How an Afghan 'Jekyll and Hyde' is doctoring postwar politics As Australian and American forces pack up to quit Afghanistan, the uncrowned king of Oruzgan watches closely, narrowing his focus to the question of how to survive in a snake pit of tribal politics. A law unto himself, 40-ish warlord Matiullah Khan is cagey, oozing bonhomie and danger in equal measure. We travel freely because he imposed security where others couldn't. Daru Khan Khaksar, tribal elder If he were in New York, Wall Street and the Mafia would compete for his services. He is the Jekyll and Hyde of the Afghan south who, by all accounts, might drown you in kindness or in a well. Power to his people: Matiullah Khan (left) talks to men in the Tarin Kowt district. The widows of Tarin Kowt shower him in blessings for his weekly distribution of money and meat, oil and flour. A foreign official who needed to talk human rights comes away intimidated - the way Matiullah twirls a Glock pistol throughout their meeting has something to do with it. In private they curse MK, as he is known locally and by the Afghanistan cognoscenti. But he's celebrated in pop music. The man who corruptly acquires nearly all his dollars goes on national TV as the crusading star in a public awareness campaign preaching against the sin of corruption. Matiullah's evolution stuns those who are in the business of watching him. "Seriously, in 2003 this guy had the mind of a child," a human rights professional says. He was a typical greedy warlord, fighting for resources. He doesn't go after every penny now. He consults the elders instead of dismissing them. He shows respect for the ones that he needs to respect, and he has developed this incredible understanding of how to play politics. Matiullah's formal title is provincial chief of police in Oruzgan. But that's a veil of official gossamer over a painstakingly crafted web of power and patronage that has catapulted a former taxi driver and field labourer to the top table in the nation. And it comes at a time when Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, is positioning his cronies to hold on to their massive, ill-gotten gains as he nears the mandated end of his term of office. Matiullah is a Karzai crony but also his own man - relying, as one international observer says, on a weak central government to do his own thing. It is late in the evening when we hear an explosion - then panic. Men with guns pour out of the compound, scattering every which way. They know Matiullah is about to return from one of his regular meetings with the Australians or Americans in a sprawling military base that sits cheek-by-jowl with his compound. It transpires that a small device detonated as Matiullah's Humvee left, but it seems to be directed at the nearby home of a tribal elder, not at MK. This is no big deal in the Oruzgan scheme of things, but there is room to cast Matiullah as the hero of the moment. He has his own radio station, and in a case like this his guards become a Greek chorus. "He didn't do what other commanders would do - speed off in the opposite direction," one of them reports breathlessly, once they have established he is safe. No, MK jumped out and investigated the bombing himself. Matiullah Khan. Outside the high walls of his compound, men sell caged partridges; inside, haughty peacocks strut freely. The compound is a sprawl of mud-walled buildings, a small mosque and an elaborate swimming pool. It has a gym, a media centre and stylish guest accommodation. A network of closed-circuit cameras feeds images of everything to a large, segmented flat-screen TV tucked under the desk in Matiullah's first-floor office suite. A new boys' school is being built at the back, he says, to specialise in English, computer studies and university preparation. His desk clutter includes heavy pieces of carved green marble, one shaped as a map of Afghanistan; plaques of appreciation from the Australian Federal Police and a US Navy SEAL team; a medal awarded by the Kabul government; and in pride of place at the front edge of the desk, a boxed boomerang - a gift from air chief marshal Angus Houston, former head of the Australian Defence Force. As we sit to talk, Matiullah removes a spittoon from the desktop. His reputation is that he will kill at will and people are afraid of him. An Afghan analyst who has observed him at close quarters compartmentalises his critique, on one hand damning MK's human rights record but also admiring what he describes as a rare capacity, for an Afghan, to take the fight to the Taliban. "He is a very brave man and he fights the Taliban with honour - in the south-Afghanistan meaning of this word," he says. There are only a couple of people in all of the south who can stand up to the insurgents and who the Taliban actually fear. Abdul Raziq, the Kandahar police chief, is one; MK is the other. Matiullah faces his enemy with real courage and psychology. He is prepared like few others when he goes in to battle. These days he leaves the compound only in a heavily armoured Humvee. Matiullah knows, the Taliban know, and his tribal rivals know that such is the power concentrated in him that his elimination would create an extraordinary and dangerous