"We have a thirst for peace" said an Afghan delegate as he went into yesterday’s opening session of the talks in Bonn, on the future of Afghanistan. His words surely echo the feelings of all his countrymen after years of invasion, civil war and oppressive Taleban rule.
But many questions remain over the talks, not least whether the four delegations taking part, the Northern Alliance, that of the former King Zahir Shah, the so-called Cyprus group of Mujahedeen exiles and the Peshawar Group headed by Pashtun leader Pir Gilani, are truly representative of all the different parties in Afghanistan. A further concern is whether the delegates, particularly the head of the Northern Alliance delegation, Interior Minister Younus Qanuni, do really have a mandate to make a deal, especially since the Northern Alliance itself is an uneasy amalgam of different groups.
Different elements of the Northern Alliance now control different parts of Afghanistan. At the moment peace reigns, even in the capital Kabul, where it seemed initially that rival Northern Alliance warlords were on the verge of coming to blows. There has not yet been a re-run of the destructive anarchy and factional fighting which made ordinary Afghans so welcome the Taleban when they originally swept to power.
The only way that the Bonn talks can succeed will be if everybody is prepared to compromise. The target is the formation of a transitional government. If it is to embrace all parties, it is almost inevitable that such a government will be a decentralized affair, which permits considerable freedom of action to individual groups and factions. But the fact that an administration in Kabul will represent all the once-implacably opposed interests in the country, could be a source of strength as well as weakness.
In the short term, there will be a central representative authority with which the international community can work on the massive task of rebuilding this shattered country. In the longer term, by working together, once-sworn enemies may discover a fellowship which transcends old rivalries and which can be developed for the great good of Afghanistan as a whole.
It is certain that Afghans have never had a better opportunity to rebuild than now. Before Sept. 11, the country’s long drought and looming food crisis was just another of the world’s humanitarian crises. Now it has become a top priority. Governments and non-government organizations are prepared to pour aid into the country. And it goes further than that. Money is there for the asking, to build for Afghanistan an infrastructure far better than anything it ever had before. The world wants to help, but the world also wants to see that the Afghans really want that help and are prepared to bury old differences to make that help possible.
The UN’s role in Afghanistan’s political as well as economic recovery must be a big one, but talk about international troops operating in the country under a UN mandate should be muted. Washington in particular should take care to confine its Afghan agenda to searching out and rolling up the Al-Qaeda network. It should not throw its weight around in the UN to impose its will beyond this single aim.
