November 26, 2001	Monday	Ramazan 10, 1422

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LOS ANGELES, Nov 25: Declassified US documents from his last years as king of Afghanistan portray Mohammad Zahir Shah as an aloof leader reigning over a nation with declining morale and a feeling of hopelessness.

Still, the grandfatherly figure who ruled Afghanistan for four decades now is viewed by many as a symbol of unity for a nation fractured by war and ethnic power struggles, reports Boston Globe’s early edition on Saturday.

The 87-year-old former king plans to send a delegation to UN- brokered power-sharing talks in Germany next week on Afghanistan’s post-Taliban leadership. And the United States and its coalition partners in the war on terrorism hope that Zahir Shah could assume a leadership role, at least as a symbolic figure in a future Afghan government.

Zahir Shah ruled for 40 years before being ousted in a 1973 coup. He now lives in Rome and says he does not want to return to the throne, but hopes to unite the Afghan people and help them establish a representative government.

“He wasn’t a very effective leader,” said Fiona Hill, an expert on Central Asia at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “But you have to remember that this guy was born into this. “You have to think of him as a monarch, chosen by birth, not by any special ability. He is a king, not a politician and all we can look to him for is a symbolic role.”

In the early 1970s, one American diplomat in Kabul privately suggested to the king that he mimic the depression-era leadership style of Franklin Roosevelt. Then-ambassador Robert Neumann urged Zahir to take bolder steps to fix economic woes threatening Afghanistan’s new democratic-leaning government of the time.

Documents about the king were released by the National Archives under the US government’s historical declassification programme.