vacuum as Afghanistan transitions to the next uncertain phase of its history. Matiullah is consolidating and the ledger splits between what he calls his "good works" and allegations from his legion of critics of sins ranging from petty theft to acts of sheer bastardry. Having, in effect, established his own shadow government, he unilaterally embarks on the jobs he feels need to be done, mocking the more cumbersome planning approach of the provincial and national bureaucracy, and even of his Australian backers. He complains that the Australians sat in their bunkers "doing nothing, while I was clearing the Baluchi Valley." And he snipes at the Australian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team: "I do things; they talk about doing them." At Chora, Achekzai tribal elder Daru Khan Khaksar interrupts his note-taking on our meeting to cast Matiullah as their saviour. "His role is more important than that of the Afghan National Army or of anyone else," he says. There is a spectral quality to the man - especially if chanced upon in the evening light as he steps out in the all-white robes of a Muslim who has made the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. He speaks quietly. Born in Tarin Kowt in the early 1970s, Matiullah attributes his lack of education to "house-to-house" disruption during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Until he was 19, he was displaced by war to his family's village north of the town, where he worked the fields. Did the family grow opium poppies? "Mostly wheat," he responds, massaging the sole of his right foot. But something is not right. A staple in accounts of Matiullah's life has been tutelage by his warlord uncle, the brutal and vengeful Jan Mohammad Khan, aka JMK. At the remote Shahidi Hassas, a tribal elder recalls: "Even when Matiullah Khan was a child, before he had a beard, he fought with JMK." But ask about the garrulous uncle and the nephew becomes monosyllabic, casting their relationship in remote terms - JMK was too busy being a leader for all to be looking out for his nephew, and then the Taliban threw him in jail. To hear Matiullah now, the critical formative influence in his life was President Karzai. Don't believe any of that talk about him being JMK's henchman, Matiullah says. The first armed combat he volunteers is an encounter with the Taliban in the mountains between Tarin Kowt and Dihrawud after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US. He and a small group led by Karzai had collected an air drop of American weapons - AK-47 and PK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. But as they hauled the booty back towards Tarin Kowt, where they planned to launch an attack on the provincial government centre, they came under attack - and the Taliban got away with all the US-supplied arms. "So we had to liberate Tarin Kowt with the few AK-47s we had," he says. It wasn't bloody. We attacked in the morning, it was over by afternoon. Two Talibs died in a traffic accident as they tried to escape. Here, MK would have us believe that already he was evolving as the human-rights-conscious, Jeffersonian democrat he hasn't quite become. "We were in the mountains, but it wasn't about being a mujahideen fighter," he insists. We were thinking about liberating Afghanistan; about helping it to develop as a nation, with a national police service and military. For many Afghans, the appeal of a police chief with deep pockets is his can-do approach to everything, circumventing funding crises and planning delays. If a village needs a mosque for prayers, he builds one; a bridge to cross a river, he'll get moving right away. A culvert gets washed away and Matiullah moves in men, machines and money. He has built more than 70 mosques in the province, some simple mud-walled constructions, others more elaborate. Discussing what he calls his "good works," Matiullah becomes almost sentimental. "I have to listen to the people and to fulfil their expectations," he says. I have to close the gap between the people and their government and help them to understand that the police serve them. I feel great responsibility. I want to win the hearts and minds of the people because it makes them happier. So I build a mosque for people who need one. I've lost count of the number of wells I drill for people with no water. I spend $80,000 to send 600 students for study in Kabul. I take care of 280 girls in the school at the back of my compound. He closes with an impressive figure: 15,000 - the number of locals he claims live off the salaries he pays. Sceptical Afghans say it's all a calculated personal investment in consolidating the power of his Popalzai tribe and at the same time eclipsing fellow tribesmen who might claim the mantle of leadership. Perhaps ... If Matiullah's good works are his Jekyll persona, then a measure of his Hyde side is the fear induced in people who speak about him. "If he understands that I've told you this, he'll kill me," a source tells Fairfax Media, without exaggeration. A United Nations official observed him to be "a ruthless individual who'll use whatever is at his disposal." Among "whatever" is a catalogue of charges by human rights and other