ON A PROMINENT HILL overlooking the ancient city of Herat, some 50 United States special forces soldiers and Central Intelligence Agency agents are ensconced in a huge palace with a white dome, on loan to them from Ismail Khan, the self-styled emir, or ruler, of western Afghanistan. Below them, on the city's main tree-lined street, dozens of Iranian diplomats representing the moderate government of President Mohammed Khatami occupy the newly opened Iranian consulate. And in yet another downtown office live Iranian military officers, spies and advisers from the hard-line Sipah-e-Pasadran, or Army of God, who are loyal not to the Iranian president but to Iran's fundamentalist supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
Herat, just 120 kilometres from the Iranian border and the former centre of several glittering Central Asian civilizations, is now the site of a tense stand-off between Iran and the U.S. Herat is now the front line of America's fight against what U.S. President George W. Bush calls the "axis of evil."
"Everyone spends most of their time gathering intelligence on what the other side is doing," says an American official. The Iranian hardliners would likely agree. But Khatami offered support and sympathy to the U.S. after the September 11 terrorist attacks. "We have no intentions to compete with the U.S., but the U.S. should realize that Afghanistan is our neighbour and we need a close relationship," says an Iranian diplomat.
Inside this triangle sits Ismail Khan, 56, the celebrated and charismatic anti-Soviet warlord who has liberated the city twice -- once in 1992 from the communists and again last year from the Taliban. Khan is a master of the Afghan art of balancing the interests of outsiders while extracting maximum benefit from them.
So far he is performing brilliantly. When the Iranians started cleaning out clogged irrigation canals and rebuilding the rutted road to Herat from Islam Qala on the Iranian border, the U.S. military also started repairing bridges, roads and canals. When the hardline Iranians supplied new uniforms, refurbished hundreds of ageing Soviet-era tanks and supplied new weapons for Khan's army, the U.S. also offered military inducements and tried to enlist some of his forces in the new national army it is helping the Afghan central government to build.
Khan is the only independent Afghan warlord who has been visited by U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who after a two-hour meeting in Herat on April 29, in which both men dismissed their aides to talk alone, described Khan as "a very interesting, deep man."
But Western diplomats say privately that Rumsfeld gave Khan an earful. Over the past few months, the U.S. has publicly accused Iran of allowing hundreds of Al Qaeda and Taliban militants to escape to sanctuary there; privately the U.S. is furious with Khan for allowing the militants to pass through his territory, which includes four of Afghanistan's 32 provinces.
That's a charge corroborated by residents of Ghurian, a small town in the desert close to the Iranian border. "Arabs, Pakistanis, Taliban and Central Asians would come through our village at night heading for the Iranian border after the Taliban were defeated in December," says a schoolteacher there. According to Western diplomats, two Iranian generals belonging to military intelligence fly regularly to Herat from their base across the border in Mashad, where Khan spent several years in exile.
Iranian diplomats privately admit that they have little idea what the Sipah-e- Pasadran is doing in Herat. But the Iranian hardliners have a simple reason to support Khan and help Al Qaeda: They fear that a too-secular or pro-West Afghanistan under the monarchy of former King Zahir Shah would become another base for the U.S. to undermine Iran's Islamic revolution.
In contrast, the moderate Khatami government would prefer to support the interim Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, and like the U.S. seeks a stable and united Afghanistan -- but with limited U.S. influence.
Khan's answer to all this is a twinkling, enigmatic smile. "The U.S. is concerned about Iran's role without any reason," he says in a midnight interview in the governor's palace, while hundreds of supplicants wait in an ante-room. " Iran has been supporting us for many years against the Taliban, but it is not supporting us now. And I am a friend of the U.S. because it supported us in the war against the Taliban."
Khan is skilfully using the divisions within Iran and the wider rift between the U.S. and Iran to his own advantage. Under his authoritarian control, Herat has become the most peaceful and cleanest Afghan city, a place where Western aid workers can work without fear, 75% of children now go to school and, even without reconstruction funds from Kabul or the West, the business of rebuilding homes and shops is booming.
The irony is that even as the U.S. and Iran lobby for influence with Khan, both are also trying to curb his ruthless desire to maintain his independence and force him to bend to the authority of Karzai's government. "The U.S. and the moderate Iranian government share a common interest in supporting stability and making sure the warlords accept Karzai's authority," says a UN diplomat. "Nobody wants an independent fiefdom here."
But working with warlords like Khan, representing different ethnic and religious groups, has been fundamental to the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. The U.S. might as well have been playing with fire. In the south, the U.S. hired Pashtun mercenaries -- and created new warlords in the process. In the north, it has backed Gen. Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek, and his main rival, Gen. Mohammed Atta, a Tajik. In central Afghanistan the U.S. has supported the Shia Muslim Hazaras to battle the influence of the Iranians, who are also Shias.
These warlords now feel sufficiently independent -- thanks to U.S. support -- that they have been fighting each other. They pay only lip service to the Karzai government in Kabul.
No warlord presents as great a challenge and as good an opportunity for the U.S. as Khan. When he ruled Herat from 1992-95, before being ousted by the Taliban, Khan was the most progressive of all the warlords. Now he barely acknowledges Karzai's authority and has refused to cooperate in downsizing his 30,000-strong army or merging elements of it with the new national army.
Khan is also hindering the election of delegates from his region for the loya jirga, or grand council, that will meet in June to create a new government. He is trying to stuff the seats allocated for his region with generals, police officers and civil servants who are loyal to him.
Khan isn't the only warlord vying for seats, according to Abdul Rahimi, a member of the Loya Jirga Commission, which is managing the establishment of the council. "By planting their nominees the warlords are denying people their rights and testing the Loya Jirga Commission and our powers," he says.
Khan calls ex-King Zahir Shah -- now an important symbol of Afghan unification -- just "one white beard among many," and has arrested several of his prominent supporters in Herat. And in contrast to his progressive past, Khan has taken on a hardline Islamic ideology. He has decreed against women taking off the burqa and stopped a celebration of Women's Day on March 8. "We expected our freedom but Ismail Khan has become more fundamentalist than he was before. Why can't we have the same rights as the women in Kabul?" says a female teacher.
Khan's newly found Islamic ideology can be attributed in part to the year he spent chained to a wall in a Taliban jail in Kandahar, and his exposure to Iranian hardliners during his three years in exile in Iran in the late 1990s. One observer calls Khan a "born-again mujahid," or holy warrior.
"More urgently than reconstruction, we need the spirit of jihad," or holy war, Khan says. "Jihad is just one word to describe freedom; it's a holy word meaning independence and we must keep the memory of the war against the Soviets and Taliban alive."
Khan, a Persian-speaking Herati, has also done nothing to stop the harassment of Pashtuns living in his territory by his non-Pashtun commanders. The Taliban are Sunni Muslims, and come from the Pashtun ethnic group; Khan rails against Gul Agha, the Pashtun warlord in Kandahar who is backed by the Americans. "Gul Agha is hiding and protecting the Taliban and delivering nothing to the Americans," says Khan. He claims that only 5% of all Taliban forces have been arrested or captured, and says they continue to pose a major threat to stability throughout the country. By making such claims he is able to maintain a climate of fear -- and maintain his importance as a warlord and his grip on power.