KABUL, Nov 15: While Kabul’s residents are enjoying new freedoms brought by the demise of the Taliban, there are problems _ law and order is worsening.
Residents complain robberies were rising.
Two non-governmental organizations have been looted of most of their equipment, guards said.
One was Shelter Now International, a Germany-based group, eight of whose staff were whisked out of Afghanistan late on Wednesday after they were rescued from the Taliban.
Then the wheat market was robbed on Wednesday night.
To cap it all, General Fahim called Interior Minister Yunis Qanuni on his wireless and ordered him to do something about security in the city after a series of daylight robberies in the Karte Parwan district.
The interior minister swiftly ordered a commander onto the job. But it was unclear how much else was getting done.
BITTER MEMORIES: Much of Kabul’s population has bitter memories of Alliance rule in the early 1990s when inter-factional fighting wrought chaos in the city.
But Haji Qahar, an aide to Abdullah, painted a bleak picture of efforts towards the formation of a government representing all Afghanistan’s ethnic groups.
“There has been no progress towards the establishment of a government,” he told Reuters. “The security committee is in charge of Kabul until we have elections.”
Elections could take place within three or four months, Qahar said, although this has not been confirmed by more senior officials.
In the meantime, Kabul will be a “police state”, Qahar admitted.
And already the ugly abuses of power that characterised the Alliance’s rule of 1992-95 are beginning to resurface.
Alliance at a loss: Three days after the euphoria of their bloodless entry into the Afghan capital on Tuesday, the Northern Alliance appears at a loss what to do next.
Alliance troops are stationed on every Kabul street corner. Its senior officials have their feet under the desks of government ministries abandoned by the Taliban in a hasty overnight retreat.
But those senior Alliance officials are unavailable in their new offices, their satellite telephones switched off.
Nighttime looting and daylight robberies have enraged General Mohammad Fahim, the de facto ruler of the city.
Kabul may have been the ultimate prize for the former opposition movement, but its sudden fall has wrong-footed the Alliance, which until the very last minute said it had no intention of entering the capital.
On Tuesday night, its Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah called a news conference in the city’s best hotel and said insecurity and chaos resulting from the Taliban’s withdrawal had left the Alliance with no option but to march into Kabul.
For its safety, the capital was under the control of a security commission headed by Defence Minister Fahim, he said.
To appease the international community, which had called for the formation of a broad-based government, Abdullah made a vague invitation to other Afghan groups — the Taliban excepted — to come to Kabul to discuss future power sharing.
But since then, the Alliance has fallen silent.
President Burhanuddin Rabbani, its figurehead leader and still internationally recognised as the Afghanistan’s legitimate president, has failed to show up in liberated Kabul after five years of exile.
JORDAN: Jordan will send troops soon to Afghanistan as part of a UN effort, but their mission will be strictly humanitarian, a Jordanian official said on Thursday.
“Jordan has given its agreement to the UN for the dispatch soon of troops, medical and food aid to Afghanistan,” the official said.
“The troops will have a humanitarian role and not military activities,” he said, adding that the date of their dispatch will be “set by the United Nations but will take place soon”.—Reuters/AFP