NEW DELHI: The ink has hardly dried on the Bonn agreement between non-Taliban Afghan leaders for a 29-member, “broad-based” interim administration led by Hamid Karzai. But it has already run into a thicket of opposition and suspicion — from ethnic military commanders and Afghanistan’s neighbours.

Much of the flak against the Bonn accord can be attributed to the domineering role played by the United States in its drafting, and the resulting regime’s unbalanced composition. This could spell instability, even chaos, in Afghanistan.

Long after Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar surrenders, and Osama bin Laden is captured “dead or alive”, some of the factors that produced the Taliban and its collaboration with the Al Qaeda network are likely to persist. So will the legacy of Washington’s intervention.

The most serious opposition to the Bonn agreement, in which the US invested heavily, comes from within the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance itself. The alliance is the victor on the ground in the war, and the Bonn process’ most important component.

Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum, has announced he will boycott the interim regime. Dostum is miffed because his demand for the foreign affairs portfolio was rejected. The Uzbek warlord is notorious for shifting allegiances. Once with the occupying Soviets, he joined the “Mujahideen”, then switched to Soviet-backed Najibullah, and soon fought on the Taliban’s side.

The second concentric circle of dissent is another Bonn participant, Pir Syed Ahmed Gailani, whose group formed the core of the largely Pakhtoon “Peshawar group” sponsored by Pakistan. Bonn brought together four different “processes”: the Northern Alliance, Rome (under former King Zahir Shah), Peshawar, and the Cyprus group of mainly exiled Hazaras.

The third circle of opposition is the group of sidelined Pakhtoon warlord Gulbadin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar, originally promoted by Islamabad, and backed by the United States, got marginalized and exiled himself — only to return two months ago to fight the Americans. Hekmatyar retains some nuisance value and could team up with other southern, Pakhtoons, to create trouble for Karzai.

That trouble might take the form of unrest centred on the under-representation of Pakhtoons in government. Karzai is himself a Pakhtoon, as are 10 others in the 30-member government, which also includes eight Tajiks, five Hazaras and three Uzbeks. Women hold just two posts in the government.

The Pakhtoons’ Cabinet representation roughly corresponds to their two-fifths population share. But the ministers’ Pakhtoon identity is nominal, since only two of the five leading members speak Pashto.

By contrast, the Tajiks are extremely well-represented in the interim government, as also in the Northern Alliance. The troika that runs the alliance consists of Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, Interior Minister Younis Qanooni and Defence Minister Abdul Fahim, all Tajiks.

Most Pakhtoon leaders were part of, or co-opted into, the Taliban. It will take some time for them to be brought (or rather bribed) out of that association.

There are intra-Pakhtoon divergences too over the prominent role given to Zahir Shah — apparently at US insistence. The king was deposed in 1973 and has not been missed since. His administration was far from popular. He has not bothered to visit Afghanistan once, not even after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. But US policymakers seem to have been led by a kind of “Orientalism”, the view that societies like Afghanistan are irredeemably feudal.

The United States had an opportunity to have Afghanistan governed by a neutral administration under UN trusteeship — until conditions ripen for a democratic constitution and representative government in a country devastated by a quarter-century of warfare.

Washington squandered that chance. Its supporters claim its options narrowed when Northern Alliance troops captured Kabul, in breach of the US assurance that they would wait until an interim government was in place.

This is fallacious. The Northern Alliance could not have captured Mazar-i-Sharif, let alone Kabul, without strong US air support that softened up the Taliban’s defences. The Americans were in a hurry to show results.

What makes the United States’ familiar heavy hand special in Afghanistan is its agenda, which goes beyond destroying the Al Qaeda-Taliban network: black gold. Afghanistan holds the key to exploiting the Caspian Basin, the world’s second largest reserve of oil and gas and the ideal territory for transporting oil out of Central Asia. —Dawn/InterPress Service.