Dostum to NYT: This Warlord Doesn’t Cry
Abdul Rashid Dostum is denying a New York Times report that he cried in a security meeting.
Abdul Rashid Dostum is an infamous Afghan warlord. He has been accused of sundry human rights abuses, including the massacre of hundreds of prisoners. He helped the CIA drive the Taliban from power. He now serves as Afghanistan’s vice president. And according to the New York Times, he recently cried at a meeting of the National Security Council because he felt he was being excluded from decision-making.
Abdul Rashid Dostum is an infamous Afghan warlord. He has been accused of sundry human rights abuses, including the massacre of hundreds of prisoners. He helped the CIA drive the Taliban from power. He now serves as Afghanistan’s vice president. And according to the New York Times, he recently cried at a meeting of the National Security Council because he felt he was being excluded from decision-making.
Dostum does not find this amusing. In a statement on his Facebook page, Dostum accuses the Times of “character assassination.” Crying, he says, doesn’t “doesn’t even stick to his personality and nature.”
The full Times report is a rather amazing, bizarre piece of journalism. It describes how Dostum was brought on as President Ashraf Ghani’s running mate in order to secure support among Afghanistan’s Uzbek population, of which Dostum is a charismatic leader. Since winning office, Ghani has marginalized the former warlord and excluded him from his circle of close advisers, according to the Times report.
In response, Dostum has begun behaving erratically, threatening to raise a militia to fight the Taliban and speculating that a truck used for a suicide bomb had been airlifted to the site of the explosion. At one point, the Times article quotes Dostum, who has taken an interest in Afghanistan’s prospective Olympic athletes, comparing himself unfavorably to the Portuguese footballer Ronaldo. “You can’t just throw a football at me,” Dostum says.
As for those security meetings, one anonymous Afghan official told the Times that he hopes Dostum keeps showing up: “It’s a lot more fun.”
SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images
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