THE vice-president of Afghanistan, Abdul Rashid Dostum, spent November 25th watching a game of buzkashi, a traditional version of polo in which the carcass of a goat serves as the ball. With his boss abroad, Mr Dostum was acting president. But his behaviour allegedly became downright unpresidential when he encountered Ahmad Ishchi, a political rival, amid the crowd. Mr Dostum is said to have punched Mr Ishchi in the face and then pinned him to the ground with his boot. His bodyguards administered a further beating before carting the injured Mr Ishchi away in an armoured vehicle. He has not been seen since. Protesters demanding his release were turned away when they visited Mr Dostum’s palace, a sprawling pink and baby blue compound plastered with large posters of its owner.

Mr Dostum likes to talk about himself in the third person. He is a warlord first, politician second. He is known to Westerners chiefly for the time his henchmen packed hundreds of Taliban prisoners into shipping containers, leading to mass suffocation. It was startling, then, when Ashraf Ghani, a technocratic reformist, picked him as his running mate in 2014, probably to secure votes among Mr Dostum’s fellow Uzbeks. That plan succeeded, but Mr Ghani has had to put up with the erratic warlord ever since. He divides his time between Kabul, where he grumbles in public, tearfully, about being marginalised, and his home territory in the north, where he mobilises unauthorised militias to fight the Taliban.

Mr Dostum (pictured) is perhaps the most glaring example of the immunity many Afghan warlords enjoy. Most recently, the Afghan government signed a peace agreement with Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a blood-spattered Islamist, granting him immunity from prosecution for past war crimes. The UN hailed the deal as a necessary step towards national reconciliation, but Human Rights Watch complained that Mr Hikmatyar’s return to national politics “will compound the culture of impunity”.

The dilemma divides Afghans, too. The Solidarity Party of Afghanistan, or Hambastagi, is one of the fiercest critics of the commanders who deal in both ballots and bullets. Its spokeswoman, Selay Ghaffar, regularly hectors warlords. Others in Kabul, however, accept grim compromises in the quest for peace.

Hamidullah, a 19-year-old doing pull-ups in a public park, was appalled to watch the vice-president turn kidnapper. But he blamed all the leading politicians, including the president, for surrounding themselves with people of their own ethnicity, compounding decades of ethnic strife. “We need leaders who represent the whole country,” he says.