Afghan Politician Wins Hearts and Minds Through Stomachs

Sheberghan (Afghanistan): It is an unassailable truth of Afghan politics, particularly after the advent of a democratic system here, that influence is gained one stomach at a time.

Election gatherings, rallies, and protests barely attract crowds if there is no promise of huge platters with small mountains of pilaf on them, the oilier the better. Politicians may break their campaign promises, but at least their supporters get fed.

The rise of Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum to the senior ranks of the national government has been far from orthodox. War-crimes accusations have dogged him for decades, and his past as a brutal warlord makes him a liability for the government in the eyes of many. But as the ranks of Western-style technocrats have grown in Kabul these days, Dostum has retained an edge as an old-school purveyor of Afghan hospitality.

In Dostum's part of the country, in the north, where he has maintained a considerable support base, politics has always required a personal touch - along with massive pots of rice and meat. And over the years, having hundreds of guests over at a time has become routine for the former general.

Just last year, as Dostum campaigned on the ticket of Ashraf Ghani in Jowzjan, his home province and the center of his ethnic Uzbek base, on some days he fed more than 4,000 people in his sprawling pink palace in Sheberghan, his aides said.

"People were sitting on the roofs, in the yard, in the garden," said Ghayeb Nazar, the logistics chief at Dostum's kitchen who has been with him for 27 years. "We had rice cooking in all of those," he said, pointing at dozens of huge tin pots, hoisted on stoves lining the palace wall. Each one of the pots holds about 90 pounds of rice.

The kitchen is run by a soft-spoken cook named Abdul Manan, who has been with Dostum or one of his commanders for more than 20 years. These days, with the big election gatherings behind him, Manan can relax a bit: A typical lunch now requires only 125 pounds of rice and 66 pounds of meat.

Though the kitchen's output has become more manageable of late, the atmosphere has become even more urgent. The Taliban have made incursions onto Dostum's turf, and in recent weeks, he has vowed to rally his old militia commanders against them. On Friday, his bodyguards had to fight off a Taliban ambush on his convoy in nearby Faryab province.

Back in Jowzjan, within the vice president's vast palace complex, the guest list of late has included his unit of nearly 400 bodyguards, some of whom wear the general's portraits on their arms, and waves of militia commanders who come to pay their respects.

The bodyguards are lodged in the guesthouse. As lunchtime nears, some crowd the hallway, drawn by the smell of steaming rice. Most of them, however, are in the rooms: sprawled out on the cushions, or playing cards in their undershirts. The hallway is scattered with empty boots, stuffy with the strong scent of dried sweat.

It takes Manan about an hour to serve lunch, after he unseals the pots of rice and meat with a soft prayer under his breath. He serves in plates, in bowls, and in buckets brought from checkpoints around the palace and outside. He serves soldiers, needy neighbors who send their children to fetch food, and party workers.

At the end of the hour, as word spreads that the food is running short, a mix of uniforms barge into the kitchen. Manan, drenched in sweat, is overwhelmed as soldiers scavenge for what is left, lifting the top of one pot after another before walking away in disappointment.

Some of his most colorful guests were some senior members of the Taliban, and the general is not pleased that they later spoke badly of his hospitality.

In the early days of the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, Dostum, one of the coalition's first allies on the ground, took some 7,000 Taliban prisoners, he has said. In those months, his men allegedly killed hundreds, and by some accounts thousands, of the prisoners in quelling a prison revolt, and by suffocating surrendered Taliban fighters in shipping containers. The general has denied those accusations.

Dostum said that the most senior Taliban prisoners, who included major battlefield commanders, were brought to his palace in Sheberghan as guests, of a sort.

"They gained weight here," Dostum told visiting reporters last month. "I put them up in nice rooms, I fed them bananas, I fed them oranges. But they said, 'Dostum did this to me, Dostum did that.'" He shook his head in dismay.

The general set in with stories about his insurgent guests and their foibles.

In one, he talked about the young boys the Taliban commanders kept in the ranks, which Dostum assumed was for the purpose of abuse.

"I have been to Turkey, I have been to Europe, I have been to Africa," he exclaimed, "but I have never seen such beautiful, beautiful boys."

While his officials would not discuss how much the general's tradition of hospitality and feeding costs every year, it is clear such a brand of politics - which requires maintaining several guesthouses and kitchens across many provinces - runs on money.

To give a sense of how much he spends, Dostum recalled the installments of cash that U.S. Special Forces paid him in the first weeks of the invasion.

"They were giving me $50,000 every 15 or 20 days," he said, adding that the Americans also brought food for his horses in their helicopters - though he made fun of the soldiers' lack of knowledge about a horse's diet.

"All of their money to me probably wasn't more than $400,000. I spend that much in one day," Dostum said, laughing.