AFGHANS are accustomed to “hoping for the best and expecting the worst.” The fragility of the current situation calls for great care and caution not to repeat past mistakes of western policy.

Great care must be taken in any steps in formulating a post-Taliban system for Afghanistan that includes an acceptable government as well as provisions for development and economic stability. More important, efforts in this direction must reflect the sentiments of ordinary Afghans inside Afghanistan in order to gain credibility and promote long-term stability. Sadly, these sentiments seem being ignored.

Currently, there are two distinct viewpoints on nation building — one held by Afghans in the West and the other by Afghans closer to home. The discourse on nation-building by the majority of expatriate Afghans in the West prefers restoring Afghanistan to what it once was by utilizing symbols from the past, as their vision remains embedded in the idea of what Afghanistan was at the time of their going abroad. The other point of view, found mostly among Afghans inside Afghanistan, envisions a future free from the baggage of the past and goes beyond politics and beyond a fascination for “ethnic representation.”

The proposed Loya jirga is filled with good intentions but remains highly problematic. The idea is endorsed by Afghans in the West but does not enjoy uncritical enthusiasm among Afghans inside the country. It is important to remember that no government or political system has been established by Loya jirga in the recent history of Afghanistan. While jirgas are very effective and will continue to work in the local context to solve land or intra-family disputes, one must proceed cautiously at the national level, particularly at this politically sensitive moment in Afghan history.

What Afghans need is substance rather than symbolism in terms of governance. Attempts by the international community to find a symbol, be in it the former king or a Loya Jirga, may be useful in the short term but may seriously undermine long-term stability in Afghanistan.

Policy pundits tread on slippery ground on the question of ethnicity which disproportionately dominates visions of post-Taliban reality. This indicates that the perspectives of ordinary Afghans are not fully represented in policy considerations. Ethnicity was never a major issue among ordinary citizens as friendships and relationships have always formed across ethnic lines. For example, our own predominately Pashtun village in Logar has a Tajik as the tribal chief. Ethnic representation has importance but it is not the sole criterion to determine government structure. The current focus on ethnicity is primarily a post-Soviet phenomenon perpetuated by a small number of politicians and warlords in order to promote their interests in the absence of any other justifiable basis for decision-making.

The short-term goal of any process should be a Council of Leaders consisting of representatives from the different regions of Afghanistan. The Council could be selected through a transparent mechanism with the active involvement of UN observers.

These observers should include a large number of individuals from Islamic countries, including Muslim scholars and clerics. They can, for example, receive a list of 200 names nominated by the local jirgas (councils) from eight regions of Afghanistan.

Ninety per cent of the names should be from different regions while the remaining 10 per cent can be from the region being surveyed in order to assess how Afghans would choose their national leaders. It may include certain number of tribal elders, credible former Mujahideen, educated Afghans, etc.

These lists should then be studied and the persons figuring in the majority of the lists would be considered to form the Council of Leaders.

This Council would provide transitional leadership for a specified number of years and determine how political development would proceed at the end of the Council’s tenure. While this Council is in place, economic assistance from the international community, along with monitoring of allocations and utilization of these inflows must foster economic progress to ensure stability. A mechanism for airing complaints and grievances must also be part of this process.

There are certain demographics in Afghanistan that must be involved in any discussions regarding governance: tribal leadership, religious leadership, intellectuals, and those who were involved in fighting against the Soviets.

There has to be certain criteria for choosing potential participants. For example, General Dostum, currently with the Northern Alliance, is widely regarded as being guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Many Afghans will find him an undesirable representative. It is important that representatives have credibility inside Afghanistan and are not overly controversial.

In terms of development, the international community as well as Afghans in the West can assist with investments, institution building, and human resource development at this stage. It is important that observers are present at every stage to ensure credibility and transparency. It is also essential that there are economic “observers” to oversee the process of economic development in an affort to prevent corruption. The World Bank, European Union, the UN and other bilateral and multilateral donors already use advisers on the ground to assist and report.

This proposal is different from the Loya Jirga idea as the international community representatives will be involved at the local level to gather names from local Afghans and the Council is not just to discuss and debate but to lead the country through a transitional period of perhaps two years. The presence of the world community representatives is essential at this stage to ensure the fairness and credibility of the processes involved.

Furthermore, such a process will inevitably bring ethnically diverse representatives as well as those affiliated with different political groups together to work towards common objectives, and yet local politics and ethnicity will not affect the credibility and acceptance of the representatives. The West must be ready to accept that many representatives may not be well known to western observers or among Afghans in the West, as local preferences of Afghans will be prioritized in this process. Furthermore, the Taliban cannot be completely sidelined in this process.

A creative discourse of care and concern must be initiated by the international community. Ordinary Afghans, those who have lived through twenty years of war and have remained relevant to the current realities in Afghanistan, must have an opportunity to determine their future.

Sayed Aqa is an Afghan aid worker who has been involved in humanitarian activities and peace negotiations inside Afghanistan since 1986. He is the founder of two NGOs, the Mine Clearance Planning Agency (MCPA) and the Afghan Campaign to Ban Landmines, a 1997 Nobel Peace Prize co-Laureate. He currently works for the United Nations. Deonna Kelli Sayed is an American-Muslim who has been active in the Muslim-American community and with issues relating to the Muslim world.

IN the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: “Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee.” Then he broke down and wept.

Here’s the rub: America is at war against people it doesn’t know, because they don’t appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an “international coalition against terror”, mobilized its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can’t very well return without having fought one. If it doesn’t find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we’ll lose sight of why it’s being fought in the first place.

What we’re witnessing here is the spectacle of the world’s most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America’s streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn’t show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, “We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them.” It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don’t.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America “enemies of freedom”. “Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’” he said. “They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy’s motives are what the US government says they are, and there’s nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it’s an easy notion to peddle.

However, if that were true, it’s reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America’s economic and military dominance — the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon — were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things — to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn’t indifference. It’s just augury. An absence of surprise.

The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government’s policies that are so hated. They can’t possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.

America’s grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world’s sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organization has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It’s almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing. But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly.

Before America places itself at the helm of the “international coalition against terror”, before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission — called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom — it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America’s war against terror in America or against terror in general?

What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was “a very hard choice”, but that, all things considered, “we think the price is worth it”.

Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilization and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilizations” and “collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead Mujahideen for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerized, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world’s superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans. There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan’s economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map — no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants.

Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines — 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out — food and aid agencies have been asked to leave — the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century.

Civilians starving to death while they’re waiting to be killed. In America there has been rough talk of “bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age”. Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there.