![]() ![]() “They've given our country to those whose hands are still red with the blood of the people,” he says. Then tracing an arc from Tarin Kowt to Kabul, the contractor sees "prostitutes and hotel servants" in what serves as a national parliament a bunch of incompetents hijacking a bureaucracy in which merit counts for naught and a pointy elbowed band of business thieves who have been licensed as a new tribal elite. ![]() ![]() I was safer as a child, riding a bicycle in the village.” “But I can't go outside my family compound because everywhere is too dangerous. “I have a nice house and 13 fine cars,” he says, holding court at a lunch of 50 dishes that he lays on for this correspondent. ![]() He worries about security at an intimate, personal level. This is a man who embodies the Afghan sense of self – what his family means to those around him, what he can contribute and, ahem, what he might take for himself on the way through. Hammedie invokes the name of his grandfather as the resolver of the most vexing local disputes, of kings and presidents who have come to his family home – but not any more because contact with today's ruling class would bring dishonour and disgrace on his noble family. Those who can, pin their hopes on a visa to Australia – or anywhere that is not Afghanistan. They expect that blood will be spilt as the contest for a slice of a smaller economic pie will be even more bitterly fought. And after the bulk of foreign forces are withdrawn next year, ordinary Afghans harbour great fears for the future. So an Afghan solution was found and the world blinked indifferently – the Hazara votes were shredded.Īmid such expediency it doesn't do to get caught between the likes of Matiullah Khan and Hakim Shujoyi. Such was voter apathy among the majority Pashtuns that an enthusiastic turnout by the minority Hazaras meant Khas Oruzgan was poised to be represented in parliament only by members of its oppressed Hazara minority. The turnout for the 2010 elections was the lowest in Afghanistan, 6.4 per cent. There is no sense of Jeffersonian or Westminster governance in Oruzgan. Out of the shadows: A woman stands in the laneways in Sakhar village, Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan. Seemingly getting away with it, Shujoyi is just as contemptuous as the more sure-footed, forty-ish Matiullah of the grand designs of the foreigners. Similarly, off in a far corner of the province, a district called Khas Oruzgan, the US-backed warlord Hakim Shujoyi, runs amok – killing, raping, looting. He has been locking in his own parallel structures at the same time as he rakes in millions from his Australian-backed highway-security scam. Matiullah is disdainful of the elaborate plans by which the international community has struggled to set up a system of strong provincial administrations to be cogs in the wheels of a central machine in Kabul. He is known as MK – his key rivals have been eliminated and he has become bigger than the government. These days it is the provincial police chief Matiullah Khan, JMK's protege and a distant cousin of the risk-averse young Qasim, who rules the roost in Tarin Kowt, Oruzgan's provincial capital and home to just 10,000, mostly illiterate people. When they got up close they opened fire, ending the old man's long, brutal existence – but not before JMK had given them $70 each.ĭaily life in Afghanistan: Izatullah, 9, releases a pigeon from its coop in Shahid Assas town in the Char Chino district. They posed as students on hard times who were after a handout. His father, Jan Mohammed Khan – dubbed JMK by the Americans and feared as much as he was revered – was one floor above where we are having tea in the family's Kabul home when his guards were conned by two gunmen. At 31 he is young to be carrying the weighty turban of a tribal elder, but Qasim is acutely aware of the risks. He shifts to a sofa when tea is served with dried mulberries and walnuts and, when a servant boy glides by, he stuffs the pistol into a gap in the upholstery.Īs Qasim excuses himself, wandering off to check a thermostat by the door, he slips the weapon into the ample folds of his dun-coloured robes. He lounges on a floor cushion and it's there on a window sill – in easy reach. Haji Mohammad Qasim moves, and his pistol follows him around the room.
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