NATO backs Afghan official despite jail accusation

KABUL (Reuters) - The NATO-led military force in Afghanistan said on Saturday it had confidence in the choice of a man picked to run a former Taliban stronghold, despite a NATO commander saying he spent years in a German prison for assault.

Abdul Zahir, head of the new administration installed in the town of Marjah, denies the accusation that could set back the biggest NATO military operation of the eight-year-old war by damaging his legitimacy.

The commander of NATO troops in southern Afghanistan, British Major General Nick Carter, told the Wall Street Journal NATO has known for two weeks that Zahir had been convicted in Germany of assaulting his stepson and jailed for four years.

Marjah, a town in southern Helmand Province, was seized last month in the massive Operation Mushtarak.

The announced goal of the offensive was to bring a so-called "government in a box" to the former Taliban stronghold. NATO has repeatedly stressed that the success of the operation depended on Zahir being accepted as legitimate.

The Journal quoted Zahir as denying he had been jailed.

"We were a family and sometimes families have problems and sometimes husbands and wives have problems and sometimes fathers and sons have problems. But I have never assaulted anyone," the paper quoted him as saying.

"I have never served any time in a prison in Germany."

Zahir could not be reached for comment. Commander Amanda Peterseim, Carter's spokeswoman, said Carter had nothing to add to his remarks in the Journal.

Admiral Greg Smith, the head of strategic communications for the NATO-led force, declined to comment on the allegations against Zahir, but said NATO stood by the choices of Helmand Province Governor Gulab Mangal, who picked him.

"We trust the judgment of Governor Mangal in making the choice in the first place," Smith told Reuters. Zahir "is doing good work down there, according to what we're hearing."

Another NATO official in Kabul said, "We know Afghanistan is not going to be run by choirboys."

"At the end of the day, Governor Mangal has got to put a team together.... We have confidence in Governor Mangal."

In his remarks to the Journal, Carter suggested that domestic violence such as that for which he said Zahir had been jailed was not necessarily unacceptable in Afghan culture.

"Haji Zahir's mistake was to behave like an Afghan in Germany," Carter said, using an honorific title for a man who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.