KABUL: Hamid Karzai adopted a risky political strategy with the Afghan leader’s decision to include several warlords in his inner circle and retain several key ethnic Tajiks in top government posts.
Karzai was inaugurated as the nation’s transitional president on Wednesday and the nine-day grand council, or Loya Jirga, drew to a close.
The cabinet was approved by a show of hands among the more than 1,500 delegates here at the Loya Jirga but many seemed more resigned than genuinely pleased with his choices.
“We are satisfied but not very much,” said Mohammed Hakim, an ethnic Pakhtoon from the southeastern region around the city of Gardez.
The Pakhtoons, who make up the largest of the nation’s many ethnic groups, have felt shortchanged in the power structure Karzai has put in place since he became interim prime minister six months ago.
Although Karzai is a Pakhtoon, his initial government was dominated by ethnic Tajiks from the Northern Alliance, the army that helped defeat the Taliban last fall. Karzai could not afford to alienate them in part because they still control significant parts of the country.
On Wednesday, Karzai retained Mohammed Qassim Fahim, a former Northern Alliance commander, as defence minister and Abdullah, a longtime Northern Alliance spokesman who goes by one name, as foreign minister.
Karzai also brought Fahim into his inner circle as one of three vice presidents. The other two also are prominent commanders: Haji Abdul Qadir, the Pakhtoon governor of Jalalabad province, and Karim Khalili, an ethnic Hazara commander.
Notably missing from the group was Gen. Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek commander from Northern Afghanistan. People close to the warlord said he had been invited to be a vice president but had declined because he did not want to move to Kabul, the capital.
The risk for Karzai is that once inside the tent, the warlords, rather than turning away from regional concerns and working for the new government, will use their influence to horde jobs for their friends and perpetuate a system that relies on guns and money to exercise power rather than merit.
In an effort to downplay any impulse to count the number of slots that went to each ethnic group, Karzai exhorted delegates to think of every one as an Afghans, rather than a member of an ethnic group.
“We are all connected to each other, we all belong to Afghanistan; we are proud of it,” he said. “Our feeling for the nation’s development are equal.”
Karzai did elevate a Pakhtoon to the Interior Ministry, naming Taj Mohamad Wardak, a resident of the Los Angeles area for 15 years before returning to Afghanistan earlier this year, to the post.
With the end of the Loya Jirga, the nearly 1,600 delegates will scatter to towns and villages across Afghanistan, bringing home with them their impressions and frustrations over the country’s first experiment with democracy in more than 30 years.
By the most generous of readings, the conference left many delegates disappointed. While they may have had unrealistic expectations coming in, given the difficulties of having such a large group take a hands-on role in choosing a cabinet, they appeared to be leaving with a sense of having been cheated of their main job of designing the new government.
They had little say in the cabinet’s composition and left without having agreed on the shape of a national assembly, a crucial body for those who want to ensure that the executive branch’s power can be kept in check.
Much of the focus was on the cabinet because it will shape the policies and set the tone of the nascent government. Karzai’s new government will be judged as much on whether the ethnically diverse Afghans perceive it as fair as on its achievements. The inclusion of warlords is particularly problematic in terms of his credibility as a new kind of leader.
Karzai appeared sensitive to the potential accusation that he was embracing “warlordism” and went out of his way to justify his choices, attempting to distinguish between warlords and mujahideen.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service.