Kabul, September 23: During his two years as a provincial governor in Afghanistan, Arsalah Jamal survived four suicide attacks.
Once, a Taliban bomber dressed as a doctor struck as Jamal dedicated a hospital wing. Twice, car bombs slammed into his convoy. Another time, an attacker blew himself up at a funeral Jamal was attending for a fellow governor killed in another blast.
Jamal, 45, escaped harm each time, but he resigned late last year as governor of the eastern province of Khost and moved his family to Canada a victory for the Taliban and its campaign to intimidate and assassinate Afghan officials.
Assassinations have intensified this year, with more than 100 officials and pro-government tribal elders attacked half of them fatally. Echoing a strategy of insurgents in Iraq, such killings sow fear, undermine the already weak government and make it difficult to fill official posts with educated and competent Afghans.
“The Taliban know that if you kill one guy in the government, it discourages another 10 from being in that job,” said Jamal, who returned to Kabul this year to work for President Hamid Karzai’s re-election.
The campaign of fear is another indication of the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, where a record number of US and NATO troops have also died this year.
The Taliban seek to weaken local government authority, Kovanen said. “Then they set up their own system of Shariah law and they install their own shadow government.”
In one recent attack, a Taliban suicide bomber killed the country’s deputy intelligence chief, Abdullah Laghmani, and 22 other people as they were leaving a mosque in Laghman province.
“Once you are in a government position, you have many enemies,” Jamal said. “My daughters couldn’t go to school. The teachers told me the whole school was in danger because of my daughters.”
Sitting in a courtyard garden where caged parakeets hirped and armed guards stood outside, Jamal ticked off on his fingers the assassinations last year in Khost province: one of his district chiefs killed by a bomb, a judge slain by a sniper, another district chief who escaped one suicide attack in 2008 only to be killed by another this year.
Hundreds of local leaders have been threatened. Tribal elder Khaki Jan Zadran said militants from the powerful Haqqani network vowed to kill him last year for serving on Paktia’s provincial council. He left his village five months ago and now stays in the eastern province’s capital, Gardez, living more like a fugitive than an elected official.
“I don’t stay in one place more than two or three nights,” Zadran said. “And I can’t go back to my village.”
Zadran, 55, is a member of the same Pashtun tribe as militant leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, and both fought against the 1980s Soviet occupation. He was disillusioned by the 1990s Afghan civil war and the Taliban’s harsh rule.
—Agencies