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A new ray of hope in Afghanistan
THE UNITED NATIONS seems to have drawn a rough but promising road map that might help steer Afghanistan, a failed state, towards a civilised political future. There can be no doubt whatsoever that Afghanistan must be liberated from the clutches of the notorious Taliban and its cohort, Osama bin Laden, the suspected czar of international terrorism. Their agenda of grisly political terror as also social obscurantism has already ravaged the country that straddles an important region in the geopolitical neighbourhood of India. With the Taliban now clearly on the retreat in the face of nearly two months of a massive military offensive by the United States, Afghanistan is generally regarded to have become increasingly inhospitable to Osama too. In one sense, a critical matter of concern to the international community is that the actual fate or present whereabouts of Osama as also the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, are still far from clear. Yet, the overall international mood in regard to Afghanistan is to count out the Taliban-Osama axis as a durable factor of instability within that country itself. It is in this context that the U.N. has found it possible to take an optimistic view of the lingering uncertainties. A subtle, unstated, distinction appears to have been drawn by the U.N. between the possible future of Afghanistan as a Taliban-free society with a democratic polity, in one scenario, and a larger international order without the scourge of political terror, on a separate plane. This alone can explain the current efforts by the U.N. to place Afghanistan on a slow track towards an orderly polity even before the Taliban-Osama axis has been conspicuously decimated in line with the stated objectives of the U.S.
If the U.S. as also its allies and friends can exercise due care to ensure that the residual battle against the Taliban-Osama axis does not ruin Afghanistan's march towards a civilised polity, the U.N.'s current efforts may be seen to be truly meaningful. The Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban force with some basic Afghan characteristics, is now in control of much of the country including the capital, Kabul. As America's present-day proxy on the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance has not only gained from the U.S.' air strikes against the Taliban but also contributed to the American war plans in some measure. This aspect accounts for the Alliance-weighted power-sharing formula worked out by the U.N. for the Afghan transition towards democracy over an estimated period of about two-and-a-half years from now.
The rough blueprint, approved by the Afghan delegations that have held intensive discussions under U.N. guidance for over a week in Germany, provides for an interim `Prime Minister' with a Cabinet. In about six months, a loya jirga or a traditional national convention will be called, perhaps under the moral authority of the former Afghan monarch (`King' Zahir Shah), to establish a new dispensation. The `government' so formed is expected to put the country through the paces of a transition to a democratic order which will be ushered in through polls to be held on the principle of political pluralism. While the interim `Prime Minister' will be from the majority Pashtun community, the Northern Alliance will get the pivotal portfolios of defence as also foreign policy and internal affairs in the run-up to the loya jirga. On paper, the division of power for this proposed `interim' period reflects the ground realities. Yet, the success of the U.N.-engineered plan will depend on a number of imponderables including the likely equation between the Northern Alliance and the planned international security force, which (if it takes off) may have more to do with turning Afghanistan into a terror-free zone rather than a democratic society.
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