LONDON: Ever since Mikhail Gorbachev pulled the Red Army out of Afghanistan in 1989, it has been Afghan against Afghan. First it was the anti-Soviet fighters against President Najibullah. Then it was the Pakhtoon forces of Gulbadin Hekmatyar against Ahmed Shah Massoud. Then came the Taliban.

Until Wednesday morning’s signatures at the Bonn talks, the past 12 years of conflict in Afghanistan have been a zero sum game in which winner takes all. Power-sharing? Fat chance. Coalition-building? Not likely.

However, on Wednesday the Northern Alliance did indeed perform the previously unthinkable: after nine days of round-the-clock bargaining made all the more fractious by the daylight fasting of Ramazan, the winners agreed to surrender some of the spoils of victory. For the first time in a generation, the Afghans have agreed to share power. The deal, masterminded by the United Nations officials Lakhdar Brahimi of Algeria and Francesc Vendrell of Spain, is delicately poised, with various factions backed by different outside powers.

If the main rivalry is that of Pakhtoon versus Tajik (a key factor in the Taliban-Northern Alliance war), the 30-strong provisional cabinet includes 11 Pakhtoon and seven Tajiks, roughly mirroring the 38 per cent and 25 per cent respective share of the population. Hazara Shias and Uzbeks are similarly represented proportionately.

But ethnic considerations aside, the deal also recognises hard facts on the ground. In its moment of magnanimity, the Northern Alliance has scored another victory, with its post-Massoud leadership triumvirate taking the key posts of defence, interior and foreign affairs, with the Alliance also taking 17 of the 30 posts.

There are several striking things about this compromise. Significantly, it is a defeat for the warlords who run the country and a victory for a new generation of actors in their mid-40s, who prefer political process to wielding power through the Kalashnikov. In this lies the great promise of yesterday’s agreement.

The top post of chairman goes to Hamid Karzai, the moderate, pro-western Pakhtoon who on Wednesday was wounded by friendly fire. Hamid Karzai, who is close to the former king, is not a warlord but is currently seeking to talk rather than shoot the Taliban out of Kandahar - his home town and their birthplace.

Similarly, Younis Qanooni, Abdullah Abdullah, and Mohammad Fahim, the Northern Alliance trio who have assumed the leadership since Massoud’s murder in September, may have been tempered in the battles of their youth, but they are all believers in the ascendancy of politics over gunfights.

All three were groomed for posts by Massoud who knew his own strengths and limitations. All three appear determined to avoid the disasters of the early 1990s which left Kabul in rubble and paved the way for the Taliban, initially welcomed by a public sick of the fighting and chaos.

If the ascendancy of politics promised by the Bonn accord erodes an ingrained culture of male violence, that will also help improve the wretched lot of women in Afghanistan. Peace is an absolute, if not the only, prerequisite for restoring women’s rights.

Wednesday’s line-up includes only two women - one, Sima Samar, a deputy chair of the administration responsible for women’s affairs, and the other in charge of public health, leaving the four delegations in Bonn open to charges of tokenism.

The seven-page agreement stipulates the need for “gender-sensitive government”, the kind of wording alien to an Afghan male which could only have been drummed up by the international UN elite.

Empowering women will inevitably be a slow and incremental process, not only in the Taliban heartlands. In Northern Alliance strongholds, too, it is virtually impossible to see an unveiled woman. Education and employment are open, in theory. In fact, the opportunities are severely circumscribed.

Some of the smarter aid organizations already pouring into Afghanistan are beginning to make a small but meaningful difference to opportunities for women by employing them as local staff. But gender politics have been characterized by regression over the past generation. As in so many other areas of life in Afghanistan, the clock has been turned back. It is too soon to say whether the Bonn accords will get the clock ticking into the future. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.