Slain Afghan was key to Karzai bridge-building

Haji Abdul Qadeer, the Afghan vice president assassinated in Kabul yesterday, was a prominent Pashtun leader who forged a key alliance with the Tajik-led Northern Alliance to overthrow the hardline Taliban last year.

Qadeer's appointment in June as one of President Hamid Karzai's three deputies seemed to confirm his pivotal role in post-Taliban Afghanistan as the link between the strategic eastern province of Nangarhar and the government in Kabul.

His pragmatic outlook and fabled business acumen - his family owned its own airline in the 1990s to import and sell in nearby Pakistan - set him apart from the other regional warlords Karzai reluctantly depends on elsewhere.

But in the end, the shrewd tactician suffered a similar fate to his younger brother Abdul Haq, the former anti-Soviet Mujahideen commander killed by the Taliban last October as he tried to rally Pashtuns against the hardliners.

There was no immediate word about who gunned down the vice president at the compound of his office in the centre of Kabul.

In April, Qadeer survived a bomb attack aimed against Defence Minister Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik, as he accompanied him on a visit to Jalalabad. The attack was seen as a Pashtun protest against Tajik domination in Kabul.

A tall and imposing man with a trim white beard, Qadeer had a chequered career that included being the first host in Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden who moved from Sudan to mountainous Nangarhar in 1996.

There was no indication that Qadeer, governor of Nangarhar from 1992 to 1996, supported bin Laden's political plans but he let him use former Mujahideen cave hideouts that later became bases for the Al Qaida organisation.

With the Kabul government dominated by rival Tajiks back then, Qadeer seemed to devote much of his time to expanding his lucrative business links across the porous border with Pakistan, where Pashtun tribesmen openly deal with smuggled goods.

When the fundamentalist Taliban, who took over the country, were defeated last November, Qadeer lost no time returning to the Nangarhar capital Jalalabad and having himself proclaimed governor again.

At the United Nations-sponsored talks in Bonn that named an an interim government in December, Qadeer was vice chairman of the Northern Alliance delegation and effectively the most powerful Pashtun around the table.

Qadeer had no chance of the top post, a job that went to fellow Pashtun Karzai with strong backing from the United States, but he used the talks to maximum effect.

Wearing a three-piece suit and northern "pakol" cap - an Alliance symbol - to the opening session, he walked about with an air of authority and members of other delegations demonstratively went up to him to pay their respects.

At one point, he stormed out to protest against what he called the conference's discrimination against Pashtuns - and promptly gave an interview to the BBC Pashto service to make sure his fellow tribesmen back home knew it.

Qadeer left Bonn with the post as urban development minister and moved into his spacious house in Kabul's comfortable Wazir Akbar Khan district, where he soon plastered walls along the streets with posters in memory of his late brother Abdul Haq.

The move was seen as veiled competition to Tajiks in the Alliance, who put up far more posters commemorating their assassinated leader, the famed commander Ahmad Shah Masood, who died two days before the September 11 attacks blamed on Al Qaida.

Reflecting the real balance of power in the city, the Haq posters were quickly torn down while the Masood posters stayed.

Afterwards, Qadeer appeared to work comfortably inside the government while expanding his influence within it. His appointment last month as vice president and public works minister appeared to confirm his continued rise as a key ally for Karzai.