General finds news of his own death is premature

The death of General Abdul Rashid Dostum was announced in the Pakistani newspapers again yesterday, for the second time in a fortnight.

The general was at his battle headquarters at the time, 60 miles south of the besieged city of Mazar-i-Sharif, and he was said to have greeted the news with his famously terrifying laugh. For few men have had death wished on them so often by so many enemies and yet survived to fight another day.

Whatever the course of the war in Afghanistan and its aftermath, General Dostum is already playing a crucial role. As a leading commander of the opposition Northern Alliance, he is tantalisingly close to capturing the highly strategic Mazar-i-Sharif from the Taliban.

He is a hero of the Uzbek people of northern Afghanistan, which means that he commands the loyalty of one of the country's most important minority groups.

And as a politician, no one has greater experience in the arts of strategic friendship and betrayal. He has been compared with Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and "a backwater Saddam Hussein".

A team of American military officers visited him at the end of last week to negotiate "assistance" for his forces, the latest in a string of powerful suitors with whom General Dostum has at various times climbed into bed.

During a 23-year military career, the 46-year-old former plumber has been supported by, and has subsequently abandoned, most of the big players in the region.

He began life as a soldier in the Soviet-backed puppet regime of President Najibullah. He betrayed him in 1992, the first in a series of lightning changes of alignment.

Over the years he has been funded by the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, Iran, Pakistan and most recently Turkey. After the bloody series of battles that ended when the Taliban captured Mazar-i-Sharif in 1997, his Uzbek forces became implicated in a number of massacres that caused the deaths of Taliban prisoners and ethnic Pashtuns in the area.

More than six feet tall and physically powerful, he is known for his lusty appetites. His laugh alone is said to be so frightening that people have died from fear on hearing it, and he is known for his ruthless cruelty. Soldiers caught stealing have been tied to the tracks of tanks and crushed to pulp under their wheels.

The Taliban insist that they are mounting a successful counter-attack in defence of Mazar-i-Sharif. One reason for their resistance may be the likelihood of further massacres if, and when, General Dostum recaptures the city.

Recently he has been reborn once more as a supporter of the former Afghan king, Zahir Shah, whose proposal for a loya jirga, a grand gathering of Afghan leaders, is seen as the best hope for Afghanistan by a growing number of anti-Taliban forces, both Afghan and foreign.

For the time being, General Dostum finds himself speaking the language of international reconciliation.

But if his American and monarchist friendships prove at all lasting, he will be breaking the habits of a lifetime.