"General Dostam has been appointed as the Chief of Staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces," President Karzai's spokesman Jawed Ludin told

Deputy Defence Minister Bismillah Khan will remain the Chief of Army Staff in actual command of Afghanistan's 25,000-strong army.

Dostam's spokesman could not be reached for comment.

If Dostam accepts the newly-created position he will become a top military advisor to Karzai, the titular head of the armed forces, officials said.

"The post is largely symbolic," a government official told AFP.

Nevertheless, the appointment is likely to alarm rights groups who have been calling for those who committed war crimes during the country's bloody civil war to be brought to justice.

Dostam, one of the most powerful men in northern Afghanistan, won 10 percent of last October's presidential vote, mostly in northern provinces where he garnered much support from the ethnic Uzbek and Turkmen communities.

However, he was singled out by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission for the violence of his troops during the civil war which raged in the Afghan capital between 1992 and 1995, and for his bombing of Kabul during that period.

Ludin insisted that Dostam's appointment to a government post was "a good thing, a positive one."

Dostam played a major role in overthrowing the Soviet-backed communist regime of which he himself was part for many years. During the subsequent civil war era, he switched sides between rival mujahedin commanders.

As the Taliban conquered large swathes of the country in the mid-1990s he fled to Turkey. After US-led forces ousted the regime in late 2001 he reappeared in possession of tanks and heavy weapons.

He has now ceded most of them as part of a UN-backed disarmament drive.

An ethnic Uzbek, he was appointed as Karzai's envoy to the north soon after the fall of the Taliban, and as an advisor to the defence ministry.

In January Dostam narrowly escaped assassination by a suicide bomber outside a mosque in the northern town of Sheberghan, where he had been saying open-air prayers at a Muslim festival.

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