Jeffrey Stern notes that Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani’s running mate is a “brutal warlord” who boasts “one of the worst records of human rights abuses in all of Afghanistan”:
General Abdul Rashid Dostum tends to slip under the American radar because recently his interests have aligned with ours; his abuses have tended to be against people the US considers enemies, most recently, the Taliban. But he’s been responsible for massacres of prisoners, accused repeatedly of using mass rape as a weapon of war, and has a long list of other war crimes on his resume. And though some of the stories about Dostum are surely myths – it’s said that he eats 12 chickens and two quarts of vodka in every sitting – the war crimes allegations are serious, repeated, and furnished by multiple international organizations.
When news of the Dostum choice came out, casual Afghanistan observers in America who know and respect Ghani were confused; people I spoke to on the streets of Kabul were disappointed, and Ghani seemed to go from a new kind of candidate whose intelligence and commitment were unquestioned to a man on top of a ticket that didn’t look that much different from the other ones. There was, however, one obvious reason for Ghani to bring the warlord on board: Dostum is a figurehead for the Uzbeks, a small minority in Afghanistan, but one that tends to vote as a bloc. Including Dostum effectively guaranteed about a million votes.
Previous Dish on Ghani and the Afghan elections here.
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