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| December 22, 2001 | Saturday | Shawwal 6, 1422 |
Afghanistan sees hope for peace
KABUL, Dec 21: About 22 years after a Soviet invasion opened the floodgates of war, Afghans are starting the new year with their first real chance to put their fractured country back together.
“There is extraordinary pressure from the international community for this to hold,” said Antonio Donini, deputy head of the UN office responsible for humanitarian affairs in Afghanistan.
“If nothing goes wrong, there will be considerable money available for reconstruction. It will be several billion dollars,” he said at his headquarters — still in Pakistan because it was difficult to work in Afghanistan.
No one, Afghan or foreign, is underestimating the potential obstacles as an interim government, that takes office on Saturday, prepares the way for a traditional assembly of elders — a Loya Jirga — to select another government in six months.
That government, in turn, is to rule until national elections in a further two years.
After nearly a quarter of a century of political chaos — it began even before the Soviet Union launched its ill-fated invasion at Christmas in 1979 — the legacy of bloodshed and the tradition that guns equal power will be hard to overcome.
“Everyone is struggling for a piece of the cake and not for peace,” said Abdul Jabbar Naeemi, the representative in Islamabad for Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, an Afghan leader who failed to get any major influence out of the conference that chose the interim government.
DIVIDING THE POSTS: Pir Gailani was upset that the dominant Pakhtoon population, about 40 per cent of the Afghan total, did not get any of the three key posts of interior, defence and foreign minister. All went to Tajik members of the Northern Alliance, which drove the Taliban from Kabul, and who come from the same town in the Panjsher valley.
That angered even Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum, a key member of the alliance but an ethnic Uzbek. Hazaras, also in the anti-Taliban alliance but tracing their ancestry to the 13th century Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan, were by-passed too.
Burhanuddin Rabbani, nominal head of the Northern Alliance and a Tajik, was also annoyed at being ignored in the new setup. He was the president recognised by the United Nations even when the Taliban controlled most of the country.
However, there has been general support for Hamid Karzai,the Pakhtoon selected to preside over the interim government, and despite the grumbling, no one is yet threatening to try to undermine it.
“People don’t see a lot of potential to a Dostum-Rabbani tie-up,” said a diplomat about one possible problem. “There are things that Mr Rabbani could do with his future, such as have a role in the Supreme Court. There is no reason to hook up with a spoiler.”
Even members of the Taliban, who only two weeks ago were still promoting the hardline Islamic group, have said they were reviving an old Afghan political party and would work with the new administration.
The reason is money.
The UN forced through the agreement in Bonn — and will keep up the pressure in 2002 — by bluntly warning that the promised billions of dollars in reconstruction aid will never materialise if Afghanistan cannot provide stability. It certainly will not be directed through the hands of those obstructing reconciliation. The need is vast.
FILLING A VOID: Afghanistan is the very model of a failed state.
Infrastructure is almost totally destroyed. Even a major city like Herat — biggest in the west of the country — depends on small privately owned petrol generators for most electricity.
Education for women was banned by the Taliban, but all schooling has been a shambles for years. Already low literacy rates have fallen and a whole generation has grown up without basic education. The young men who provide the armed muscle for warlords have no other skills.
The public service will have to be rebuilt. Mr Donini said the new administration would probably need assistance just to pay salaries — although employees get only a small amount, in many cases they have not received even that.
Any details of reconstruction — the priorities, who controls the funds, who runs the projects — will not be clear before potential foreign donors assemble in Tokyo in late January. Even then it will be conditional on continued peace that will allow the rebuilding to proceed.
But, for the first time in the decades of war, an international commitment exists to rebuild a stable state in Afghanistan.
“Of course I’m nervous but if the international community is there — the peacekeepers, the aid — I’m optimistic,” said Mr Naeemi. “This is the only chance we have. We won’t have another. If we go down this time it will be the end of Afghanistan.”
After the Soviet Union ended its occupation, harried out by US-backed fighters, the West lost interest in Afghanistan and its problems. Aid workers say UN plans drawn up for reconstruction in the early 1990s attracted almost no interest from donors.
That changed on Sept 11. The attacks on the United States, which Washington blames on Osama bin Laden, who ran his al Qaeda organisation from Afghanistan, have demonstrated the danger to the West in leaving a vacuum where militants can find a safe base. An international security force will patrol the streets of Kabul, providing security to the new administration and reassuring both sceptical Afghans and aid donors anxious to get on with rebuilding.—Reuters
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