analysts: summary executions and torture, arbitrary detentions and extortion, all of it funded by drug running and the extraction of massive highway security tolls. More spectacularly, Matiullah gets away with it all because of the real or implied blessings his highway-security racket derives from his ties to the Australian and American military machines in southern Afghanistan. The fear element in the Matiullah narrative emanates in particular from events after the fall of the Taliban in the Baluchi Valley, a stronghold of the pro-Taliban Ghilzai tribe north of Tarin Kowt. As explained by an analyst who has conducted interviews in the area: "JMK and MK went house to house, killing people. These days MK is so strong that people are afraid to tell their stories openly, but I spoke with the victims. About a year after the fall of the Taliban, a few shots were fired from one of the villages, so JMK and MK started rounding up people. One man told me how his son was made to lie on the ground - and then they drove a truck over his head. The source then turns to the town of Mirabad: "It was the same there - maybe 700 people have been killed in multiple, brutal killings. That's why Mirabad became a home to the Taliban again; it was more about revenge on the tribal establishment than it was about loving the Taliban. Half of them arguably were Taliban - the rest were sympathisers, or maybe just relatives of sympathisers. But a good 200 were innocent - wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. But for many ordinary Oruzganis, MK is the last line of defence between them and a return to the brutal warlord madness of the early 1990s, or to the straitjacketed Taliban years that followed. Even Matiullah's long-term rival Nabi Khan Tokhi speaks up. "People's appreciation of MK is genuine because he opened the roads," he says. I had to abandon the Chora road after 40 of my men were killed trying to secure it. MK did what I couldn't do ... six governors and police chiefs before him couldn't do it, either. So people say, however much money he has, may God give him 10 times more. At Dihrawud, district police chief Haji Namatullah explains how he is under orders from Matiullah not to rob the people: "He said, 'Come to me for money if you have a problem - do not extort it from the people.' And I know too well that he'll punish me if I commit a crime. So more than a decade later, how does Matiullah Khan judge progress? Is the provincial chief of police in Oruzgan a part of the problem or the solution? He talks about an encounter with an 85-year-old man who has never left his village near Sawar, in Oruzgan's remote Charchino district. "What can we expect from such people in supporting or playing a role in governing this country?" he asks. That old man has never seen Tarin Kowt. He doesn't know what his rights are; how do you introduce democracy to him? It's very difficult. The people are ignorant and they don't understand this democracy. We need time, lots of time, but gradually we're working for better governance. A question that exercises many in Tarin Kowt is the fate of Matiullah in 2014, after the foreigners clear out and Karzai can no longer be called on to send reinforcements. This is the context in which Matiullah's appointment as police chief is seen as part of the new Karzai crony network that is intended to survive beyond the end of his presidency. Because if they cannot hold the south, what's to come of the Karzai cabal? Juma Gul Heimat, the former police chief, uses cashews, sugared almonds and other nibbles to map tribal conflict in Oruzgan. "There are big areas that MK does not control, and because his Popalzai people have fought with everyone else, it will be difficult for him to assert himself as a powerbroker," he says. Even if Kabul backs him, people will want to test him. When the foreigners leave he will be nothing. A warning by the former police chief that "MK will lose his power, lose his men" resonates with a throwaway line by one of Matiullah's militiamen during the convoy run from Tarin Kowt to Kandahar. "We do this for the money," he says as the armoured Toyota barrels down the highway. It's not about loyalty to MK. And though Matiullah and his rival Nabi Khan Tokhi have recently come to some sort of accommodation, the latter seems to think all bets might be off come next year's elections. "Then we'll see who is president and who is police chief," he says. MK has brought good benefits for his tribe but he has done nothing for the rest of us. The balance between the tribes is not maintained - and without that balance there can be no security. Walking Fairfax Media through continuing sectarian violence in Khas Uruzgan, a community leader ponders the fate of Matiullah in the absence of the foreign forces. What is he if there are no Americans, no Australians? The people will stand against him - he'll be nothing," the leader says. Nobody in the other tribes - Achekzai, Noorzai or Barakzai - likes him and people work for him only to earn a living. The day the foreigners leave his own men will kill him ... They'll be lining up to take Matiullah down. See also: Rise of the warlords How the ADF tried to control the real story of Oruzgan