LONDON: The military overtook the political in spectacular manner in Afghanistan on Tuesday as the Northern Alliance captured Kabul and left a dangerous power vacuum in the war-ravaged country.

“The military has run ahead of the politics, which now has to rush to catch up,” Sir Timothy Garden of the Royal Institute for Strategic Studies think tank said.

“The discussion about putting together a coalition or more representative government has to start now.” Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute think tank said.

He said that the politicians had been caught completely unaware by the speed of the apparent collapse of Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, whose grip on power seemed to have been destroyed in a ground offensive lasting barely three days.

“Before the war began the political thinking about what needs to be done, and the laying of the ground of the coalition was far more advanced than the military option,” Eyal said.

“All of a sudden in the last 48 hours it has gone in exactly the opposite direction,” he added, amid reports of looting and occasional shooting in Kabul.

French President Jacques Chirac, in Abu Dhabi, called for the immediate formation of an interim administration, and the British government urged the international community to work rapidly to piece together a truly representative coalition.

“Nothing would be worse than a transition period where there was no coordination, a situation which would not guarantee stability,” Chirac told reporters.

Pakistan urged the Northern Alliance to keep out of Kabul and declare the capital a demilitarised zone.

Eyal said Islamabad was barking up the wrong tree. ”Pakistan’s desperate effort to persuade the Northern Alliance to abandon Kabul or declare it an open city is a bit of a nonsense,” he said.

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law as everyone knows. So whoever come to Kabul now to join a coalition government will be doing so on terms dictated by the Northern Alliance,” he added.

He said that the United States, Russia and the European Union had to act quickly to rein in the Alliance, as its troops appeared to be ignoring their commanders’ pledges to stay out of Kabul and were entering the city in increasing numbers.

“Carrots have to be dangled very quickly. These loose alliances tend to break up very quickly when the common purpose has been achieved,” Eyal said.

Even as Eyal spoke, a group of former Afghan mujahideen commanders criticised the Northern Alliance for allowing its troops into Kabul, and a senior advisor to the country’s exiled king expressed concern.

“We did not expect that they would enter Kabul. We wanted Kabul to be demilitarised and that the Kabul government and the administration should come under a political process,” Abdul Sattar Sirat said in Rome.

Garden said that they key lay in persuading a senior representative of Afghanistan’s ethnic Pakhtoon — concentrated in the Taliban’s southern heartland — to switch sides.

“The optimistic view is that the Taliban have crumbled so quickly that the Pakhtoon will rethink their position and may come over into the new government,” he said.

The pessimistic view was that the Pakhtoon would remain loyal to the Taliban and the country would split and face civil war.

“It is difficult to say which way it is going to go. But since they gave up Kabul so easily and so quickly I think we could hope that the optimistic scenario is going to work,” Garden said.

Garden said that the United Nations, which has so far acted with unanimity but frustratingly slowly in trying to piece together a cross-sectional administration including the exiled king, Zahir Shah, would have to sanction a peace-keeping force.

“The UN will have to get a move on fairly quickly. They were talking about it taking five months to form a coalition, but in reality we are looking at closer to five weeks,” he said.

“We are also going to have to have non-Afghani military forces to do the same stabilisation operation that we have been used to in the Balkans. There has never been an opportunity like this before for the United Nations to get on and do something right.”—Reuters