December 12, 2003	Friday	Shawwal 17, 1424

BAGHDAD: Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, is getting around. He has been to Kabul to meet Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai. A few days later, he was in Kirkuk and Baghdad to meet US military and Iraqi civic leaders.

Rumsfeld’s appraisal visits follow a pattern. He pops in for a day, then, based on what he sees and hears from inside his protective bubble, declares everything to be just hunky-dory.

On Dec 6, Rumsfeld remained true to form. “I am convinced,” he told reporters in Baghdad, “that the direction that we set from the outset is the right one and that is being executed exceedingly well.” He said security arrangements would “be passed over time to Iraqi security forces of various types”.

Last week it was Afghanistan where everything was proceeding “exceedingly well” towards planned presidential elections in June. This despite the continuing violence and instability, which was dramatically underlined by the recent bomb in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, which injured 18 people.

The difference between Afghanistan and Iraq is that Afghan ministers and the UN have had a little longer to consider how the declarations of the Pentagon’s own Candide meet up with the reality on the ground. Many insist that security must improve — with the aid of more foreign troops — to ensure the vote is fair and includes all the country’s bitterly divided groups.

“I don’t think incomplete elections will be acceptable to anyone,” Karzai’s Interior Minister, Ali Ahmad Jalali, told reporters on Thursday. “The government is determined to hold the timetable. But if something happens we will have to make a decision on whether to wait.”

If this rush into a bright new future sounds familiar it is because it is. Iraq too, amid similarly growing violent instability, is being pushed down a path that has been only barely successful in Afghanistan: towards a transitional government selected by caucus, which then must try to write a constitution and hold national elections.

And the greatest problem in both countries is the one that George Bush’s great experiment to bring Western-style democracy tends to forget: the fact that self-interested local power structures continue to operate pretty much unchallenged in both countries.

I was reminded of this earlier this month by the report of a friend who lives in the Iraqi city of al-Kut, who told me of going to listen to a sermon by a follower of the firebrand Muslim leader Moqtada al-Sadr. A dynamic and charismatic young man, he has been attracting thousands to his sermons. His name is not one to elicit any kind of recognition so far — and that is rather the point.

For as the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority accelerates, apparently unstoppably, towards a hand over of sovereignty in Iraq to a transitional government next summer, a critical question is emerging. Does Ambassador Paul Bremer and the CPA have any idea who really speaks for Iraqis?

Seen from a distance, it seems a facile question. The hand- picked Iraqi governing council — in theory at least — is designed to represent the ethnic and nascent political diversity of Iraq.

But examine Iraq’s cities and governates close up and it no longer seems such a stupid question. For who speaks for Iraqis at a local level — as in Afghanistan — is a constellation of competing interest groups and local elites which make the issue of a smooth transition to democratic governance fraught not only with difficulties but real danger.

At its centre is perhaps the biggest misunderstanding by the occupying powers of Iraqi society and culture in a troubled and error-strewn pospost-invasion period. While Afghanistan’s warlordism is pretty much self-evident, what has been revealed in the aftermath of the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime is just how flawed was our simple model of his dictatorship. Flawed because we imagined his secret state to be more encompassing than it was.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.