December 17, 2001	Monday	Shawwal 1, 1422

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WASHINGTON, Dec 16: Fundamentalism may have been weakened in Afghanistan, but it is by no means certain that even if Pakistan does not want it to be so, extremism will not creep back into the country, and the best way to prevent this from happening will be to ensure that the reconstruction effort reaches every Afghan village and every Afghan citizen.

Making a plea for a broad-based rehabilitation of Afghan society, Mr Qayyum Karzai, the US-based brother of Mr Hamid Karzai, who takes over as head of the new administration in Kabul, believes that Afghanistan needs politics based on realism. The Taliban had turned Afghan society upside down and changed the methodology of politics, and peacekeeping now need a professional approach that the warlords did not have and which would be essential to rebuild the country’s institutions.

Mr Qayyum Karzai, who attended the Bonn negotiations as his brother’s representative, was speaking at a seminar held under the auspices of the Centre for International Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Another participant in the Bonn talks, Mr Ashraf Ghani, who is on loan to the United Nations from the World Bank and is working as adviser to UN special representative Lakhdar Brahimi, hoped for the rise of a new leadership in Afghanistan, which was a destroyed society and destroyed state.

He said not all groups were represented at Bonn, but as Mr Brahimi had repeatedly pointed out, the members of the interim government would be judged by their performance and not on the basis of where they stood as individuals. “There’s going to be a lot of noise, but we must be patient,” Mr Ghani said.

One of the main speakers at the seminar was Ahmad Rashid, the Pakistani journalist and author of a book on the Taliban that has been on the bestsellers’ list here since Sept 11, who said the UN had created space for a new generation of Afghans who were not warlords to take control of the country’s affairs. He pointed out that the Northern Alliance had nominated Hamid Karzai, a Pakhtoon from the south, as the new leader in what Mr Ahmad Rashid thought was an unprecedented move on the alliance’s part.

He referred to the lack of a political strategy to accompany America’s military strategy in the initial phases of the Afghan campaign, which was part of the reason for the chaos now seen in southern Afghanistan, and stressed the need for a partnership between the interim government in Kabul and the international community.

Mr Selig Harrison, journalist and well-known writer on South Asia, also spoke, but confined his remarks to Pakistan, whose military establishment he strongly criticized.

He said the US had made the “historic mistake” in the 80s of letting Pakistan decide which Afghan group should be favoured, and there was a danger that as in the past, Pakistan, whose interest in Afghanistan was partly due to its need for security against India, would continue to manipulate diehard elements in Afghanistan. He said a return to civilian, democratic rule in Pakistan would lessen such a possibility.

Since Mr Harrison’s remarks appeared to isolate Pakistan for criticism without referring to the overall regional context, he was subjected to pointed questions from some of the Pakistanis present in the audience.

All the seminar’s speakers emphasized the crucial importance of continued US and international engagement with Afghanistan’s rebuilding.