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BONN, Dec 5: US officials put heavy pressure on Afghanistan’s nominal President Burhanuddin Rabbani to step aside, threatening serious consequences if he blocked a new government, officials at the talks said on Wednesday.
Apart from the threat of withholding billions of dollars in reconstruction aid, the US reminded the reluctant leader he would not be back in Kabul if it had not been for the heavy American bombing campaign that preceded his return, they said.
Rabbani, 61, who repeatedly tried to delay the Bonn talks on a post-Taliban government that were bound to end with him being pushed aside for a new generation of Afghan leaders, got the message from every side.
A US official called Northern Alliance warlords such as Ismail Khan in Herat, Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum and Hazara leader Karim Khalili to have them persuade Rabbani to approve the power-sharing deal worked out in nine days of exhausting negotiations, the officials at the talks said.
Host country Germany also used its good contacts with Iran and Russia, key backers of the Northern Alliance from the time it held only a small corner of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, to get them to put pressure on him as well, the officials said.
“The problems we had earlier with him are solved,” said one official involved in the negotiations.
“Will we have future problems between now and Dec 22 when the transfer of power takes place, we will have to see,” he said.
“We ought to be prepared that people may raise issues and we will need to keep working with them.”
Washington relied on Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, a special assistant to President George Bush and National Security Council official, to telephone Rabbani and others in Afghanistan.
FACILITY WITH LANGUAGES: In the corridors of the isolated Petersberg hotel where the Bonn talks took place, Khalilzad mixed easily with the Afghan delegates, helped by his facility in their languages.
According to an official close to the negotiations, Khalilzad confronted Rabbani with the message that anyone who hindered the peace process would be held accountable and face unspecific consequences.
He was also told his reputation in history could suffer, one official said.
The fact that billions of dollars in international reconstruction aid were at stake, a carrot-and-stick message that diplomats from many potential donor countries sent to delegates here, was also repeated to him like a mantra.
The message appears to have worked.
Despite his dogged attempts to reshape the deal in recent days, Rabbani agreed to hand over power by December 22 under a deal on creating a new interim government.
Rabbani, 61, was a Tajik professor of Islamic law who led the most effective fighting force during the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s and clung to power as Afghan president during most of the 1992-1996 Mujahideen government.
After the hardline Taliban took over the country, Rabbani kept Kabul’s United Nations seat even though his forces controlled only the far northeast of the country.
It was the civil war of those years, combined with his refusal to honour a power-sharing deal with the other parties which helped defeat Moscow, that convinced even some supporters it was time for Rabbani to step aside.
“The efforts to put Rabbani back in his box have succeeded,” a Western envoy said. “My gut feeling is Rabbani is being bypassed, eclipsed, but he is not out of the picture.”
The U.N.-organised Bonn talks brought together the Northern Alliance and three exile groups.
As number of countries called on Rabbani to step aside, diplomats also warned him of the dangers of a repeat of the civil war that raged in the Afghan capital after his forces seized the city in 1992.
An estimated 10,000 Afghans were killed in the first two years of his four-year rule. Large parts of Kabul, safe during the war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, were flattened.—Reuters
