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Qadir, a Pashtun, played key role©Associated PressJuly 7, 2002 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The assassination Saturday of Afghan Vice President Abdul Qadir robs the new transitional government of its most significant member of the ethnic Pashtun community. Afghan President Hamid Karzai made Qadir one of his vice presidents last month in an attempt to appease the country's majority Pashtuns, who complained bitterly that the government was dominated by ethnic Tajiks from the Northern Alliance, which fought the Taliban and al-Qaida. Last year, Qadir walked out of U.N.-sponsored talks near Bonn, Germany, which set up the first interim government after the Taliban, because of what he considered a lack of Pashtun representation. In the end, the Cabinet was carefully chosen to balance ethnic and special interest groups. While it blended all of Afghanistan's ethnic groups, half its members were aligned with the Northern Alliance. The three vice presidents chosen had consisted of one Pashtun, one Tajik and one Hazara. Six of the 13 Cabinet posts went to Pashtuns, including Qadir, who was minister of public works. Many observers believe that no Afghan government can succeed unless Pashtuns accept it. In October, barely two weeks before the Taliban abandoned Kabul, Qadir's brother, Abdul Haq, was captured and killed by the religious militia. He had slipped quietly into his homeland to try to rally anti-Taliban opposition. But Qadir's personal history was colorful and often controversial, making it difficult to limit the number of groups that might have decided to kill him. A guerrilla commander during the 1980s war against the Soviets, Qadir belonged to the conservative Hezb-e-Islami party, led by Islamic cleric Yunus Khalis, whose farm in Nangarhar's Farmada region housed hundreds of al-Qaida fighters during the Taliban regime. As governor of eastern Nangarhar province in 1996, before the Taliban took power, Qadir welcomed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden when he arrived in Jalalabad with 180 Arab followers on a chartered jet from Sudan. Bin Laden and his followers were greeted by Qadir and his lieutenant Engineer Mahmood, the man who invited bin Laden to Afghanistan after the U.S. government pressured the Sudanese government to get rid of him. Bin Laden spent several weeks in Jalalabad before Mahmood was killed in a tribal dispute. Bin Laden remained in the area as the Taliban marched through Jalalabad taking control and pushing on to Kabul in September 1996, driving feuding Islamic factions from the capital. Qadir, whose son spent more than one year in a Taliban jail, fled to Germany where he has business interests. He later returned, and maintained soldiers in the Panjshir Valley with the Northern Alliance. As governor of Nangharar province from 1992 until 1996, Qadir was often criticized by the United Nations Drug Control Program for not doing enough to curb poppy production in Nangarhar, one of the largest poppy producing provinces of the country.
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