power often emanates from tribal ties, if not brute force.

"We are starting a campaign to have a new army, and it must be different from before, one made up of a professional soldiers," says Gen. Abdul Qadir Gulzad, the chief of national security and defense affairs and a military adviser to the interim government chairman, Hamid Karzai.

"It will no longer be, 'this man is from this province, and he must stay in this province,' " he says. The interim government, he adds, is concerned about reports that Pashtuns are frustrated with the US because it mainly used Dari speakers, or Tajiks, who dominated the Northern Alliance – the forward forces who ran the Taliban out of Kabul. In the future, he says, ethnicity need not be an issue. He points to the time when the mujahideen fought the invading Soviet soldiers as a model of national cooperation.

"The idea is to end this problem, where people are always loyal to a commander who is a friend or from the same tribe," he says. "We want to bring people from Kandahar to work in Mazar-e Sharif," and vice versa, he says, denoting two radically different parts of the country. "Now, a young man from Herat won't be stationed in Herat, but maybe another part of the country."

General Gulzad, a man with 40 years of military experience, says it can be done. "We can recruit the warlords and put them in leadership positions because we respect their contributions," he says. "They will have symbolic roles as commanders, but their deputies will be professionals."

The battle to build an army that crosses geographic, ethnic, and tribal boundaries will be formidable. Kamal Khan Zadran, Khost's military commander and deputy governor – as well as the younger brother of warlord Badsha Khan – says that Pashtuns from this region do not even feel safe going to Kabul.

"If I have a turban on," he says, "they will stop me at every checkpoint."

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