Khan's ability to maintain his army, keep the Americans and Iranians at bay and defy Kabul rests on his growing financial independence. At the customs post outside Herat, hundreds of trucks are parked, loaded with Japanese tyres, Iranian fuel, cooking-gas cylinders from Turkmenistan and consumer goods from Persian Gulf ports. Each truck pays between $200 and $1,000 in customs duty to Khan's coffers. Every day some 500 reconditioned cars arrive from the United Arab Emirates. Offloaded at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, they are driven through Iran and Afghanistan to be smuggled into Pakistan and sold, providing Khan with more revenue. Judging by the traffic at the customs post, this year Khan could earn as much as $80 million from customs duty on smuggled goods from Iran and Turkmenistan and the reverse traffic from Kandahar and Pakistan. He refuses to share this income with Kabul. "We cannot regularize tax collection until the Kabul government is stronger and reconstruction starts," says a senior bureaucrat under Khan.
Khan has instead started his own reconstruction projects, cleaning out canals and repaving Herat's roads, complete with painted zebra crossings.
Khan's independence and rhetoric are proving problematic to Karzai, who wants to unify the nation. Even some of Khan's own advisers are worried. "Ismail Khan is a charismatic leader who should transform himself into a civil and democratic leader, but we cannot push him too fast," says one senior adviser. "We cannot push aside our elders, but we can try and transform them."
The refusal of the U.S. and the international community to send international peacekeepers to major cities outside Kabul after the Taliban's defeat, when the warlords were weak and unsure of their future, is now proving intensely detrimental. "The warlords with income are stronger now than they were last December when the Taliban fell. They can now defy the central government and the international community at will," says a senior European aid official in Herat. Nevertheless, Khan, with all his skills, will not preach outright revolt. Instead, he will just try and keep everyone happy while he remains the warlord of the west.
(This story was originally published by Dow Jones Newswires)
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