December 17, 2001	Monday	Shawwal 1, 1422

LOS ANGELES: While many people are optimistic about the outcome of the UN-sponsored meeting on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, there could be trouble ahead.

The “winners” in Bonn have a history of repression almost equalling the Taliban’s. And the Afghans most likely to embrace democracy were excluded from active participation, meaning the losers are likely to be, yet again, the Afghan people.

The important Afghans excluded from the Bonn negotiations do not side with any of the feuding parties, although, for security reasons, they may belong to one or the other political group. Many of these “dissidents” are among the elite, which is largely based abroad, but others are found throughout Afghanistan.

They refer to one another as “democrats,” “nationalists” or ”independent patriots.” They are from all the ethnic groups as well as Sunni, Shias and Ismailis. While he has not publicly proclaimed himself as part of this group, the newly appointed head of Afghanistan’s temporary administration, Hamid Karzai, is not on a very different wavelength.

The fact that these secularists resemble a secret society more than a political party goes back to the war against the Soviets. In prewar Afghanistan, there were few doctrinaire hardline Muslim parties. The masses of Afghan refugees had to register with one or the other of those radical parties to get food rations.

Those willing to fight the Soviets could get weapons only as members of a radical party. These procedures did not win many Afghans over to the new ideology of Islam, which is by no means the same as old Islam. Many only paid lip service to radicalism to survive.

Then after the Soviets withdrew, another horse was brought into play: the Taliban. Its core consisted mainly of orphans from refugee camps who had been indoctrinated with the most extreme version of Islam, which most Muslims consider absurd. They pushed some radicals aside and co-opted others. Secular-minded Afghan nationalists were forced to lie low.

All the same, the independent nationalists established themselves in a few corners of the country such as the sparsely inhabited southwest, where they shook off the Taliban and created their own administration even before the US intervention. On the many maps of Afghanistan published every day, the area was shown as being under the Taliban and then under the Northern Alliance. This did not change even when the independent nationalists took Shindand, Afghanistan’s most important air base.

Should there be fair elections, Afghanistan’s political scene is going to change profoundly. Ethnicity will play a less dominant role, and the ideological parties will lose. At present, the strongest among those is the Jamaat-i-Islami of Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, a radical Muslim who scorns democracy. As one women’s rights activist put it, the only difference between Rabbani and the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar is the length of their beards.

Rabbani’s followers are the strongest component of the Northern Alliance. Allowing them to enter Kabul was a mistake that threatens to undo the success of the United States’ Afghan campaign. Although Rabbani’s hardliners got the lion’s share in the interim government approved in Bonn (the ministries of defence, interior and foreign affairs), they are not likely to share power; they already have set up their own government in Kabul.

The independent nationalists have formed an Islamic National Council of the Afghan Peopleples. Their representative was invited to Bonn but was relegated to observer. Given protection by UN peacekeepers, the secularists would be a major force for democracy, especially if Afghanistan’s elite - 100,000 educated Afghans living abroad - feels safe to return. But if there is no protection by UN peacekeepers, Rabbani’s radicals will seek to exterminate the secularists, just as they tried to do in the past. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.