As Mullah Muhammad Omar and Osama Bin Laden run for cover it seems as if two Afghanistan’s are emerging: one on the ground, the other in the imagination of international diplomats.

Despite its apparent complexities, the one on the ground is fairly simple.

The Northern Alliance now controls 80 percent of the territory including the capital Kabul and all of the 20 most populous cities, except Kandahar. Various local warlords looking for someone to make a deal with before they take sides control a further 15 percent. The remaining five percent, along the southeastern slopes of the Safid-Kuh (The White Mountain) range close to the Pakistani border, is in a fluid state with Taleban and Al-Qaeda trying to seize control and hide there.

This real Afghanistan already has a government of sorts.

There is a president, the Tajik professor of sociology Burhanuddin Rabbani. There is also a High Council, a kind of legislature that includes all the principal anti-Taleban warlords plus the representatives of most ethnic groups. The government in question is still recognized by the United Nations. This real Afghanistan is desperately short of food, has almost no money because the Taleban looted the Central Bank in Kabul before fleeing and smashed the office equipment in the ramshackle ministries.

But contrary to current perceptions, if allowed time and given urgent aid, this Mickey Mouse government may work.

Unable to swallow its strategic defeat in Afghanistan, Islamabad is spreading the notion that the Northern Alliance government has excluded the Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic community with some 38 percent of the population. But the Northern Alliance includes many Pashtuns in prominent positions. Foreign Minister Dr. Abdullah Abdullah is a Pashtun from Kandahar as is Interior Minister Yunus Qanuni. Ismail Khan, the man who now rules over Herat and six other provinces on the Iranian border, is also a Pashtun. Abdul-Rabb Sayyaf, another Pashtun, led the main body of forces that entered Kabul. The alliance has also concluded accords with Pashtun warlords in nine provinces, leaving them in charge of local affairs.

What the Alliance government does not have are Pashtuns sponsored by Pakistan. That is seen by Pakistan as a snub. This is why Islamabad is pressing Washington to seek "a broad-based government" for Kabul.

And that brings us to the second Afghanistan, the one of diplomatic imagination.

This is an imaginary beast that would be required to assume contradictory tasks. Since the Americans do not wish to become too directly involved in what could be a long, and potentially dangerous, enterprise, the United Nations is pressed to take the lead.

The UN point man in this is Lakhdar Ibrahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister. He is a charming man but has no clue about Afghan politics. He speaks none of the Afghan languages and has never spent more than 24 hours in any part of that country. He is also an Arab at a time that most Afghans hate the very word.

Ibrahimi has come up with a harebrained scheme that envisages the creation of an interim authority headed by the ex-King Muhammad Zahir Shah. But, aged 87, the ex-king is not in the best of health, to say the least. We are almost certain that he is not able to travel any distance, and certainly not to Kabul. But even if he does, he has no troops at a time and in a place in which power comes out of the barrel of the gun.

Today there are an estimated 200,000 armed men in Afghanistan divided into over 600 separate groups of various sizes and ethnic backgrounds. We know of none that would use its guns for the ex-king.

The Northern Alliance is sure to play as if it is ready to go along with the Ibrahimi plan. Lip service is paid to the ex-king in public. In private, however, none of the alliance leaders are prepared to hand him the power for which they have been fighting for 22 years while he was in comfortable exile in Rome. "The king?" asks a senior alliance leader speaking on condition of anonymity." He is welcome. After all, we have invited all Afghans abroad, all six million of them, to return home. But what can the king bring us? Troops? Arms? Money?"

The Ibrahimi plan also envisages the creation of a peacekeeping force made of so-called "willing partners". Again troops are being sought from several Arab countries regardless of deep anti-Arab sentiments in Afghanistan. Turkey is also being invited although such a move could only upset Iran that will certainly retaliate by inciting its Afghan clients, the Shiite Hazara Hizb-e-Wahdat Islami (Islamic Unity Party) to make life difficult for any Turkish troops.

Ibrahimi’s plan also contains the childish hope of turning Afghanistan into an electoral democracy when few Afghans know what that means. Will women be allowed to vote and be candidates? Will the constituencies be drawn on existing administrative lines? Will there be proportional representation? These are luxury questions in a country on the edge of famine and still threatened with chaos. Even if one holds the cleanest of elections, the results would only confirm the ethnic divisions that have already been reflected in the new status quo.

Finally, the Ibrahimi scheme envisages a government of non-political and non-military" technocrats"... Well, there are no such people inside Afghanistan. Anybody who is somebody in Afghanistan today is both political and has a gun.

The alliance leaders, again speaking in private, resent the fact that part of the American media refers to them as "our foot soldiers".

"Americans can never shed their arrogance," says one senior commander. "They forget that we have been fighting the Taleban, which they and their Pakistani allies created, for almost six years. We were prepared to fight another 100 years if necessary. We are grateful that the Americans helped by bombing the Taleban heavy weapons and aircraft. But does that make the Americans our air soldiers?"

The alliance ignored President George W. Bush’s public "advice" not to enter Kabul because, the commander says, the Afghans know more about own country than the Americans.

Bush’s principal advisor on Afghanistan is Zalmay Khalilzad, an ethnic Pashtun and former supporter of the Taleban who became a US citizen a few years ago. The alliance sees him as the chief influence behind Washington’s attempt at promoting a government that would reflect Pakistan’s interests in Kabul.

Washington’s views will be directly relayed to the alliance by James Dobbin, the diplomat just appointed by Bush as "ambassador" to the Rabbani government in Kabul.

What could they discuss?

The most realistic plan would be to accept the new status quo as the starting point. The Rabbani government should be expanded by including a number of other ministers from the Pashtun, Hazara and Char-Imaq ethnic groups. A "Loya Jirgah" (Supreme Assembly) should be set up, with the ex-king nominating some members, to draft a constitution within a fixed time. Here the UN could play the role of facilitator and observer.

Meanwhile, massive aid should be brought in not only to feed the people but also to create new jobs to absorb as many of the armed men as possible into civilian pursuits.

The US has indirect influence within the alliance thanks to the Uzbek warlord Abdul-Rashid Dostum who is close to the Turkish army. (A contingent of Turkish officers helped Dostum gain control of Mazar-e-Sharif.)

Pakistan’s anxieties could be allayed by including some of its Afghan protégés into the future Loya Jirgah". These include Pir Ahmad Gailani, a religious leader, Amin Wardak, a tribal chief also backed by France, and Hamid Karzai, a former diplomat. All three are Pashtuns. Iran could be kept from making mischief by bringing its two main clients, the Hazara chiefs Abdul Karim Khalili and Saeed Anwari into the Rabbani government.

Afghanistan was originally created as a buffer state separating Russian, Persian and British empires. Attempt by any outside power to have exclusive influence in Kabul has always led to war. The new status quo is valuable because it leaves almost all of Afghanistan in control of ethnic groups with no firm commitment to any foreign power. The US and the UN could help either consolidate this status quo or upset it with the risk of provoking a new civil war. In the meantime, the task of capturing or killing the Al-Qaeda gang, the primary reason for US intervention, risks being pushed aside if Washington warms up to the deadly fascination of Central Asia’s "Great Game."