ISLAMABAD: It was supposed to be a triumph, a Grand Council to usher in Afghanistan’s first ever elections next year. But, when Malalai Joya, a delegate from western Farah province, stepped up to speak last week she was not celebrating.

With a steady hand, Joya pointed to the council leaders, or ‘Loya Jirga’, Afghanistan’s new rulers since the Taliban’s demise. “These were the ones who destroyed our country,” she said. “They should be tried in international and national courts. If our poor people forgive these criminals, history will never forgive them, their criminal activities have all been recorded.”

At Joya’s outburst, there was uproar. Many of the council’s 500 delegates screamed abuse at her, her microphone was switched off. A security guard bundled her away. None denied the truth of her words, not even the war crimes she spoke of, including the murder of six of her relatives in a rocket attack on Kabul.

“In order to make her secure, I told her to get out of the tent,” explained the council’s chairman Sibghatullah Mojaddidi. “As you know, our Mujahideen are a different kind of people. Once they get upset, it’s difficult to control them.”

President Hamid Karzai knows that. The government he was bequeathed nearly two years ago is barely functioning, its members constantly squabbling for control. The 500 delegates of the Loya Jirga — politicians, businessmen and mullahs — are deadlocked over the new constitution. Nearly half the delegates are threatening sabotage if it is not rewritten. Most contentious is a last-minute revision scrapping a proposed prime ministership, to give Karzai almost unrivalled powers. The warlords, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, want to install one of their own as prime minister.

With such dissent, in its first week the Loya Jirga has achieved nothing. “The Jirga is heading towards deadlock,” said Karim Aimaq, a former mayor of Kabul, and Rabbani’s ally. “Delegates have refused to participate in group discussions on Karzai’s draft.”

Karzai defends the powers he seeks by saying that anything less would lead to perpetual in-fighting. If the Jirga refuses to approve them, Karzai says he will step down before elections next year.

That would be considered a disaster by America and Afghanistan’s other donors. They see Karzai, a Western-friendly moderate of the Pashtun group, as the only man capable of bringing sanity to Afghanistan’s factional politics. While the warlords squabbled last week, three rockets rained down on Kabul; a bomb was defused outside a Chinese restaurant frequented by foreign aid workers; and a German peacekeeper with the 5,000- strong Nato-led force policing Kabul was shot. The Taliban, resurgent in a sweep back from their bases in next-door Pakistan, are thought to be responsible. Dozens of civilians and 15 aid workers have been killed in recent attacks.

Two factors have fuelled the Taliban’s return, say analysts. By allowing the Northern Alliance, which is composed of smaller ethnic groups including Tajiks and Uzbeks, to grab most government seats, the US deepened Afghanistan’s ethnic rift. America’s continuing military campaign against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan has enraged the Pashtuns further.

In constant fear of assassination, Karzai rarely leaves his heavily guarded presidential compound but on Tuesday he went forth to open the 300-mile Kabul to Kandahar road, the only major reconstruction project outside the capital since the Taliban’s fall. The new road is supposed to be a metaphor for the new Afghanistan. Yet observers in Kabul say this may be all too true. According to the engineers who worked on it, the road was resurfaced with wafer-thin asphalt. One harsh winter could see Afghanistan’s flagship reconstruction project disintegrate. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.