Last year one commander who remains loyal to Dostum was offered $11m

Last year, one commander (who remains loyal to Dostum) was offered $11m (pounds 7m) to capitulate.Still another theory is that General Malik is fighting a blood feud in the classic Afghan style. His family used to be headed by his brother, Rasool Palhawn, who rose to prominence as General Dostum’s deputy. Last June, Mr Rasool was mysteriously assassinated by his bodyguard – on the orders, some say, of General Dostum himself. Although his father, like General Dostum is an Uzbek, his mother is a Pashtun, the same ethnic minority as the Taliban. On the fall of Kabul last September, the Taliban strung him up from a lamppost.The routing of General Dostum has implications for the whole of central Asia. Mazar’s population is already to swollen to many times its normal size by refugees from all over the country – some of them covert Taliban sympathisers, although many are not. The arrival of the fundamentalists, Western aid workers fear, could drive hundreds of thousands of refugees north across the borders of the central Asian republics.The great worry is that sectarian warfare could spread.

Tajikistan, which is only now emerging from a five-year civil war of its own, is seen as being particularly vulnerable.General Dostum isn’t finished yet, however. Mazar is still calm; he possesses a considerable number of tanks and fighters, and has been kept well supplied over the winter months by Russia, Iran and Uzbekistan, all of which are anxious to prevent Taliban’s success.General Dostum’s current whereabouts are unknown. In a statement from Kandahar, the Taliban headquarters, Mullah Moham-med, the movement’s reclusive leader, said that anyone surrendering voluntarily would be spared by the regime.But he said: “Those forced to surrender by the Taliban will face Islam courts.” No one in Mazar has forgotten what this meant for Mohammed Najibullah, the former Afghan president. This leaves his troops on the far western front hopelessly isolated; their defeat, which according to some reports is already a fact, would allow the Taliban to begin the final advance on Mazar, the key to the remaining third of the country not yet under their control.Unlike the eastern front, the terrain the Taliban must cross is almost perfectly flat and an easy prospect for any mechanised army They are already scenting victory.

Yet suspicions abound in Baku that it was official policy, which has since been abandoned. At the moment, as the pipe-laying barge glides across the Caspian, peace prevails. How long that will last is anyone’s guess.With so much at stake, from money to history itself, the Great Game seems certain to go into extra time.. A calamitous split in the alliance ranged against the Taliban has opened the way for a fresh offensive by the Afghan fundamentalists. Azerbaijan’s security services accuse Russia of training Armenian troops in southern Russia; there are reports of non-Russian ships being harassed in the Black Sea, apparently as part of a strategy to undermine the argument for a pipeline through Georgia.At the top of Moscow’s rap sheet is a piece of skulduggery that it now admits – the gift of $1bn of arms to Baku’s enemies in Armenia in a breathtakingly cynical attempt to prolong divisions in the southern Caucasus.